The Metapsychology of Speech

The Project for a Scientific Psychology of 1895 represented an attempt to fuse a sophisticated theory of the psychic apparatus with the concepts needed to explain the structure and aetiology of hysterical symptoms. In the first section of this chapter we will be concerned with the precise function of the ‘zone of language’ in ‘a machine that in a moment would run of itself’. (Freud (1950a) Origins, (20 Oct 1895) p. 129). A general account of the Project, impenetrable as it will remain, is necessary.1