DANIEL
SHANAHAN
Freud's total approach to man was part - and perhaps the culmination
- of the most important trend in Western thought since the seven–
teenth century: the attempt to grasp and be in touch with reality, and
to rid man of illusions which veil and distort reality.... The natural
sciences, crowned by the new insights into the nature of matter, con–
stitute another attack with the same aim ... they are the expression
of the passionate outburst of Western man 's desire to relinquish false
gods, to do away with illusions and to grasp himself and the world as
part of a total reality. This is the aim of science....
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We might call Freud the "maturation" of science rather than the
"culmination," but the accuracy of Fromm's statement speaks for itself
Freud's precursors are those who made unrelenting attempts to see the
world free of unproven biases, taking their evidence from experience and
weighing it without recourse to
a priori
explanations or mystical truth.
Da Vinci, one of the precursors Freud took time to study in depth, is a
case in point: Sitting at his desk, dissecting corpses at night, or sketching
birds in the afternoon sky, Leonardo was the preeminent example of a
man whose eye could detect the subtleties of the physical world and
whose mind could deduce the causes and induce natural laws from those
causes. Freud was more predisposed to detecting the subtleties of
personality than he was at perceiving the laws of physics. One might
prefer to credit his vision to a "mind's eye," but he was nonetheless
convinced that his observations were as demonstrably accurate and
naturalistically determined as Leonardo 's . And we have a particular
instance of that belief that is worth a closer look.
In 1895, when he had not yet immersed himself in psychoanalytic
research exclusively, Freud spent a "feverish" four months writing what
became known as "A Project for a Scientific Psychology. " In this paper,
which predates
The Illterpretatioll oj Dreams
(1900) by five years, Freud
hoped to develop a neurological explanation of all mental processes ,
"from the details of neurosis to the conditions that make consciousness
possible." Freud finally abandoned the "Project," and the work has rarely
been taken seriously by later commentators; Daniel Yankelovich and
William Barrett, for instance, characterize it as "an abortive effort,
quickly abandoned."
However, a recent assessment of the "Project" by Karl Pribram and
Merton Gill (1976) makes two interesting - and for our purposes, in–
valuable - points. First, a reassessment of the "Project" shows that it
"contains early conceptions of processes which in many instances antici–
pate by years the later formulations made not only by Freud but by
other psychologists and neurologists." Freud's provisions for memory, his
system of "contact barriers" necessary to allow choice, and his notion of
