The Origins of Psychoanalysis

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Freud’s correspondence with his close friend, confidant, and fellow physician Wilhelm Fliess was key to the development of his psychoanalytic theories. Between December 1892 and May 1897, Freud sent Fliess a series of manuscripts attached to letters, offering his early thoughts on many concepts including hysteria, melancholia, and the origin of neurosis. Some of these manuscripts contained drawings, or iterations of ideas that would be worked and reworked throughout Freud’s long career.

Diagram of the Network of Neurons Comprising the Ego

Introduction of the Ego (1895)

“Let us picture the ego as a network of cathected neurons well facilitated in relation to one another,” Freud wrote explaining this image in his posthumously published Project for a Scientific Psychology. Here Freud relies on a neurological model in which the psyche is composed of a series of nerves working in a feedback system, today known as a Hebbian synapse. Notably, this contrasts with his later structural depictions of the ego. Freud’s drawing renders the ego as the sum total of inhibitory and excitatory stimuli that move from one neuron to another to create pleasure and unpleasure.
Sigmund Freud Papers, Library of Congress

Diagram of Neuroses

Emma’s Neurosis (1895)

Emma Eckstein, one of Freud’s early patients and the first female psychoanalyst, was pivotal to Freud’s development of the “seduction theory,” which located the roots of hysteria and the neuroses in early experiences of sexual trauma. Freud used Emma’s neurosis as the example to illustrate how a childhood sexual trauma (Scene 1) could reemerge in adulthood in the form of neurotic symptoms. The diagram, from an 1895 letter, conflates the two temporalities (past and present) and maps out the triggering elements for Eckstein’s illness. The black circles stand for conscious events, while the empty circles represent unconscious and repressed memories. As Freud wrote to Fliess the next year, memory-traces in the past were subject to rearrangement and revision in the present—a process known as nachträglichkeit or “deferred action.”
Sigmund Freud Papers, Library of Congress

Diagram of the Elements of Hysteria

Architecture of Hysteria, Draft M (1897)
Sigmund Freud Papers, Library of Congress

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Diagram of Melancholia

Melancholia, Draft G (1895)
Sigmund Freud Papers, Library of Congress

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