Abstract

In the last 20 or 30 years a vision of Sigmund Freud has been seeming to become reality: It is well known that Freud never gave up his hope that some day developments in the neurosciences might contribute to a “scientific foundation” of psychoanalysis in terms of the natural sciences. One reason why Freud himself did not continue his own attempts for such a neuroscientific foundation of psychoanalysis, his Outline of psychoanalysis [1], was his confrontation with the obvious limitations of the methodologies of the neurosciences of his time [2]. He then consistently defined psychoanalysis as a “pure psychology of the unconscious.”