PSYCHE, 1955, Jg. 9, Ausgabe 1

Freuds Arbeiten zur Gehirnpathologie tragen nicht nur zum Verständnis der Entwicklung der Psychoanalyse bei, sondern sie haben auch zur aktuellen Situation der hirnpathologischen Forschung Wesentliches zu sagen. Die kritischen Einwände, die Freud bereits in der Frühzeit der klassischen Lokalisationslehre gegen die tragenden Begriffe der »Projektion« und »Assoziation« erhebt, lassen in der Verbindung mit seinem spekulativen Entwurf, der den Begriff der »Repräsentation« und die funktionelle Regression eines solidarisch arbeitenden Sprachapparates herausarbeitet, das Bemühen erkennen, den Zwang des anatomischen Schemas in eine beweglichere funktionelle Ordnung hinüberzuführen. Bei diesem Versuch leisten Gedanken und Anschauungen des englischen Neurologen Jackson eine entscheidende Hilfe. Freud führt diese Wendung auf drei Stufen durch, denen drei »Studien« gewidmet sind: der Stufe des Bewegungsapparates, der Stufe des Sprachapparates und der Stufe des psychischen Apparates, der zunächst als ein solcher des Gedächtnisses gefaßt wird. Von dieser letzten Stufe aus führt die Entwicklung zur Psychoanalyse.

Freud's works on brain pathology, besides contributing to our understanding of the development of psychoanalysis, are of an essential interest even in the actual situation of cerebro-pathological research: The critical objections Freud made, in those early times of the classic localization theory, against such supporting concepts as »projection« and »association«, and his speculative draft suggesting the concepts of »representation« and of a functional regression of the co-ordinated system of speach, reveal the effort made to ascend from a stationary anatomic model to a more flexible view of the order of functions. In the ideas and deliberations of the English neurologist Jackson Freud found a decisive support to his attempt. Freud undertook his new approach in three steps corresponding to his three studies which are dedicated respectively to the locomotive system, the system of speech and the psychological apparatus which he originally conceived as that of memory. It is from this latter step that psychoanalysis took its rise.

Similarity judgments play a very important role in psychology. For the most part, they are treated as accessible only to the subjective and intuitive attitude of the psychologist. The development of objective and quantitative measures of similarity is, however, not only possible but highly desirable. Two such methods are treated in detail, the interpersonal Q-correlation and the polarity-profile, i. e. the »semantic differential« of Osgood. Both methods recommend themselves because of the ease with which they can be handled and because of the insights into the dynamics of the psychotherapeutic process with which they provide us. As an example of the uses to which the Q-method may be put the problem of the congruence between self and ideal self is discussed. The general properties of the PP-method are explored, such as the reliability and the validity of the distance-measure, and the dimensionality of the D-space. The latter appears to be two-dimensional.