Was Sigmund Freud the first neogrammarian neurolinguist?

Abstract

Background: Over 30 years ago in a paper, John C. Marshall suggested that Sigmund Freud was the first neogrammarian neurolinguist. This claim has only rarely been assessed in any depth as to its plausibility. Nevertheless, the issues, ideas, and personalities that Marshall in his study considered were significant in 19th-century neuropsychology, were being debated at the time he wrote his paper, and are still among the major questions being asked today in the “mind/brain” approach to modern neuroscience. Aims: The primary objective of the present contribution to John's Festschrift is to revisit his evaluation of Freud as the first neogrammarian neurolinguist. The basic point Marshall was considering was that Freud not only seriously read, understood, and incorporated the current works of anatomy and classical aphasiology, but also brought to bear on his theories works from the newly formed fields of evolutionary psychology and historical linguistics. The present paper will show how Freud wove these areas together within a framework of “mind and brain”, opting to work at the abstract levels of language description that were more in line with the ways in which psychologists and linguists approached the study of human language. Main Contribution: The paper demonstrates the value of Marshall's claim as a focal point for an historical analysis of the contributions from psychology and linguistics to the early scientific study of language and the brain, and traces the often unappreciated role of 19th-century Indo-European linguistics, especially in the case where those, such as Berthold Delbruck, dared to delve into the data of aphasia—largely the anomias. Conclusions: The compatible descriptive levels of psychology and linguistics served to guide the early formulations of a more mentalistic and less physicalistic nature of the aphasias, an account that reflects the 19th-century coalescence of the fields of historical, psycho- and neuro-linguistics. Whether Berthold Delbruck, the neogrammarian, deserves to be given equal billing as the first neogrammarian neurolinguist is considered, and the conclusion is that, indeed, he does.