ABSTRACT
Freud unquestionably considered the Interpretation of dreams to be his most successful theoretical work, the book that, also as a result of its great clarity, laid the foundations for the birth of psychoanalysis and its subsequent development. The work he considered his most unsatisfactory, on the other hand, was Project for a Scientific Psychology, which he interrupted after a laborious first draft. Although Freud wanted to provide a broad neurological description, the language is closely tied up with the quantitative hypotheses of energy discharge. Freud conceived the neuron as a passive reservoir of energy coming from outside, whereas it is considered to be an active transducer of information endowed with its own metabolic energy by means of which it modulates signals transmitted by other neurons. Freud's goal was to resolve the erroneous reactivation of memory traces that form for endogenous reasons, the memory traces in which he was most interested.
