Psychic Apparatus

The notion of psychic apparatus (or of the intellect) is common in Freud's work from the very start (cf. for example, the article of 1898b, "The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness"). It appears continuously from then on, and is the title of Chapter I of one of his last texts, An Outline of Psychoanalysis1940a [1938]). It was borrowed from the vocabulary of nineteenth-century psychologists who were seeking to accord to animal and human mental functioning a representation conforming to the exigencies of the natural sciences (physiology...