Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [116]
By 1900, he had done much more than invent a new therapy for neuroses and discover childhood sexuality. He had developed a number of highly consequential theories about human psychology, both normal and abnormal. While he drew on the latest findings and ideas of certain psychologists (the French psychologist Pierre Janet would even accuse Freud of plagiarizing his ideas about the “subconscious,” as he called it), what was original in Freud’s work—and much of it was—was based on what he had gleaned from his own mind and his patients’ by a form of exploration without precedent in the history of psychology.
Dynamic Psychology: Early Formulations
The theories that would make Freud famous and would profoundly affect Western culture describe mental processes in purely psychological terms. Freud had begun as an adherent of the mechanistphysiologist school, in which all mental events supposedly were, or someday would be, explicable in physiological terms. Not until he gave up that view did he make his major discoveries.
Freud had clung to the physiological doctrine for some time after turning to hypnotherapy and psychoanalysis. In 1895, the very year in which Breuer and he published Studies on Hysteria, a predominantly psychological approach to that subject, he wrote an eighty-page rough draft of a “Project for a Scientific Psychology” in which he ambitiously sought to explain mental processes in terms of the physiological events taking place in the brain.34 While the “Project” contained a number of his budding psychological theories, it accounted for them in such physical terms as the laws of motion, the quantity of nervous excitation in neurons, the inertia or discharge of that energy, the pathways of discharge, and the principle of the conservation of energy.
Freud sent the draft to Fliess, but he himself criticized it harshly and left it unfinished. Neuroscience, he found, was not yet advanced enough for such an approach; like William James, he felt that for the time being psychology would have to deal with thoughts and emotions solely in psychological terms. Freud wrote to Fliess, a month after sending him “Project,” “I no longer understand the state of mind in which I hatched [it] out…It seems pure balderdash.”35 A few years later he added:
I have no desire at all to leave psychology hanging in the air with no organic basis. But, beyond a feeling of conviction [that there must be such a basis], I have nothing, either theoretical or therapeutic, to work on, and so I must behave as if I were confronted by psychological factors only.36
Although he abandoned the attempt at a unified theory, Freud in no way reverted to the traditional dualist view that mind is a substance separate and distinct from body. He often used the word Seele, which is translated in the Standard Edition of his writings as “soul,” but the German word has many meanings and the psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim has persuasively argued that Freud meant by it psyche, the mental and emotional aspects of the individual, or, simply, the entire apparatus of mind and emotions.37 All his life Freud was firmly convinced that no aspect of mind existed apart from the brain and that physical processes in its neurons are the materials of the phenomena of mind. Also, as a scientist he was a thorough determinist; he believed that every mental event has its causes, and that free will is only an illusion.38
After Freud gave up the effort to construct a physiologically based theory of mental events, he made a series of great leaps forward. In only five years (1895 to 1900), he invented a new psychotherapy and formulated a number of revolutionary theories of human psychology. In the years to come he would amplify, alter, and add