What if Freud Hadn't: Commentary on Arnold Modell's Paper

Dr. Modell's paper is an enjoyable and helpful review of some of the important integrative work he has done in bringing other scientific and theoretical approaches to psychoanalysts, most important being the ideas of Gerald Edelman and Walter Freeman. My commentary focuses on the author's view of (1) Freud's turning from his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) to a more psychological model, and (2) the unconscious as the biological source of meaning.

First, this discussion examines Modell's statement that Freud's turning away from attention to the brain, along with his abandonment of the efforts of the Project, was an unfortunate choice on his part, one which delayed the neuroscientific understanding of psychoanalysis. At the manifest level, that may have some truth, but there are other aspects to that history that we might think about. One is that it may have been a necessary choice at the time. It is commonly accepted that the neuroscience of the time was nowhere near ready to tackle the understanding of brain and mind. This is the case despite the work of Pribram and Gill (1976), whose classic monograph shows some of Freud's ideas in his neuropsychological works to be quite prescient and in tune with current views of brain function. However, one might wonder what would have happened had Freud stuck with the Project, and his paper “On Aphasia” (1891), which are deemed the cornerstones of his neuroscientific work?

We could fantasize that he would have not erected the psychological model that we know as psychoanalysis, but would have continued