74
PARTISAN l iVI EW
a " feed-back" mechani sm as a devi ce fo r correcting errors have all found
support in the neurologi cal research of the last twenty-five yea rs. But
even more important for our di scussion is the fa ct that, according to
Pribam and Gill:
many terms used throughout that part of psychoanalyti c theory which
deals with mechani sm are given operati ve definiti ons in the Proj ect.
As these usually involve neurologica l as well as behavioral referents,
the do cument is, in a sense, a Rosetta stone for those interested in
making communicati on between these realms of discourse possible.
In
other words, the basis o f much of what later becam e psychoana–
lyti c theory sprang from an earli er, neurological theory, on e whi ch came
at a moment when , as Freud put it in a letter to Flciss (1895) , " the bar–
riers w ere lifted , and the veil w as drawn aside ."
Whether or not we agree that intuition and inspiration all ow us to
see through "veils" to a " clear" visio n , w e can , I think , safely assume that
such a moment at least reveals th e deepest attitudes of the inspired. Dur–
in g this , a very important m om ent in the devel opment of what w as to
become psychoanalysis, Freud writes to Fleiss :
Everything seemed to connect up . The whole worked well together,
and one had the impression that the thing was now really a mac hine
and would soon go by itself. The three systems of neurones, the free
and bound state of Quantity , the primary and secondary processes, the
main tendency and the compromise tendency of the nervous system,
the two biological laws of attenti on and defense, th e indi cati ons of
Quality, R eality, and determinant of repress ion, and fin all y th e
necessary conditi ons for conscio usness as a fun cti on of perception: all
that was perfectly cl ear, and still is. Naturally, I don't kn ow how to
contain myself for pleasure.
H ere w e see Freud at his best and as himself: the avid sc ienti st, firm in
his convi ction that psychical ph en om ena had a clea r neurological basis,
determined to take individual insights and assembl e th em into a unifi ed ,
comprehensive picture that w o uld tell man more about himself and draw
him further out of the shadows of superstition than he had eve r been be–
fore. At bottom, Freud 's insisten ce o n th e sc ientifi c verifiability o f his
wo rk wa s ye t another refl ec tion of his antinarcissism . Sc ien ce and
psychoanalysi s w ere synonymous, Freud beli eved , because bo th allow ed
man to verifY his perceptions of what he saw around and inside him.
Y et at th e same time , th e sto ry of the "Proj ec t" revea ls th e short-
