ABSTRACT
This chapter examines what might be dubbed a mechanical psychoneurology, as it is propounded in an essay of Sigmund Freud's entitled by his editor the Project for a Scientific Psychology. And instead of 'history', it also examines periodicity and, more grandly perhaps, temporality, as it relates to this mechanical/neurological account of the psyche. The chapter shows however, is something that perhaps needs to be considered in any discussion of 'history and psychoanalysis' – namely that the stone-shifting manoeuvres which in Antony Easthope's account seem to belong to the metadiscursive jockeying for explanatory primacy between 'history' and 'psychoanalysis', in fact turn out to be what comes 'first'. Freud's story of first things and second things holds off the notion that the neurones 'possess' force, thereby preserving the ostensible primacy of the inertia principle. Operating under the auspices of the inertia/constancy principles, the neurones have, in a sense, to take the future into account if they are to persist at all.
