The Relationship Between Somatic and Psychic Processes: Lessons from Freud's Project

Abstract

As the nineteenth century progressed, the intellectual worldview became increasinglymechanized. In the life sciences, the notion of vitalism was abandoned, and by ex-tension, the insane came to be no longer regarded as possessed or wicked, but rather as sick: the victims of a fault in the mechanism of the brain. Freud took a final step. To him, even the expressions of the normal mind were the product of an apparatus. As it did for most of the physiologists, neurologists, and psychiatrists of his day, the choice of a scientific approach led automatically to a mechanistic view of the mind. Freud’s predecessors were guided by particularly Cartesian notions: the brain was the organ of the mind and its working could be seen as part of the machine that was the body. But another Cartesian notion had been abandoned: the mind as substance, with wholly au-tonomous properties. After all, mental states were always the result of neurophysio-logical states, the search for which had brought physiology, neurology, and psychiatry to blossom. In his initial neurological period Freud adopted this prevalent psy-chophysiological parallelistic view. When he came to make it his goal to establish a sci-entific psychology, he distanced himself even further from Descartes: he now regarded the mind itself, not just the brain, as an apparatus. This had far-reaching heuristic im-

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