Freud's "Core of our Being" Between Cytology and Psychoanalysis.

Abstract

Freud's "Core of our Being" Between Cytology and Psychoanalysis. This article deals with an aspect in the work of Sigmund Freud that lies at the heart of his psychoanalytical theory: the biological underpinnings of the "Kern unseres Wesens" (the core of our being). This is the phrasing Freud used in his first and his last description of the unconscious. Notwithstanding the centrality of this notion for both Freud's work and for the intertwined history of biology, brain research, and psychoanalysis, cytological aspects of 'the core of our being' remained untouched in the growing body of studies on his biological background. Before Freud began his career as a therapist, he spent over a decade working as a medical biologist. First in the laboratory of Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, in the orbit of Hermann von Helmholtz's thought, and later in neurologist Theodor Meynert's laboratory, Freud focussed principally on the visualisation of (primarily neuronal) cells. Amongst the over 100 articles Freud produced during these years we find a publication that presents pictures for the first time of what would decades later be accepted as 'nuclear motility'. To describe what he observed, Freud used the common cytological term 'Verdichtungen' and introduced another - 'Verschiebungen' - in reference to the 'Zellkern' (the nucleus). These are essential terms which Freud would later use to describe the dreamwork of the unconscious. The fact that Freud presented his work as inspired by Darwin additionally invites investigation of the relationship between his visual experience of the 'Zellkern' and his concept of the "Kern unseres Wesens". Freud's drawings and verbal images as metaphors of the 'Kern' (core) are so intricately connected, that many of his metaphorical expressions could be taken as ontological. Freud consistently sought to contend the assumption that his psychoanalytical models were of material or biological import. Rather than having been driven by his existing biological preconceptions or observations without being aware of them, Freud's involvement in the contemporary debate between plasmatic and nuclear theories of memory suggests his deliberate use of this powerful rhetoric.