Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
Recent explorations into Sigmund Freud's intellectual development by Frank Sulloway and Lucille Ritvo have directed attention to the significance of evolutionary theory for psychoanalysis. In this paper I shall pursue the exploration by showing how Darwin was received by members of the so-called Helmholtz circle (Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Ernst Brücke) and certain of Freud's teachers in the University of Vienna medical school. I will make the point that the Leibniz–Kant background of these several scientists was important for this reception. I will argue that the Leibniz–Kant tradition came forward to Freud by two roads, Helmholtz's unconscious inference as foundation for a physiology of the senses, and Arthur Schopenhauer's not unrelated uses of the principle of sufficient reason to explain the possibility of lawlikeness in a universe of lawless energies. Finally, I will suggest ways in which Freud received and used the tradition.
1 Sulloway, Frank, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend, London, 1979, pp. 238–76, 361–92Google Scholar; Ritvo, Lucille, ‘Carl Claus as Freud's Professor of the New Darwinian Biology’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, (1972), 53, pp. 277–83Google ScholarPubMed, and ‘The impact of Darwin on Freud’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, (1974), 43, pp. 177–92Google Scholar; Darwin's Influence on Freud, New Haven, 1990.Google Scholar
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4 Ibid.
5 Ibid., II, p. 1348.
6 Ibid., II, p. 1334.
7 Ibid., II, p. 1333.
8 Ibid., II, p. 1334.
9 See, e.g., Culotta, Charles, ‘German biophysics, objective knowledge, and romanticism’, Hist. Studies in the Physical Sciences, (1975), 4, pp. 3–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rothschuh, Karl, History of Physiology (tr. Risse, Guenter), Huntington, New York, 1972, pp. 152, 205Google Scholar; Goodfield, June, The Growth of Scientific Physiology: Physiological Method and the Mechanistic Vitalistic Controversy, New York, 1975.Google Scholar
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36 Sherman, Paul, Colour Vision in the Nineteenth Century: The Young–Helmholtz–Maxwell Theory, Bristol, 1981, p. 90Google Scholar, holds that Helmholtz's rejection of the equivalence of mixing light with mixing colours was a revolution in the area of colour theory on a par with the rejection of the fixed earth theory in astronomy. Sherman, who points out that Helmholtz found five fundamental colours, does not discuss Helmholtz's physiological theory regarding colour reception.
37 Brücke, Ernst, Vorlesungen ueber Physiologie, Vol. II, Vienna, 1885, pp. 167–71.Google Scholar
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39 Ibid., pp. 155–6, 224. ‘Das Gehirn übernimmt es, das, was an dem unmittelbaren Sinneseindruck mangelhaft ist, zu ergänzen.’
40 Ibid., p. 226. ‘Wir gehen eben unbewusste Schlüsse aus allen Sinneseindrucken, aus welchen sie gezogen werden können, and die ganz Welt unserer Vorstellungen setz sich aus solchen Schlüssen zusammen.’
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46 Ibid., p. 370.
47 Ibid., p. 347; he cited Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Theodor Ziegler.
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