Freud was a pioneering neuroscientist

Before gaining worldwide recognition as the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud made an important
contribution to early modern neuroscience

Mo Costandi
Monday 10 March 2014 15.25GMT

The father of psychoanalysis was also a pioneering neuroscientist.

Photograph: AP

Penis envy. Repression. Libido. Ego. Few have left a legacy as enduring and pervasive as Sigmund
Freud. Despite being dismissed long ago as pseudoscientic, Freudian concepts such as these not
only permeate many aspects of popular culture, but also had an overarching inuence on, and
played an important role in the development of, modern psychology, leading Time magazine to
name him as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century.

Before his rise to fame as the founding father of psychoanalysis, however, Freud trained and
worked as a neurologist. He carried out pioneering neurobiological research, which was cited by
Santiago Ramny Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, and helped to establish neuroscience
as a discipline.
The eldest of eight children, Freud was born on 6 May, 1856, in the Moravian town of Pbor, in
what is now the Czech Republic. Four years later, Freud's father Jakob, a wool merchant, moved
the family to Austria in search of new business opportunities. Freud subsequently entered the
university there, aged just 17, to study medicine and, in the second year of his degree, became
preoccupied with scientic research. His early work was a harbinger of things to come it focused
on the sexual organs of the eel. The work was, by all accounts, satisfactory, but Freud was
disappointed with his results and, perhaps dismayed by the prospect of dissecting more eels,
moved to Ernst Brcke's laboratory in 1877. There, he switched to studying the biology of
nervous tissue, an endeavour that would last for 10 years.

Brcke was a pioneering physiologist interested, among other things, in the eects of electricity
on the nerves and muscles. Together with contemporaries such as Hermann von Helmholtz and
Emil du-Bois Reymond, he played a key role in overturning vitalism, the notion that living things
dier from inanimate objects because they possess some kind of non-physical entity, often called
a "vital spark," or merely "energy," that was likened by some to the soul. (Brcke was also of the
opinion that all living things are dynamic and subject to the laws of chemistry and physics, an
idea later misappropriated by Freud in his psychodynamic theory.)

Freud spent six years in Brcke's lab, during which time he was tasked with comparing the brains
of humans and other vertebrates with those of invertebrates, to determine whether there were
any essential dierences between them. This involved examining the brains of frogs, craysh and
lampreys under the microscope, and led to a number of important discoveries.

He demonstrated, for example, that nerve bres emerge from grey matter within a web-like
substance, and that the lamprey spinal cord contains undierentiated cells that later become the
origin of the sensory nerve roots a discovery that helped establish the evolutionary continuity
between all organisms. He was also the rst to describe the structure and function of a part of the
brainstem called the medulla oblongata, and the white matter tracts connecting the spinal cord
and cerebellum.

Freud's 1877 drawing showing nerve cells in the lamprey spinal cord.

At the time, the structure of the nervous system was the subject of an on-going debate. In the
1830s, Theodor Schwann and Matthias Schleiden had proposed, on the basis of what they had
seen under the microscope, that all living things consisted of fundamental units called cells. But
the microscopes available at the time were not powerful enough to resolve synapses, the
miniscule gaps between nerve cells, and histologists were divided into two camps the
neuronists, who argued that the nervous system must consist of cells like all other living things,
and the reticularists, who believed that it was composed instead of a continuous network of
tissue.

Freud made a signicant contribution to this long-lasting debate. In the late 1870s and early
1880s, he observed the relationship between the grey matter and the nerve bres that emerge
from it, and described it accurately and consistently. The diagram above, from a paper that he
published in 1877, shows the spinal cord of the lamprey, and includes what appear to be nerve
cell bodies within the grey matter.

Freud also developed a new method for staining nervous tissue. "In the course of my studies of
the structure and development of the medulla oblongate," he wrote in an 1884 paper entitled 'A
new histological method for the study of nerve-tracts in the brain and spinal chord,' published in
the prestigious journal Brain, "I succeeded in working out the following method Pieces of the
organ are hardened in bichromate of potash, or in Erlicki's uid (2 1/2 parts of bichromate of
potash and 1/2 of sulphate of copper to 100 parts of water) and the process of hardening is
nished by placing the specimen in alcohol; thin sections are cut by means of a microtome and
washed in distilled water. The washed sections are brought into an aqueous solution of chloride
of gold (1 to 100) to which is added half or an equal volume of strong alcohol."

Freud described his observations in a lecture in 1884: "If we assume that the brils of the nerve
bre have the signicance of isolated paths of conduction, then we would have to say that the
pathways in which the nerve bres are separate are conuent in the nerve cell: then the nerve cell
becomes the 'beginning' of all those nerve bres anatomically connected with it I do not know if
the existing material suces to decide this important problem. If this assumption could be
established it would take us a good step further in the physiology of the nerve elements: we could
imagine that a stimulus of a certain strength might break down the isolated bres, so that the
nerve as a unit conducts the excitation, and so on."

Thus, Freud very nearly discovered the neuron, but the way in which he presented his ndings
was somewhat reserved and vague. The Neuron Doctrine which states that nerve cells are the
fundamental structural and functional element of the nervous system nally gained wide
acceptance in the early 1890s, a full seven years after Freud's lecture. This was, in large part,
because of Cajal, who used staining methods similar to that developed by Freud to visualise and
compare nervous tissue from various animals.

Today, the Neuron doctrine is the cornerstone of modern neuroscience. But although Freud's
early observations were cited in Cajal's magnum opus, Histology of the Nervous System of Man and
Vertebrates, as evidence for the existence of neurons, his contribution to the development of this
crucial idea are all but forgotten, and were eventually overshadowed by his work in
psychoanalysis.

References: Triarhou, L.C. (2009). Exploring the mind with a microscope: Freud's beginnings in
neurobiology. Hellenic J. Psychol. 6: 1-13 [PDF]

Costandi, M. (2006). The discovery of the neuron. Neurophilosophy blog.

Galbis-Reig, D. (2004). Sigmund Freud, MD: Forgotten Contributions to Neurology,

Neuropathology, and Anesthesia. Internet J. Neurol. 3(1). DOI: 10.5580/2210

Kandel, E. (2012). The Age of Insight. Random House, New York.

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