Flechsig and Freud: late 19th-century neurology and the emergence of psychoanalysis

The author analyzes the potential influences of Paul Flechsig's work on early Freudian theory, particularly on Sigmund Freud's 1966b/1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology. Gehirn und Seele, a discourse authored by Flechsig in 1894, is the focus of this analysis. The author believes that the links between the intellectual production of both German-speaking neurologists have been underrated to this day and attempts to establish that the early Freudian approach to many key issues in the history of psychoanalysis--dreams, unconscious processing, and drives, to name a few--was not unique but shared with some distinguished colleagues in neuropathology and psychiatry. Thus, he attempts to shed additional light on the transition from state-of-art neurology in the last decade of the 19th century to the creation of psychoanalysis as a discipline on its own.