Before he developed psychology Freud wrote an important document it was an untitled handwritten manuscript, one hundred pages in length, which he mailed to his Berlin friend and confidant, Wilhelm Fliess. It was never edited for publication, In 1950, when establishing the Freud museum it was published in its original German as part of a collection of Freud's correspondence with Fliess.

 

In this document he wrote "The intention is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate stages of specifiable material particles"

 

He then described neural networks as his drawings from these letters reveal.

 

 

In effect he was developing the ideas that today we describe under the terms of neural-network models, or neural-computation. So one may say, that even before being the father of psychology, he was initially to be the father of computational neuroscience. But he was not the first, before him were his teachers Ernest Bruck and Theodor Meynert.

 

Bruck argued that the brain should be investigated as a physical system with mathematics and physics, Meynert stated A thought is the consequence of activations of cortical cells. After two cells have been simultaneously excited (equivalent to the simultaneous arousal or two ideas), an association fibre opens up between them. A "train of thought" is simply the consequence of excitation flowing through a series of cortical cells that have been associated because of previous simultaneous excitations. Every person, of course, has a unique pattern of experience and so develops a unique pattern of cortical associations that represent his memories. These associations are the anatomical substrate of a person's "individuality," and Meynert referred to them collectively as the ego (German Ich).

 

Under certain ‘toxic’ conditions this substrate of a person's "individuality," can be disrupted causing sever mental disturbances i.e., ‘psychosis’

 

Later on Freud abandoned this line of thought and decided to develop his ideas unrelated to the brain physiology.

 

"I shall entirely disregard the fact that

the mental apparatus with which we

are here concerned is also known to

us in the form of an anatomical preparation,

and I shall carefully avoid the temptation

to determine psychical locality in any

anatomical fashion. I shall remain

on psychological ground"

(Freud, 1953/1900, p. 536).

 

 

 Nevertheless he was aware of the need to go back and relate his psychological conceptualizations to the brain.

 

In my mind this recording from U-Tube ending with Freud saying “but the struggle is not yet over” see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfGsjQ_0l54&feature=related

Means that the endeavor of having a brain related psychiatry is not yet achieved and is still waiting for us to accomplish.