ABSTRACT
On March 27, 2006, in anticipation of Sigmund Freud’s 150th birthday in May, Newsweek’s title story was “Freud is NOT Dead.” Given that Thanksgiving week, 1993 Time asked on its cover “Is Freud dead?” something had shifted. Psychoanalysis, if not back “in fashion,” is, at least, the subject of popular attention. Half way between, John Horgan in a 1996 Scientific American article titled “Why Freud Isn’t Dead,” claimed that the reason was simple: No one had provided as comprehensive a model of the mind. 1 Indeed over the past decade, the innovative field of brain imaging has tended to provide more and more evidence (or at least material) that seemed to show the pattern of brain function in many of the fields Freud claimed as his own, in the act of dreaming, 2 in the repression of emotional responses. 3 Freud, trained as a neurologist, had argued in one form or another much of his creative life that “we must recollect that all of our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably one day be based on an organic substructure.” 4 The claims of “neuro-psychoanalysis” seem to fulfill Freud’s vision of the future. We can only be amazed at how the claims of the most recent technologies of neurology hark back to the claims of the new science of neurology before Freud entered medical school in Vienna.
