After having briefly but exhaustively recalled the main lines of Freudian psychoanalytic thought, we have discussed a possible psychoanalytic theoretical model for human symbolic function mainly centred on the action of a set of primary psychic mechanisms rejoined around the negative, in its widest sense according to the works of André Green. A chief aspect of this pattern has turned out to be an underlying, irreducible dialecticity that reflects on the one hand, the typical feature of human symbolic function, and, on the other hand, the main outcome of the unavoidable presence of a basic dichotomy formalized the so-called phallic logic, that is, that primordial, ancestral and irreducible logical nucleus inevitably present in the deepest meanders of human psyche as an inborn structure phylogenetically preformed and ontogenetically re-established during the psychic evolution of any human being.
Top2.2. The Birth Of Psychoanalysis: A Brief Historical Survey And A General Introductory Overview
At the turn of the 18th century, from the conjunction between the philosophical thought and the neurological research, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) started to build up his magnificent, monumental and revolutionary theory of human psyche turned to work out a new theoretical system and to set up an innovative psychotherapeutical method. The psychic apparatus of the human being is indeed theoretically describable on the base of the main assumption by which a fundamental importance for the whole human psychic life, is just played by the unconscious phenomenology, which is approachable only by means of a new, specific technique, the psychoanalytic method.
Freud begins to conceive his psychoanalytic ideas gradually, after a strong preliminary training in neurology. During the studies at the faculty of medicine, he attends the laboratory of physiology of Ernst von Brücke, where he meets Joseph Breuer, and the laboratory of zoology of Carl Friedrich Claus. After the degree in medicine in 1881, he moves to the psychiatric division of the general hospital of Wien, headed by Theodor Meynert.
In 1885, Freud moves to Paris, to attending lessons by Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière, where he is fascinated by the new ideas of hysteria, hypnosis, traumatic neuroses introduced by Charcot. Then, he goes to Berlin, for studying paediatrics, hence, in Wien, he works at the institute headed by Max Kassovitz, specialized in neurological paediatrics, until up 1887. In the next decade, it takes place that scientific evolution which will lead Freud to work out his first theoretical and therapeutical system of human psyche.
Just in 1895, Freud publishes, in collaboration with Breuer, the first book on these new ideas, entitled Studies on Hysteria. From 1895 to 1899, he is in epistolary correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, through which his psychoanalytic ideas consolidate even more, also thanks to a personal self-analysis. In 1895, he writes (but not publishes in that left unfinished) the Project for a Scientific Psychology, in which he tries to give a neurobiological basis to his new psychoanalytic ideas.