Among the most notable achievement of psychoanalysis was its charting of areas and operations of the psyche that had eluded the scientific gaze without resorting to the theological. Throughout his life, Freud plotted the contours of the unconscious and, fashioning himself an archaeologist of the mind’s depths, unearthed the most repressed and unsettling relics of the human mind. If the poet Goethe’s last words, “More light [mehr Licht]!,” signified the zenith of the Enlightenment project, Freud may be seen as shining that light on a twentieth- century world filled with the darkness civilization had failed to keep at bay. The Freud diagrams shown below demonstrate different schematic versions of the relations between the various agencies of the psyche.
Neuronal connection between systems of perception, from Letter to Fleiss, Dec. 6, 1896
Drawn from a letter to Fliess describing how memory traces are rearranged in time, Freud represents these relations within a neurological paradigm. This “schematic picture” shows memories—in the form of neurons—subject to continual retranscription as they move through agencies of mind, originating as perceptions (W—Wahrnehmungen) and admitted finally to consciousness (Bew—Bewusstsein.)
Sigmund Freud Papers, Library of Congress
Diagrams from “The Interpretation of Dreams”
These diagrams from The Interpretation of Dreams deploy a more abstract representational mode. Using a grid-like schema, Freud describes (from left to right) the metamorphosis of a sensory stimulus through the mental apparatus as dependent upon time rather than the physicality of the system itself.
Translation by A. A. Brill, 1950
The Psychical Mechanisms of Forgetfulness –”Parapraxis,” 1898/1901
This diagram is Freud’s attempt to capture the complex associative mechanisms that resulted in his forgetting the name of the Renaissance painter Luca Signorelli while visiting the Duomo (Cathedral) in Orvieto, Italy. Freud sees this forgetting as an example of Parapraxis, a term referring more broadly to a slip of the tongue and other errors emanating from the unconscious.
Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke, Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens (1901).
Fischer Verlag (Frankfurt am Main, 1999)