Ernst Brücke and Sigmund Freud: Physiological roots of psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT

Ernst Brücke was one of the most influential figures in Sigmund Freud’s life and work. Freud studied under him for around six years during his student years, and he never turned his back on Brücke’s fundamental teachings. Brücke was a member of the strictly materialist and reductionist movement called the School of Helmholtz. This article will interpret how this physiological movement influenced Freud’s psychoanalysis and how its understanding of science was embedded in Freud’s theory. For this purpose, I will focus on the relationship between Brücke and Freud, and then will demonstrate how Brücke’s influence appears in Freud’s psychoanalytical theory. Despite the common practice of evaluating Project for a Scientific Psychology as the last attempt of Freud’s physiological commitment, I will take Freud’s ontology and epistemology as a product of his interaction with Ernst Brücke. In this conjunction, I will discuss psychoanalysis’s essential physiological and neurological components, such as the conservation of energy, the principle of constancy, the pleasure principle, and dual-aspect monism. For this purpose, I will apply the methodology of Randall Collins, the so-called sociology of philosophy. This method allows us to analyze personal contacts between master and pupil and the results of this interaction. This method will help to demonstrate why Brücke’s influence was more prevalent in Freud’s psychoanalysis than any other neuroscientific master of Freud.

KEYWORDS:

• Ernst Brücke
• history of ideas
• history of psychoanalysis
• School of Helmholtz
• Sigmund Freud
• sociology of philosophy

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Siegfried Bernfeld coined the name for this group as the School of Helmholtz. Bernfeld was the first scholar who demonstrated the link between Freud and this school (Izenberg 1976, 36–37). Consequently, his choice of name is widely used in psychoanalytical writings, and I will follow this tradition. However, it is appropriate to remember Cranefield’s criticism against this name. Paul Cranefield said that Helmholtz was a member of the group but not a leader in any sense. He preferred to call the group “the 1847 group” (Cranefield 1957, 407).

² This is the same theory that Freud used against Charcot. While Charcot was conducting his lecture, Freud objected to one of Charcot’s claims by saying, “But this contradicts to Young-Helmholtz theory” (Freud 1986i, 13). The answer he received was something he never forgot and help him develop a distinct approach while developing psychoanalysis: “So much the worse for the theory, clinical facts come first” (Freud 1986i, 13).

³ Freud wrote to his wife that he took Helmholtz as an idol (Gay 1987, 18). Also, his close friend Fliess sent him a copy of Helmholtz’s book one Christmas, proving Freud’s admiration of Helmholtz, and he was sharing his feelings toward Helmholtz with his friends (Gay 1987, 61).

⁴ Freud wrote his latest neurological work in 1897 (Freud 1986c, 256). However, up until that date, the number of neurological papers had decreased gradually.

⁵ The first edition of Studies on Hysteria was printed as 800 copies, and it took 15 years for the reprinting (Grubrich-Simitis 1997, 15). We can assume that the book attracted readers only after Freud’s later success.

⁶ Years later, covertly, Freud admitted his attempt was not successful: “But every attempt to go on from there to discover a localization of mental processes, every endeavour to think of ideas as stored up in nerve-cells and of excitations as travelling along nerve-fibres, has miscarried completely” (Freud 1986j, 174).

⁷ In 1753, an autopsy was declared mandatory by the state for every patient who died in the Vienna General Hospital (Batt 2011, 14). Rokitansky, the cofounder of the Second Vienna Medical School, himself performed more than 30,000 autopsies (Batt 2011, 23).

⁸ Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing was a famous and influential sexologist whose theories affected many leading sexologists at the time (Sulloway 1979, 295). His Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) is one of the first books on sexual pathology. He was also acquainted with Freud. In 1986, he famously said that Freud’s seduction theory is “a scientific fairy tale” (Masson 1985, 184). Also, he requested from the assembly of professors with Nothnagel to propose Freud for the position of extraordinary professor (Ellenberger 1994, 453).

⁹ Freud himself made the neuron doctrine more dynamic as he did not try to localize any of the neurons. Instead, he focused on their functions (Kandel 2012, 55). Freud learned this dynamic approach from Charcot.

¹⁰ The term’s original German name is Besetzung. It is translated as cathexis. Strachey’s footnote might be helpful here: “The German word is one in ordinary use, and, among many other senses, might have some such meaning as ‘occupation’ or ‘filling.’ Freud, who disliked unnecessary technical terms, was unhappy when in 1922 the present editor, in the supposed interests of clarity, introduced the invented word ‘cathexis’ (from the Greek κατέχειν, catechein, to occupy) as a translation. He may perhaps have become reconciled to it in the end, since it is to be found in his original manuscript of his Encyclopaedia Britannica article” (Freud 1986k, 63). The original use of cathexis that we come across in Project is only physiological. Later on, Freud repudiated this usage: “It is only when I speak of the ‘cathexis of psychical paths’ that I seem to depart from the analogies commonly used by Lipps. My experiences of the displaceability of psychical energy along certain paths of association, and of the almost indestructible persistence of the traces of psychical processes, have in fact suggested to me an attempt at picturing the unknown in some such way. To avoid misunderstanding, I must add that I am making no attempt to proclaim that the cells and nerve fibres, or the systems of neurones which are taking their place to-day, are these psychical paths, even though it would have to be possible in some manner which cannot yet be indicated to represent such paths by organic elements of the nervous system” (Freud 1986l, 147–48).

¹¹ The contact-barriers are synapses as we know them today (Sacks 1998, 231). The synapses were only named 11 years after this manuscript (Sherrington 1906, 18).

¹² One example of the School of Helmholtz’s discontent about science without an appropriate method is how they treated Goethe. Both Hermann Helmholtz and Emil Du Bois-Reymond gave lectures on Goethe’s scientific status, as Goethe was still perceived as a scientist in the second part of the nineteenth century. Both members of the school of Helmholtz criticized Goethe for his lack of method and artistic concerns over scientific truth. They regarded some of his claims as artistic intuition, but nothing more (Nicholls 2010, 98–99, 101–02).

¹³ Freud’s former master and famous psychiatrist Meynert openly attacked Freud because of his use of hypnosis and implied that Freud was not a physician anymore, as he was practicing hypnosis, something that can be practiced even by a shepherd or most likely by unmedical charlatans (Eissler 1971, 354–55).

¹⁴ According to Ellenberger, there is no proof of isolation from the medical circle (Ellenberger 1994, 448). This isolation might be what Freud felt, despite how the medical circle felt about him.

¹⁵ In a letter to Auguste Forel, Breuer admitted that, “this immersion in the sexual in theory and practice is not to my taste” (Grubrich-Simitis 1997, 36).

¹⁶ Even before Project, he wrote that, even though we cannot measure them, displacement and discharge can be used in psychological studies (Freud 1986k, 60).

¹⁷ Freud believed in the “constitutional bisexuality of each individual” (Freud 1986m, 31). This idea found its foundation in the same physiological reasoning. Discharge is discharge. It does not matter if the tension is discharged in a heterosexual or homosexual way; therefore, everyone is born bisexual. Freud’s ideas on bisexuality are usually attributed to the influence of Fliess (Freud 1986d, 127), and it is true, yet his physiological cultural capital already made him prone to accept this idea.

¹⁸ It should be pointed out here that Freud’s fight against the social stigma was his own belief (Breuer and Freud 1991, 294; Freud 1986d, 205). However, that does not mean he aptly did it. In literature, it can be found that his commentaries and theoretical constructions were detrimental to the women he had studied. For an impartial evaluation of social influences in Freud’s approach to his patients, see Decker (1982).

¹⁹ Fleck points out that conducting a natural science out of medico-clinical data is a genuine problem for establishing medicine as science (Fleck 1986, 39). According to Wallace, the addition of biological paradigm to the neurological one is inescapable in medicine in which the doctor–patient relationship is inevitable (Wallace 2008, 716).

²⁰ For the dream and its analysis, see Freud (1986h, 452–455). Newton’s analysis of this dream is more interesting than Freud’s analysis itself: “Perhaps the dream also meant that the Brücke inside was ordering him to get on with real science, yet doing so in his mentor’s way disabled him. It was not yet clear to Freud how to use his scientific training in pursuit of his new psychological interests” (Newton 1995, 14–15).

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