How Psychology Moved Beyond the Mechanical Brain: The Origins of Psychoanalysis
In Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis, George Makari traces the intellectual developments that led to Sigmund Freud's creation of psychoanalysis. One of the most interesting aspects of this history is the struggle among nineteenth-century scientists to understand the relationship between the mind and the brain.
The Rise of the Biophysics Movement
During the nineteenth century, a group of German scientists sought to explain human life entirely through the laws of physics and chemistry. This movement, known as the Biophysics Movement, rejected the idea that there was some distinct life force or nonphysical principle that animated living things.
Scientists such as Hermann von Helmholtz believed that life could be explained through physical processes alone. This mechanistic understanding became particularly influential during the 1850s and 1860s.
Theodor Meynert and Sigmund Exner attempted to apply these assumptions to psychology. They sought to explain human thought and behavior through reflexes, nervous energy, and the physiological activity of the brain.
Exner even developed a model in which consciousness was understood entirely in terms of nervous stimulation and reflexes. The difficulty with this approach was that it seemed to leave no room for human agency or free will.
Meynert attempted to address some of these difficulties by incorporating ideas from Arthur Schopenhauer. He recognized that human beings were motivated by desires and internal drives, and he developed an account of conflict between different levels of mental functioning.
But Meynert continued to insist that thoughts themselves could not have any independent causal power. Human behavior was ultimately explained through competing reflexes.
The Limits of the Mechanical Model
By the 1880s, the Biophysics Movement was encountering serious difficulties, particularly in its efforts to explain consciousness and psychological experience.
Makari observes that the biophysicists could not explain the mind without effectively eliminating it as an independent subject of study. Psychological events were simply identified with underlying physical events in the brain.
Even some of the movement's leading figures began to recognize these limitations.
The physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond acknowledged that consciousness and free will presented problems that science could not adequately resolve.
This created an important question for the development of psychology: Could human thoughts, desires, and experiences have a causal influence on behavior, or were they merely the products of physical processes in the brain?
The Emergence of Psychophysics
One alternative emerged through the work of Gustav Fechner, who pioneered the field of psychophysics.
Fechner sought to study the relationship between physical stimulation and subjective experience. He demonstrated that perception could be studied scientifically without reducing psychological experience entirely to mechanical processes.
In 1860, Fechner published Elements of Psychophysics, in which he developed methods for measuring the relationship between physical stimuli and conscious perception.
He also proposed that people could register stimuli without being consciously aware of them. This was an important step toward a scientific understanding of unconscious mental processes.
Helmholtz, who had previously been one of the leading figures in the Biophysics Movement, also moved toward this alternative approach.
He developed the concept of unconscious inference, arguing that perception involves unconscious mental processes that connect present sensory information with past experience.
Our minds do not simply reproduce the external world. They interpret what we experience, often without our being aware of the interpretive process.
This was a significant departure from the earlier mechanistic framework.
Freud and the Causal Power of the Mind
Freud was trained in the physiological tradition of the Biophysics Movement, particularly through his work in Ernst Brücke's laboratory.
But as he began treating patients with psychological symptoms, he became increasingly convinced that physiological explanations were inadequate.
In 1888, Freud argued that psychological causation was evident even in ordinary human behavior. A person reaches for something not simply because their nervous system produces movement, but because they want it.
Freud's developing theory of psychological illness depended on the possibility that thoughts and experiences could themselves produce suffering.
He proposed that people could develop psychological symptoms through conflicts between threatening ideas and the mind's efforts to defend itself against them.
A disturbing thought might be pushed out of consciousness, while the feelings associated with it remained. Those feelings could become connected with something else, producing a seemingly irrational fear or obsession. In other cases, psychological conflict might be expressed through physical symptoms.
Freud began to explain these conditions through psychological conflict rather than inherited neurological defects.
He also moved away from hypnosis toward a method of examining the client's thoughts, associations, and memories. This became an early form of what he called psychical analysis.
As Makari explains, Freud came to believe that human beings were often unable to bear a full understanding of themselves.
The mind could work against itself, defending against experiences and ideas that were too difficult to acknowledge.
The Historical Significance
One of the most interesting things about this history is that psychoanalysis emerged partly as a reaction against attempts to reduce human life to physical processes.
Freud was trained within a scientific tradition that sought to explain human thought and behavior entirely through the mechanisms of the brain. But he came to believe that psychological experiences, desires, conflicts, and defenses had to be taken seriously as causes of human behavior.
This does not mean that Freud abandoned his ambition to develop a scientific psychology. Rather, he sought to develop a psychology that could account for the mind itself.
Makari's account shows that the origins of psychoanalysis cannot be understood simply as the work of Freud alone. His ideas emerged from a much broader intellectual struggle over the relationship between mind and brain, the nature of consciousness, and the possibility of human agency.
The central question was whether human beings could be understood entirely through physical processes or whether understanding human behavior required attention to the thoughts, desires, and conflicts of the person.
That question remains important for psychology today.
