Exhibition Features 57 Years of Freud's Neurological Drawings and Diagrams of the Mind

In celebration of the 150th anniversary of Sigmund Freud's birth on May 6, 1856, a special exhibition was mounted of Freud's drawings of cells, especially nerve cells, and diagrams of the workings of the human mind that Freud made throughout his long career. This was the first time that the complete collection had been exhibited and published. This exhibition of Freud's diagrams includes now-famous icons of psychoanalysis and also relatively unknown, rarely seen images. They are presented in first-edition rare books and in science periodicals of Freud's day. Some of the images in this exhibition, which I curated, are facsimiles of original drawings and diagrams. The exhibition script and the translation of the captions were done by Mark Solms.

The exhibition opened at the New York Academy of Medicine in Manhattan on Freud's birthday and then moved to the Binghamton University Art Museum of the State University of New York until its close on October 20.

The exhibition shows a clear progression in the images beginning with Freud's earliest recordings of detailed observations of the neurons in fish and in fiber pathways of the human brain that he saw through a microscope. In his later images, he diagrammed abstract concepts like the id, ego, and superego that were unobservable and inferred. This progression corresponded to Freud's shift away from his early training in a neuroanatomical laboratory to his development of psychoanalysis, in which his consulting room was his laboratory for investigating the workings of the nonconcrete human psyche.

From 1876 to the early 1880s, Freud drew his earliest scientific drawings of neurons and other tissue in fish and the human brain. Looking through a microscope, Freud saw light transmitted through the transparent tissue, with stained bodies standing out in silhouette. These diagrams of cells and nerve tissue are typically simple outlines of overall, flat shapes, within which the relations of the various parts are delineated and the viewer's attention is directed to some part of the cell, such as the nucleus.

By the mid-1880s Freud was working only on the human nervous system, and he had begun to think about the function of complex neural networks such as those used to produce language and memory. His drawings from this time are still anatomical, but they became more abstract and are more like conceptual diagrams than pictures of something actually seen. For example, in his book on language disorders, On Aphasia, of 1891, Freud drew interconnecting optical and acoustic fields that, while suggesting a neurological substrate, were completely hypothetical.

Then by the late 1890s and early 1900s, in works such as his unpublished manuscript for “Project for a Scientific Psychology” and The Interpretation of Dreams , Freud moved beyond pure physical anatomy and attempted to diagram psychological processes underlying his patients' neuroses. Freud continued making these kinds of ideational diagrams for the rest of his life, drawing his last image in 1933, six years before his death at age 83. His late diagrams are different arrangements of the structural model, the id, ego, and superego.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue in which all Freud's known drawings and diagrams of the mind are reproduced. The exhibition was organized by the Binghamton University Art Museum of the State University of New York at Binghamton. The celebration of Freud's 150th birthday was presented in New York in co-operation with the Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuro-Psychoanalysis of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and the American Psychoanalytic Association.