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Penis envy. Repression. Libido. Ego. Few have left a legacy as enduring and pervasive as
Sigmund Freud. Despite being dismissed long ago as pseudoscientific, Freudian
concepts such as these not only permeate many aspects of popular culture, but also had
an overarching influence on, and played an important role in the development of,
modern psychology, leading Time magazine to name him as one of the most important
thinkers of the 20th century.
Before his rise to fame as the founding father of psychoanalysis, however, Freud trained
and worked as a neurologist. He carried out pioneering neurobiological research, which
was cited by Santiago Ramny Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, and helped to
establish neuroscience as a discipline.
The eldest of eight children, Freud was born on 6 May, 1856, in the Moravian town of
P!bor, in what is now the Czech Republic. Four years later, Freud's father Jakob, a wool
merchant, moved the family to Austria in search of new business opportunities. Freud
subsequently entered the university there, aged just 17, to study medicine and, in the
second year of his degree, became preoccupied with scientific research. His early work
was a harbinger of things to come it focused on the sexual organs of the eel. The work
was, by all accounts, satisfactory, but Freud was disappointed with his results and,
perhaps dismayed by the prospect of dissecting more eels, moved to Ernst Brcke's
laboratory in 1877. There, he switched to studying the biology of nervous tissue, an
endeavour that would last for 10 years.
Brcke was a pioneering physiologist interested, among other things, in the effects of
electricity on the nerves and muscles. Together with contemporaries such as Hermann
von Helmholtz and Emil du-Bois Reymond, he played a key role in overturning vitalism,
the notion that living things differ from inanimate objects because they possess some
kind of non-physical entity, often called a "vital spark," or merely "energy," that was
likened by some to the soul. (Brcke was also of the opinion that all living things are
dynamic and subject to the laws of chemistry and physics, an idea later misappropriated
by Freud in his psychodynamic theory.)
Freud spent six years in Brcke's lab, during which time he was tasked with comparing
the brains of humans and other vertebrates with those of invertebrates, to determine
whether there were any essential differences between them. This involved examining
the brains of frogs, crayfish and lampreys under the microscope, and led to a number of
important discoveries.
He demonstrated, for example, that nerve fibres emerge from grey matter within a
web-like substance, and that the lamprey spinal cord contains undifferentiated cells that
Freud was a pioneering neuroscientist
Before gaining worldwide recognition as the father of
psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud made an important contribution
to early modern neuroscience
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later become the origin of the sensory nerve roots a discovery that helped establish the
evolutionary continuity between all organisms. He was also the first to describe the
structure and function of a part of the brainstem called the medulla oblongata, and the
white matter tracts connecting the spinal cord and cerebellum.
Freud's 1877 drawing
showing nerve cells in the lamprey spinal cord.
At the time, the structure of the nervous system was the subject of an on-going debate.
In the 1830s, Theodor Schwann and Matthias Schleiden had proposed, on the basis of
what they had seen under the microscope, that all living things consisted of fundamental
units called cells. But the microscopes available at the time were not powerful enough to
resolve synapses, the miniscule gaps between nerve cells, and histologists were divided
into two camps the neuronists, who argued that the nervous system must consist of
cells like all other living things, and the reticularists, who believed that it was composed
instead of a continuous network of tissue.
Freud made a significant contribution to this long-lasting debate. In the late 1870s and
early 1880s, he observed the relationship between the grey matter and the nerve fibres
that emerge from it, and described it accurately and consistently. The diagram above,
from a paper that he published in 1877, shows the spinal cord of the lamprey, and
includes what appear to be nerve cell bodies within the grey matter.
Freud also developed a new method for staining nervous tissue. "In the course of my
studies of the structure and development of the medulla oblongate," he wrote in an 1884
paper entitled 'A new histological method for the study of nerve-tracts in the brain and
spinal chord,' published in the prestigious journal Brain, "I succeeded in working out
the following method Pieces of the organ are hardened in bichromate of potash, or in
Erlicki's fluid (2 1/2 parts of bichromate of potash and 1/2 of sulphate of copper to 100
parts of water) and the process of hardening is finished by placing the specimen in
alcohol; thin sections are cut by means of a microtome and washed in distilled water.
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The washed sections are brought into an aqueous solution of chloride of gold (1 to 100)
to which is added half or an equal volume of strong alcohol."
Freud described his observations in a lecture in 1884: "If we assume that the fibrils of
the nerve fibre have the significance of isolated paths of conduction, then we would have
to say that the pathways in which the nerve fibres are separate are confluent in the nerve
cell: then the nerve cell becomes the 'beginning' of all those nerve fibres anatomically
connected with it I do not know if the existing material suffices to decide this
important problem. If this assumption could be established it would take us a good step
further in the physiology of the nerve elements: we could imagine that a stimulus of a
certain strength might break down the isolated fibres, so that the nerve as a unit
conducts the excitation, and so on."
Thus, Freud very nearly discovered the neuron, but the way in which he presented his
findings was somewhat reserved and vague. The Neuron Doctrine which states that
nerve cells are the fundamental structural and functional element of the nervous system
finally gained wide acceptance in the early 1890s, a full seven years after Freud's
lecture. This was, in large part, because of Cajal, who used staining methods similar to
that developed by Freud to visualise and compare nervous tissue from various animals.
Today, the Neuron doctrine is the cornerstone of modern neuroscience. But although
Freud's early observations were cited in Cajal's magnum opus, Histology of the Nervous
System of Man and Vertebrates, as evidence for the existence of neurons, his
contribution to the development of this crucial idea are all but forgotten, and were
eventually overshadowed by his work in psychoanalysis.
References: Triarhou, L.C. (2009). Exploring the mind with a microscope: Freud's
beginnings in neurobiology. Hellenic J. Psychol. 6: 1-13 [PDF]
Costandi, M. (2006). The discovery of the neuron. Neurophilosophy blog.
Galbis-Reig, D. (2004). Sigmund Freud, MD: Forgotten Contributions to Neurology,
Neuropathology, and Anesthesia. Internet J. Neurol. 3(1). DOI: 10.5580/2210
Kandel, E. (2012). The Age of Insight. Random House, New York.
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