¹ Freud, Sigmund, On Aphasia: A Critical Study, trans. Stengel, E. (London, 1953), 55Google Scholar.

² To Solms, Mark and Saling, Michael, “On Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience: Freud's Attitude to the Localizationist Tradition,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 67 (1986), 397–416Google ScholarPubMed, Freud's Aphasia book marks his departure from German neurology. Forrester, John, Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (London, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 14, has called On Aphasia the “sine qua non of the birth of psychoanalytic theory.”

³ Izenberg, Gerald, The Existentialist Critique of Freud: The Crisis of Autonomy (Princeton, 1976), 30Google Scholar, has suggested, “There was at this time for him no real distinction between psychic and physiological explanation.” This is true in the sense that for Freud there was no distinction in the object of study: physiological processes were also psychological processes. Freud was, however, concerned to make an epistemological distinction, rejecting the confusion of “physiological” and “psychological” categories, which he diagnosed in the work of Meynert and Wernicke.

⁴ The debate on Freud's engagement with nineteenth-century brain science has been rumbling for a long time. Some historians have denied its relevance, either because Freud had to liberate himself from it to develop his psychoanalysis (Jones, Ernest, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, vol. 1 (New York, 1953)Google Scholar, e.g. 379–80; Strachey, James, “Editor's Introduction to J. Breuer and S. Freud, Studies on Hysteria,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, 1893–5 (London, 1955Google Scholar), ix–xxviii), or because Freud, though not caught in it, still developed his psychology independently (Levin, Kenneth, Freud's Early Psychology of the Neuroses: A Historical Perspective (Pittsburgh, 1978)Google Scholar). Others have emphasized the relevance of brain science for psychoanalysis, e.g. Dorer, Maria, Historische Grundlagen der Psychoanalyse (Leipzig, 1932)Google Scholar; Amacher, Peter, Freud's Neurological Education and Its Influence on Psychoanalytic Theory (New York, 1965)Google ScholarPubMed; Sulloway, Frank, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (New York, 1979)Google Scholar. The debate has continued to resonate with scholars; see, amongst others, Solms and Saling, “On Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience”; Guttmann, Giselher and Scholz-Strasser, Inge, eds., Freud and the Neurosciences: From Brain Research to the Unconscious (Vienna, 1998)Google Scholar; Métraux, Alexandre, “Metamorphosen der Hirnwissenschaft. Warum Sigmund Freuds ‘Entwurf einer Psychologie’ aufgegeben wurde,” in Hagner, Michael, ed., Ecce Cortex: Beiträge zur Geschichte des modernen Gehirns, (Göttingen, 1999), 75–109Google Scholar.

⁵ Others scholars have emphasized different traditions in their contextualization, commenting on the influence of e.g. the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson (Solms and Saling, “Psychoanalysis and neuroscience,” esp. 403–4; Forrester, Language, esp. 18–21), or the German experimental physiologists Ernst Brücke and Sigmund Exner (Amacher, Freud's Neurological Education). See also Makari, George, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (New York, 2008), esp. 9–84Google Scholar.

⁶ See Durkheim, Emile, The Division of Labor in Society (New York, 1984), 181CrossRefGoogle Scholar–2; and Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morality (Indianapolis, 1998), 91Google Scholar–2.

⁷ This is not to say that the localization of function was Meynert's primary interest even though he has been cast as a proponent of the localization tradition. Indeed, as historians have suggested (e.g. Hagner, Michael, Homo cerebralis: Der Wandel vom Seelenorgan zum Gehirn (Frankfurt, 2008), 268Google Scholar–72), and as will become evident in this article, Meynert's emphasis on connections subtly undermines all simple attempts to describe functional centers in the brain.

⁸ The historical connection between Meynert and Freud, especially Freud's work in Meynert's anatomical laboratory and their gradual estrangement, has been researched in great detail by Hirschmüller, Albrecht, Freuds Begegnung mit der Psychiatrie: Von der Hirnmythologie zur Neurosenlehre (Tübingen, 1991)Google Scholar. See also the work of Nitzsche, Bernd, esp. “Warum wurde Freud nicht Psychiater?”, in Aufbruch nach Inner-Afrika: Essays über Sigmund Freud und die Wurzeln der Psychoanalyse (Göttingen, 1998), 197–208Google Scholar. The debate between Meynert and Freud over male hysteria and hypnosis has also attracted the interest of scholars, for various reasons. See Mayer, Andreas, Mikroskopie des Psyche: Die Anfänge der Psychoanalyse im Hypnose-Labor (Göttingen, 2002), 146–52Google Scholar; Sulloway, Freud, Biologist, 49–50; Wegener, Mai, Neuronen und Neurosen: Der psychische Apparat bei Freud und Lacan. Ein historisch-theoretischer Versuch zu Freuds Entwurf von 1895 (Munich, 2004)Google Scholar, 151–69; Micale, Mark, Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness (Cambridge, MA, 2008), 237–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ For a discussion of Gall, phrenology, and localization see Breidbach, Olaf, Die Materialisierung des Ichs: Zur Geschichte der Hirnforschung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 1997)Google Scholar; Clarke, Edwin and Jacyna, L. S., Nineteenth-Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley, 1987), esp. 33–46Google Scholar, 212–307; Cooter, Roger, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge and New York, 1984)Google Scholar; Hagner, Homo cerebralis; Harrington, Anne, Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Thought (Princeton, 1987)Google Scholar; Young, Robert, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century: Cerebral Localization and Its Biological Context from Gall to Ferrier (New York, 1990)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Flourens, Pierre, Recherches expérimentales sur les propriétés et les fonctions du système nerveux dans les animaux vertébrés (Paris, 1824)Google Scholar; Flourens, Examen de la phrénologie (Paris, 1842).

¹¹ This is not to say that Flourens rejected all aspects of localization. To his mind, each of the brain's subdivisions (such as the cerebral hemispheres, the cerebellum, or the medulla oblongata) had its own specialized action propre even though this action was spread uniformally throughout it. Together, the various actions propres produced the brain's action commune. Cf. Clarke and Jacyna, Origins, esp. 244–66. See also Swazey, Judith, “Action Propre and Action Commune: The Localization of Cerebral Function,” Journal of the History of Biology 3/2 (1970), 213–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Fritsch, G. and Hitzig, E., “Ueber die elektrische Erregbarkeit des Grosshirns,” Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medizin 37 (1870), 300–32Google Scholar. As Michael Hagner has beautifully shown, interest in localization began in Germany after Fritsch and Hitzig had managed to conduct the “ideal experiment” of eliciting motor responses after the electrical stimulation of the cortex, which “the most famous physiologists of an entire generation had not managed to conduct successfully.” Fritsch and Hitzig's success was made possible through the conjuncture between the clinic and the laboratory. Before Fritsch and Hitzig's work, localization had only been part of a latent discourse in Germany. Hagner, Homo cerebralis, 273–9, 238–46.

¹³ Fritsch and Hitzig, “Erregbarkeit,” 312. However, there are indications that Fritsch and Hitzig did not fully embrace the term “center” (311 and 332).

¹⁴ E.g. Ferrier, David, “Experimental Research in Cerebral Physiology and Pathology,” West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports 3 (1873), 30–96Google Scholar; Munk, Hermann, Ueber die Functionen der Grosshirnrinde: Gesammelte Mittheilungen aus den Jahren 1877–80 (Berlin, 1881)Google Scholar. Fritsch and Hitzig themselves did not talk about “sensory centers” but rather divided the brain into “motor” and “non-motor” centers. Fritsch and Hitzig, “Erregbarkeit,” 310.

¹⁵ Indeed Broca explicitly rejects the idea that he had discovered a “locomotor” function. Broca, Paul, “Remarques sur le siège de la faculté du langage articulé, suivies d'une observation d'aphémie (perte de la parole),” Bulletin de la Société de l'anatomie de Paris 36 (1861), 330–57, 335Google Scholar.

¹⁶ As Michael Hagner, Homo cerebralis, 279–93, has shown, in this he responded to the local context of the Berlin speech controversy (Berliner Sprachenstreit).

¹⁷ Cf. Harrington, Anne, “Beyond Phrenology: Localization Theory in the Modern Era,” in Corsi, Pietro, ed., The Enchanted Loom (New York, 1991), 207–39Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Bell, at least initially, aimed to use his understanding of the spinal cord to understand the brain, cf. Clarke and Jacyna, Origins, 111.

¹⁹ Hall believed that the excito-reflector system was connected to the spinal cord and medulla oblongata, but was physiologically (and perhaps anatomically) separate. Hall, Marshall, Memoirs on the Nervous System (London, 1837), 49Google Scholar.

²⁰ Hall, Memoirs. For a thorough discussion of Hall's work on the reflex see Leys, Ruth, From Sympathy to Reflex: Marshall Hall and His Opponents (New York: Garland Pub., 1990)Google Scholar. Clarke and Jacyna, Origins, 114–56.

²¹ Apart from those discussed here, Volkmann and Pflüger are notable examples in the German tradition. In the British context, William Carpenter, Richard Grainger, Thomas Laycock, and John Hughlings Jackson conceived brain functions in sensory-motor terms by extending the scope of the reflex, cf. Clarke and Jacyna, Origins, 124–47. On the emergence of reflex psychology in mid-nineteenth-century Britain see Tom Quick, “Techniques of Life: Zoology, Psychology and Technical Subjectivity (c.1820–1890),” PhD diss., University College London, 2011, esp. chaps. 2 and 3. See also Smith, Roger, Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (Berkeley, 1992)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 3.

²² As Hall and others at the time pointed out, the medulla oblongata, located between the brain and spinal cord, was responsible for respiratory function. Like the medulla spinalis, it was involved in reflex function. Hall, Memoirs, 35.

²³ Müller, Johannes, Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, vol. 1 (Coblenz, 1833), 698Google Scholar.

²⁴ Ibid., 699. Hall did not address the exact process by which excitation moved from the excitatory to the reflector part of the reflex arc. His notion of tonus, however, suggests that more than one muscle was involved. Hall, Memoirs, 93–4.

²⁵ Müller, Handbuch, 699–700.

²⁶ Many theorists of the reflex at the time draw on the concept of tonus (e.g. Marshall Hall, Johannes Müller). They usually refer to the tone of the muscles of the body and sphincter muscles, which disappears when the spinal cord is removed (e.g. Hall, Memoirs, 31, 94; or Müller, 783–9).

²⁷ Griesinger, Wilhelm, “Ueber psychische Reflexactionen: Mit einem Blick auf das Wesen der psychischen Krankheiten,” Archiv für physiologische Heilkunde 2 (1843), 76–113Google Scholar, 84.

²⁸ Ibid., 84–8.

²⁹ Apart from Meynert's work, association plays a significant role in the work of Carl Wernicke, Paul Flechsig, August Forel, Sigmund Exner, and Otfrid Foerster. Only a small part of Meynert's rich work can be discussed here.

³⁰ According to Boring, association psychologists up to James Mill held that ideas were associated in consciousness. Boring, Edwin, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York, 1950), 171Google Scholar. See also Breidbach, Olaf, “Vernetzungen und Verortungen: Bemerkungen zur Geschichte des Konzepts neuronaler Repräsentation,” in Ziemke, Axel and Breidbach, Olaf, eds., Repräsentationismus: Was sonst? (Braunschweig, 1996), 35–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Young, Mind, Brain, and Adaptation. On Herbartianism and its long shadow on Meynert and Freud see Dorer, Historische Grundlagen. On Herbart see also Ingrid Kleeberg, “Poetik der nervösen Revolution: Psychophysiologie und das politisch Imaginäre, 1750–1860,” PhD diss., University of Constance, 2011.

³¹ Meynert, Theodor, “Anatomie der Hirnrinde als Träger des Vorstellungslebens und ihrer Verbindungsbahnen mit den empfindenden Oberflächen und den bewegenden Massen,” in Leidesdorf, Maximilian, Lehrbuch der psychischen Krankheiten (Erlangen, 1865), 45–73Google Scholar. Meynert is not named as the author in Leidesdorf, but makes his authorship clear in his Psychiatry: A Clinical Treatise on Diseases of the Fore-brain Based upon a Study of Its Structure, Functions, and Nutrition, trans. B. Sachs (New York, London, 1885), 153.

³² More specifically, the connection was from the eye to the originating cell (Ursprungszelle) of the optical nerve, and from there, through the corona radiata, to the cortical cell. Meynert, “Anatomie,” 52–3. The same was true for other sensory surfaces (Sinnesoberflächen), such as the ear.

³³ Leidesdorf, Lehrbuch der psychischen Krankheiten, 52.

³⁴ This was an induction process, like in the philosophy of John Stuart Mill; cf. Meynert, Psychiatry, 153–5. Meynert's view of consciousness corresponded to Theodor Fechner's notion of partial sleep, according to which the Hemisphärenleistung was always in a state of partial sleep. The Funktionshöhe of the different cortical territories varied, they were never all active at the same time, a process that was to Meynert regulated by cortical functional hyperemia. Meynert, Psychiatrie, 199.

³⁵ As, for example, in the example of the child and flame presented in Meynert, Psychiatry, 160–61.

³⁶ For Meynert's engagement with Griesinger's theory of mental reflexes see Meynert, Theodor, “Beiträge zur Theorie der maniakalischen Bewegungserscheinungen nach dem Gange und Sitze ihres Zustandekommens,” Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 2 (1870), 622–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 626–8. Meynert criticizes Griesinger (at 628) for relying on the insufficiently physiological concept of the Strebung to explain which sensory and motor nerves are associated.

³⁷ Meynert, “Beiträge.”

³⁸ Meynert, T., “Ueber die Nothwendigkeit und Tragweite einer anatomischen Richtung in der Psychiatrie,” Wiener medizinische Wochenschrift 18 (1868), 573–6Google Scholar, 589–91, 591.

³⁹ E.g. Meynert, Theodor, “Vom Gehirne der Säugethiere,” in Stricker, Salomon (ed.), Handbuch der Lehre von den Geweben des Menschen und der Thiere, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1872), 694–808Google Scholar, 695. In this emphasis on the one-to-one fiber connection between cortex and periphery, Meynert conformed to the tradition. See Müller, Handbuch, 659.

⁴⁰ True, it was a determination arising from the connectiveness of sites on peripheries of brain and body; also, localization was not fixed, but dynamic and changing. But it was static still in the sense that the location of an individual Vorstellung was in a specific cell, connected to a specific peripheral site.

⁴¹ The term “clinical anatomical method” seems better suited to describe the method but is found predominantly in the French context. There, René Laennec first used the méthode anatomo-pathologique of correlating clinical symptom and anatomical lesion, which Charcot later renamed méthode anatomo-clinique to emphasize the importance of the clinic. Goetz, Christopher, Bonduelle, Michel, and Gelfand, Toby, Charcot: Constructing Neurology (Oxford, 1995), 65Google Scholar–6. The literature on the history of the method in the German-speaking world is sparse, although at least in Vienna the method developed in parallel to France; cf. Lesky, Erna, The Vienna Medical School of the 19th Century (Baltimore, 1976)Google Scholar.

⁴² See Meynert, “Nothwendigkeit.”

⁴³ Ibid., 575.

⁴⁴ In the following, I will quote from E. Stengel's 1953 English translation of Freud's aphasia book, Freud, , On Aphasia: A Critical Study. For the other Freud texts that have been translated into English, I rely on The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. Strachey, James, 24 vols. (London, 1953–1974Google Scholar, hereafter SE); and Solms, Mark and Saling, Michael, A Moment of Transition: Two Neuroscientific Articles by Sigmund Freud (London, 1990)Google Scholar. All other translations are my own.

⁴⁵ The book has the following structure: mismatch between “psychic” clinical symptoms and the Wernicke–Lichtheim model of nervous architecture (Sections I–IV); development of a new nervous architecture without drawing on psychological factors (Section V); reassessment of the clinical (psychological) symptoms with the new model (Section VI).

⁴⁶ Sigmund Freud, “Kritische Einleitung in die Nervenpathologie,” 1887: Container 50 Reel 1, Sigmund Freud Papers, Sigmund Freud Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. For a translation and critical edition see Guenther, Katja, “Freud's ‘Critical Introduction to Neuropathology’,” Psychoanalysis and History 14/2 (July 2012), 151–202Google Scholar, 168. See also Guenther, “Recasting Neuropsychiatry: Freud's ‘Critical Introduction’ and the Convergence of French and German Brain Science,” Psychoanalysis and History 14/2 (July 2012), 203–26. The manuscript overlaps in parts with Freud's article “Gehirn,” in Albert Villaret, ed., Handwörterbuch der gesamten Medizin, vol. 1 (Stuttgart, 1888), 684–97, whose authorship is contested (cf. Solms and Saling, A Moment of Transition, 7–12; and more recently Menninger, Anneliese, Sigmund Freud als Autor in Villarets Handwörterbuch der Gesamten Medizin von 1888–1891 (Hamburg, 2011))Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Guenther, “Freud's ‘Critical Introduction,’” 166.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 167.

⁴⁹ See Freud, Aphasia, 3, 29. These two meanings of “functional” correspond broadly to what Levin calls “functional_a” and “functional_b” though I give a different interpretation of their meaning and place within Freud's thought. Levin, Freud's Early Psychology, 76.

⁵⁰ Cf. Meynert's notion of functional energy as a “physiological force” in Psychiatry, 138–9, and “functional hyperaemia,” 194–5, amongst others.

⁵¹ Leuschner, Wolfgang, “Einleitung,” in Freud, Sigmund, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien: Eine kritische Studie, ed. Vogel, Paul (Frankfurt am Main, 2001), 7–31; Levin, Freud's Early PsychologyGoogle Scholar.

⁵² See Aphasia, 10–18, 19, 49, 58, 68, 87, amongst others.

⁵³ See Aphasia, 15, 29–31, 39–40, 43, 71, 83–4; Project for a Scientific Psychology, SE 1: 294–397, e.g. 296. Even in Freud's more psychologically oriented texts, function remains at this cellular and intercellular level. See “Some Points for a Comparative Study of Organic and Hysterical Motor Paralyses,” SE 1: 157–72. Readers should note moments when Freud seems to slip between the two meanings, e.g. Aphasia, 30, 87.

⁵⁴ In the “Critical Introduction,” Freud argued that Meynert's system, although itself relying on results gained through purely anatomical investigations—Meynert after all promoted the method of cleavage—was a deeply physiological account of the nervous system, “a creation saturated [durchtränkt] with physiological ideas.” Thus any critique brought up against it would have to be based on physiological viewpoints as well. Guenther, “Freud's ‘Critical Introduction,’” 196.

⁵⁵ Aphasia, 55. Freud acknowledged that Meynert and Wernicke did not envision a simple “localization” of an elementary Vorstellung in individual cells, but rather its physiological correlate.

⁵⁶ Freud, Aphasia, 55–6.

⁵⁷ It has to be noted, however, that Freud defended Meynert and Wernicke at the same time as criticizing them (cf. 3, 48, and 64). Note also that in “Gehirn” Freud seems to endorse the localization of elementary functions, trans. in Solms and Saling, A Moment of Transition, 39–86, 65.

⁵⁸ Freud, Aphasia, 56.

⁵⁹ Ibid., 56.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 57.

⁶¹ Most scholars, in contrast, have seen Freud's use of association as a strange introduction of psychological elements into his account, e.g. Marx, Otto, “Freud and Aphasia: An Historical Analysis,” American Journal of Psychiatry 124 (1967), 815–25CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, esp. 822. John Forrester, in his brilliant book Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis, recognizes that Freud is moving towards physiology. However, he remains suspicious of Freud's declarations to move towards physiology, and rather suggests a linguistic structure. Forrester, Language, esp. 14–29. My argument builds on Forrester's but lends greater credence to Freud's own assertions that he was developing a purely physiological model.

⁶² Freud, Aphasia, 57, my emphasis. The postmortem finding that Freud refers to has been described by Heubner; see ibid., 23–6.

⁶³ Ibid., 57.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 50–54. In his own research in the 1870s and 1880s, Freud also showed how gray matter challenged the principle of fiber identity. Working on the anatomy of fiber tracts, he criticized the tendency in neuro-anatomical research to look out for “only one continuation [of a fiber] for each fiber bundle.” Freud, S. and Darkschewitsch, L., “Ueber die Beziehung des Strickkörpers zum Hinterstrang und Hinterstrangkern nebst Bemerkungen über zwei Felder der Oblongata,” Neurologisches Centralblatt 5 (1886), 121–9Google Scholar, 127. See also Freud, “Über Spinalganglien und Rückenmark des Petromyzon,” Sitzungsberichte der Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftlichen Classe der k. Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien, III. Abtheilung, 78: 81–167. Indeed, as Freud pointed out in his paper on the anatomy of the acoustic nerve, it was impossible to do this. Fiber tracts would not travel beyond gray matter in the same way; they rather changed their thickness and color. Freud, “Ueber den Ursprung des N. acusticus,” Monatsschrift für Ohrenheilkunde 20 (1886), 245–82, 250. For example, from the nucleus of the acoustic nerve, two fiber tracts emerged. These had, therefore, to be considered only as “mediate continuations of the N. acousticus” (mittelbare Acusticusfortsetzungen). Freud, “Ueber den Ursprung,” 250. The meaning of a fiber was not stable across gray matter: “a fiber on its way to the cortex [changes] its functional meaning after every new emerging from its gray matter.” Freud and Darkschewitsch, “Strickkörper,” 95.

⁶⁵ Freud, Aphasia, 53.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 51.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 63.

⁶⁸ Cf. Freud's 1891 article “Lokalisation” in Villaret, Handwörterbuch, 231–3. See also Reicheneder, J., “‘Lokalisation’: Ein bisher unbekannt gebliebener Beitrag Freuds zu Villarets Handwörterbuch der gesamten Medizin,” Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse 32 (1994), 155–82Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Freud, Aphasia, 63.

⁷⁰ Ibid., 64.

⁷¹ Indeed, with the emphasis on thoroughfare, the notion of a center dissolves.

⁷² Ibid., 64.

⁷³ Ibid., 64.

⁷⁴ Cornelius Borck has shown the progression of Freud's move away from anatomical explanations at the level of illustration, working out the performative aspects of Freud's diagrams. Cornelius Borck, “Visualizing Nerve Cells and Psychic Mechanisms: The Rhetoric of Freud's Illustrations,” in Guttmann and Scholz-Strasser, Freud and the Neurosciences, 57–86. Cf. Jacyna, who calls Freud's diagram of the “speech association field” an “anti-diagram.” Jacyna, L. S., Lost Words: Narratives of Language and the Brain (Princeton, 2000), 179Google Scholar. My work is complementary to this, by developing how the connections that the diagrams emphasized served to disrupt the attempt at localization.

⁷⁵ In the English version of Aphasia, the word “lesion” translates two German words, Läsion and Verletzung. Freud predominantly uses Läsion, except on two occasions when he uses Verletzung, once where he is translating from the English “injury” (66) and another time where he seems to be referring specifically to the event (“nach der Verletzung,” 74). Freud, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien. In the “Critical Introduction,” on one occasion, Freud also uses the word Krankheitsherd.

⁷⁶ Cf. discussion about the “physiological” and the “functional” above.

⁷⁷ Freud, Aphasia, 29.

⁷⁸ Freud, “Organic and Hysterical Paralyses.” Levin, in Freud's Early Psychology, places great emphasis on the psychological perspective that Freud takes here and suggests that the physiological developments in Aphasia are unimportant for “Organic and Hysterical Paralyses.” As I argue here, we can only understand the form of Freud's psychological explanations by relating it to his physiological developments in Aphasia.

⁷⁹ Freud, after introducing Charcot's notion of “purely dynamic or functional” cortical lesion, mentioned that “many who read M. Charcot's works believe that a dynamic lesion is indeed a [real organic] lesion,” Freud, “Organic and Hysterical Paralyses,” 168. Cf. Métraux, “Metamorphosen,” 84–91.

⁸⁰ Freud, “Organic and Hysterical Paralyses,” 168.

⁸¹ Ibid., 170.

⁸² Ibid., 169.

⁸³ Ibid., 170–71.

⁸⁴ Ibid., 171.

⁸⁵ Ibid., 170. Note that Meynert, “Das Zusammenwirken der Gehirntheile,” in Meynert, Sammlung von populär-wissenschaftlichen Vorträgen über den Bau und die Leistungen des Gehirns (Vienna and Leipzig, 1892), 201–31, 223, also uses the expression “play of the associations” (Spiel der Associationen).

⁸⁶ Freud, “Organic and Hysterical Paralyses,” 170.

⁸⁷ Freud, Sigmund, “Hysteria,” SE 1: 37–59, 41Google Scholar. Freud's link between the lack of visible changes in hysteria and the “neurosis in the strictest meaning of the term” can be explained in view of the larger history of the neurosis concept. As López Piñero has pointed out, from the mid-1830s onward hysteria and other neuroses were seen as physiological or functional, leaving no anatomical trace. See López Piñero, José, Historical Origins of the Concept of Neurosis, trans. Berrios, D. (Cambridge and New York, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 44–58.

⁸⁸ Freud, “Hysteria,” 41. The quote is generally used as evidence for Freud's move away from materialist conceptions of the mind. But as I have shown, the move away from anatomical explanations, rather than foregoing materialism, represented for Freud a more radically materialist conception of the nervous system.

⁸⁹ Freud, S., The Interpretation of Dreams, SE 4: ix–627, 536Google Scholar. Though it should be noted that the optical analogy points to a more radical conception than presented in the Project. Even though the apparatus of the camera was material, a purely materialist way of explaining its workings was no longer helpful for understanding the science behind it.

⁹⁰ Some scholars have argued for its importance in its own right, see esp. James Strachey and John Forrester. Strachey, “Editor's Introduction,” 283–93, esp. 290–93; Forrester, Language, 223 n. 40. See also Smith, Inhibition, 210 ff. Other scholars have expressed doubt about the status of the Project for several reasons: first, the Project was a draft sent by Freud to Wilhelm Fließ that was never revised or published. Second, although key elements of the text reappear in chapter 7 of Freud's Traumdeutung, Freud distanced himself from the text, and never asked Fließ to return it to him. Scholars have instead suggested that On Aphasia should be considered the more important text. Solms and Saling, “Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience”; Borck, “Visualizing,” 71 n. 15. For other critical readings of the Project see Métraux, “Metamorphosen”; Wegener, Neuronen und Neurosen; Porath, Erik, “Vom Reflexbogen zum psychischen Apparat: Neurologie und Psychoanalyse um 1900,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 32 (2009), 53–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Janßen, Sandra, “Von der Dissoziation zum System: Das Konzept des Unbewussten als Abkömmling des Reflexparadigmas in der Theorie Freuds,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 32 (2009), 36–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹¹ As I argue below, Freud's criticism of Meynert's distinction between projection and association still remains.

⁹² Freud, Project, 299–300.

⁹³ Freud, Project, 319, original emphasis.

⁹⁴ Ibid., 319.

⁹⁵ The opening sentence expresses this succinctly: “The intention is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles, thus making those processes perspicuous and free from contradiction.” Ibid., 295. That the notion of quality derives from psychological explanations can be seen in the section “The problem of quality,” 307–10.

⁹⁶ In the structure of the Project, Freud explains the construction of Vorstellungen first before explaining how similar processes could associate them, thus moving from the most basic to more complicated structures.

⁹⁷ Freud, Project, 327. If Freud continued, “So far we have neglected this feature; it is time to take it into account” (327), he probably referred to his earlier simplification “If the wished-for object is abundantly cathected, so that it is activated in a hallucinatory manner” (325), which (misleadingly) seemed to indicate that one object was localized (cathected) in an individual cell.

⁹⁸ Ibid., 363. Throughout Aphasia, Freud used the terms Vorstellung and Empfindung interchangeably. In the Project, he identified Vorstellung (perception) with Erinnerung (memory), 325. While in Aphasia Freud just described the structure of Vorstellungen/Empfindungen, in the Project he was concerned with their genesis. Since Vorstellungen were produced from Erinnerungsbildern (memory images), this explains the shift.

⁹⁹ Ibid., 299–300.

¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 300.

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 300.

¹⁰² Ibid., 298.

¹⁰³ Ibid., 303.

¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 304. Likewise, in “Gehirn,” Freud suggested, “The individual cortical elements . . . are differentiated . . . essentially by their connection with the different centripetal and centrifugal conductors of excitation.” Trans. in Solms and Saling, A Moment of Transition, 64.

¹⁰⁵ I use the term “psychological” here in a different sense to that earlier in the essay. Here I oppose the etiology of disease in experience (psychological trauma) to the etiology of disease in physical damage (lesion).

¹⁰⁶ Freud, Project, 356. He also mentions the term at the end of “Organic and Hysterical Paralyses,” 171–2. Freud first used the term “psychical trauma” in 1893 in a way that related to the “Organic and Hysterical Paralyses” definition of the hysterical lesion, see “Studies on Hysteria,” SE 2: 1–17, 6. There is a history of psychological trauma before Freud. Most conspicuously, Charcot converted John Erichsen's “railway spine” into a psychological condition. See Young, Allan, The Harmony of Illusions (Princeton, 1995), 12–42Google Scholar; and Leys, Ruth, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 3–8.

¹⁰⁷ Freud, Project, 348.

¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 350.

¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 349. As we shall see, it is the idea that an association can be repressed, i.e. that it is not available to consciousness and that an association can “pass through unconscious intermediate links until it comes to a conscious one” (Freud, Project, 355) that marks Freud's distance from association psychology.

¹¹⁰ Gauchet, Marcel, L'inconscient cérébral (Paris: Seuil, 1992Google Scholar), 42–68, does not spend much time on the (anatomical) complexity of the reflex, e.g. he lumps together Müller and Hall, nor on association; Sandra Janßen, “Dissoziation,” offers a closer reading of Freud's texts to support her argument that the concept of the unconscious originated in the reflex paradigm. See also Smith, David L., “Freud's Neural Unconscious,” in van de Vijver, Gertrudis and Geerardyn, Filip, eds., The Pre-psychoanalytic Writings of Sigmund Freud (London, 2002), 155–64Google Scholar.

¹¹¹ E.g. Freud, “The Unconscious,” SE 14: 159–215, 167 f.

¹¹² Freud suggested that the Bahnungen in the creation of Vorstellungen could be understood without appealing to consciousness. Freud, Project, 308.