Table Of ContentA MOMENT OF TRANSITION
Two Neuroscientific Articles
by Sigmund Freud
A MOMENT
OF TRANSITION
Two Neuroscientific Articles
by Sigmund Freud
edited and translated by
Mark Solms and Michael Saling
The Institute of Psycho-Analysis
London
1990
Karnac Books
London New York
to Sidney Press
First published in 1990 by
H. Karnac (Books) Ltd.
58 Gloucester Road
London SW7 4QY
Distributed in the United States of America by
Brunner~Mazel,I nc.
19 Union Square West
New York, NY 10003
Copyright @) 1990
by A. W. Freud et al. for the Freud text
Copyright @) 1990
by Mark Solms and Michael Saling for the translation and editorial matter
By arrangement with Mark Paterson and Sigmund Freud Copyrights
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
in any form, by any process or technique,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Freud, Sigmund, 18561939
A moment of transition: two neuroscientific articles.
1. Neuropsychology
I. Title 11. Solms, Mark 111. Saling, Michael
152
ISBN 0-946439-92-3
Printed in Great Britain by BPCC Wheatons Ltd, Exeter
CONTENTS
Foreword Mortimer Ostow vii
Preface xvii
PART ONE
Introduction
1. Scope and objectives of the study
2. Description of the articles
3. The question of authorship
4. Literature review
5. Potential importance of the articles
PART TWO
Translations
6. Translators' notes
7. English translation of 'Aphasie'
8. English translation of 'Gehirn'
PART THREE
Exposition
9. Introductory remarks 89
10. Significance of 'Gehirn' for psychoanalysis 9 1
11. Significance of 'Aphasie' for psychoanalysis 121
12. Significance of 'Aphasie' for neuroscience 131
13. Significance of 'Gehirn' for neuroscience 139
14. Summary and conclusions 145
References
Index
FOREWORD
Mortimer Ostow
orld War 11, and especially the Holocaust that
accompanied it, drove the centre of ferment of
psychoanalysis from Central Europe, where it had
originated, to England and the United States-the English-
speaking world. As a result it became necessary to provide
accurate English translations of the foundation works of
psychoanalysis, Freud's essays and books, as well as the
contributions of his disciples. These translations have been
undertaken by a series of dedicated and gifted individuals,
for whose efforts we are grateful. Of course the papers first
translated were those that bore directly upon clinical prac-
tice and its supporting theory. Only latterly have the works
of primarily historical interest been presented to the
English-speaking public. Nevertheless, as Solms and Saling
note, many of Freud's neurological works remain untrans-
lated, so that English readers are deprived of the opportunity
to see Freud functioning as a neurologist and then turning
his interest to psychopathology, on the way to the evolution
of psychoanalysis. Solms has undertaken to provide a series
viii FOREWORD
of English translations of Freud's hitherto untranslated neu-
rological papers, the first two of which are presented in this
volume.
As the reader will observe, the work of translation has
been carried out with an unusual degree of meticulousness,
faithfully rendering even complex thoughts into clear, lucid,
unambiguous, and easily readable English.
The translator and his associate, Michael Saling, have
provided also a thoroughgoing discussion of the origin of
these pre-analytical articles, what they reveal to us about
the scientific climate in which Freud worked, how his work
and ideas related to those of his contemporaries, and how
they can be seen as steps on the road to the discipline of
psychoanalysis. They also confront various challenges that
have been posed to psychoanalysis in recent decades, that are
based upon claims that Freud was limited by the archaic and
dated views of central nervous system function that pre-
vailed in his time. The authors demonstrate decisively
Freud's departure from the conventional wisdom and the
development of his original ideas.
We are treated to a view of the thinking of the most
distinguished neuropsychiatrist of history as he disappoin-
tingly comes to grips with the fact that neurological studies
offer no window onto the discipline of psychopathology. On
the contrary, Freud observed, psychological considerations
must be taken into consideration in anatomical and physio-
logical theorizing. For example, in the 'Aphasic' article, on
the basis of clinical observation of aphasic speech disorders,
he rejects the localization theories of aphasia, the concept
that various 'speech centres' each controls a specific aspect of
speech, proposing instead a 'speech field', a broad area in
which the operations subserving speech are carried on.
Lesions in specific regions impair those operations in some-
what specific ways because they impinge upon fibres passing
through these regions, but one is not justified to infer that
these regions are discrete speech centres in the sense that
they are concerned with the psychological formulation or
control of speech. In this respect, Freud anticipated import-
ant developments in twentieth-century aphasiology and is
considered by the editors of this volume to be one of the
founding fathers of modern neuropsychology.
The 'Gehirn' article demonstrates cogently Freud's dy-
namic mode of thinking, so that even his description of the
gross neuroanatomy of the brain takes the form of an explo-
ration rather than a colourless exposition. I refer to Freud
as a neuropsychiatrist deliberately, because until recent
decades, neurology and psychiatry were practised by the
same individual, the assumption being that knowledge of the
one would facilitate the practice of the other, and that the
knowledge of brain anatomy and physiology would facilitate
the practice of both. For similar reasons, obstetrics and
gynaecology are frequently practised together to this day.
Freud was a neuropsychiatrist. So was Meynert, and so was
Charcot. The psychoanalytical reader will recognize the
name of Paul Flechsig, whose neuroanatomical investiga-
tions Freud quotes admiringly, as the psychiatrist who cared
for Daniel Paul Schreber.
In practice, the two disciplines are approached indepen-
dently. In the second half of the nineteenth century, their
interests coincided primarily in the case of dementia para-
lytica and of focal lesions of the brain, traumatic, vascular,
or neoplastic. In our day, psychopharmacological theory has
been promising to promote a fruitful exchange between neu-
rophysiology and neurochemistry on the one hand, and psy-
chiatric theory on the other, but at this time, psycho-
pharmacology remains an empirical discipline.
Sigmund Freud, like the other scholarly neuropsychiat-
rists of his time, seems to have been beguiled by the hope that
neuroanatomy could illuminate psychical function. He was
disappointed. In the two essays in this book 1 was able to find
only two examples of a claimed relation between these areas.
In the one instance, Freud observed that the commissures
and decussations of the brain 'link equivalent cortical ele-
ments of the two hemispheres with each other. and . . . place
experiences delivered by the senses of the two bilaterally
symmetrical body-halves in the kind of relationship with
