Every now and then there is a centennial and I think the reason that there is this fake Freud title on my talk is that 1995 is the centennial of the first good book on structural psychology, namely Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, which came out in 1895. It’s the first major work which discusses the mind as though there weren’t a single little homunculus or mastermind in the mid- dle of it pulling the strings.
Freud’s book is the first one that I know of that says that in the mind there isn’t a single thing there, there are at least three or four major systems. There is the common-sense reasoning system – later he wrote a book on the psychopathology of everyday life in which he tries and fails to account for how people do ordinary common-sense reasoning, but he recognizes that as a very hard problem. If you look at the later Freud a lot of people think that Freud must have studied emotions and emotional illnesses and disorders because that was the really hard and important problem, but Freud himself said the really hard thing to understand is how people do ordinary everyday non-neurotic reasoning.
The reason I suggested that he was a great AI researcher is that in trying to make this theory of how people’s motivations worked in this period 1895 and a couple years thereafter, he wrote this long essay, some of which is lost, for the Project for Scientific Psychology. The project wasn’t published until around 1950 by Carl Pribram, and it has little diagrams which are sort of neural network like, but more like the hydraulic motivation theory that later Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz won the Nobel Prize for, this diagram that is the foundation of modern ecological theory.
But the point is that Freud is an important figure because he’s the first one to consider that the mind is a big complicated kludge of different types of machinery which are specialized for different functions. If you look at the brain you find 400-odd different pieces of computer architecture with their own busses and somewhat different architecture. Nobody knows much about how any of those work yet but they’re on the track. The idea that the brain is made of neurons and works largely by sending signals along the nerve fibers which are the connections between them is only from about 1890. The neuron doctrine, that the nerve cells are not a single organism, not a single thing but there are a lot of independent gadgets which do separate things and send signals that are informational rather than chemical and so forth, is only a hundred years old