Dear Bob
I can only think of two occasions when Freud explicitly mentions
psychophysical parallelism. The first was in his 1891 book On Aphasia,
which was written prior to his shift to materialism in 1895. Later, in
'The unconscious' (1915), Freud speaks of the 'insoluable difficulties of
psychophysical parallelism' as something that psychoanalysis avoids by
refusing to equate the mental with the conscious. So here we have an
explicit repudiation of parallelism.
Of the writers who claim that Freud was a parallelist, Solms & Saling
(1986, 1990) draw on pre-1895 writings as evidence, Sulloway (if
recollection serves me correctly does not present evidence, and is probably
thinking of the 1891 remark mentioned above, and Leupold-Loewenfeld
(1998)prevents no evidence at all. Mackay (1898) claims that he abandoned
parallelism for materialism at some point between 1895 and 1900 - which I
think is rather roughly right. More precisely, textual evidence shows that
Freud entertained various dualist positions prior to his shift to
materialism in 1895.
Some writers confuse methodological parallelism with ontological
parallelism. Freud was, in large measure, a methodological parallelist
throughout his psychoanalytic career. That is, he felt that the vocabulary
of psychology is something different that than the language of
neurophysiology. This was view was proboably inspired by the philosophical
reflections of John Hughlings Jackson, who expounded it brilliantly.
However, Freud did into believe that body and mind are made of distinct
'substances'. He held that dualism is an enemy of scientific psychology,
and was quite consistent in his materialism from 1895 until 1939. In my
trawl of all of Freud's translated writings and letters, I have found only
one ambiguous passage which might conceivably call this interpretation into
question.
All the best
David
http://sites.netscape.net/davidsmithdavids/homepage
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|