Chapter XII. Early Psychopathology (1890-1897)

By 1890 Freud had had for some years to renounce all further laboratory work in neuro-histology, and, although he had become a competent neurologist, he does not appear ever to have been seriously interested in clinical neurology. Fortunately the private practice in it, on which he had to depend for a living, brought, as it usually does, mostly neurotic patients. The problems they provided soon aroused his attention, and his interest in them rapidly grew. His official position at the head of the Neurological Department of the Kassowitz Institute, it is true, made it incumbent on him to produce some research work in that field, and his publications in it between 1891 and 1897, on the paralyses of children, were valuable contributions to our knowledge of that subject. But his heart was never in such work, and as time went on it irked him more and more. Somehow he never regarded clinical neurology as ‘scientific’, and he longed to get back to ‘scientific’ work. What he meant by the word in that connection is not always evident, but the anatomy of the brain ranked high. It was not simply ‘original research’, but something more fundamental—probably any investigation that would throw light on the nature of man, on the relationship between body and mind, of how man came to be a self-conscious animal.

The only work of his in neurology of which he thought well was that on aphasia, and since speech is the only function where there is any pretension to linking the mind with the brain (dating from Broca's discovery of the localization of it in the frontal lobe), one can well understand Freud's special interest in it.

His attitude on these matters was expressed in a letter to Fliess, dated May 21, 1894. ‘Here I am pretty much alone in the elucidation of the neuroses. Colleagues look on me as somewhat of a monomaniac, and I have the definite feeling of having touched on one of the great secrets of nature. There is something