A metáfora psicológica de Sigmund Freud: neurologia, psicologia e metapsicologia na fundamentação da psicanálise

Abstract

This paper discusses the relationship between Freud's neurological and psychoanalytical work, and what can be established about the degree of continuity or rupture between them. In the first place, it discusses the evidence for the persistence of a neurological orientation even during the most typically psychoanalytic period of Freud's work, and argues that his references to neurological matters are not merely circumstantial or episodic, but always related to important aspects of his metapsychological ideas. Secondly, comments are made on some of the passages where Freud supposedly reiterated the renunciation of his early project for a neurological theory of mind; and it is argued that the only thing Freud rejected in these passages is the theory of brain localizations, a theory he had rejected from the outset of his work. From this standpoint, the originality of the Freudian psychoanalysis does not consist in the formulation of an exclusively psychological theory of the conscious and unconscious mind, but in the construction of non-isomorphic theoretical models of the mind-brain relationship that are at the core of the theory of the psychic apparatus and all the metapsychological concepts related to it.