I do not know, if one can say Freud's work got 'neglected' (there are various citations of and comments on Freud's early 'Entwurf'), but here are some thoughts to your question:

(1) Freud himself considered the text as not worthy for a publication – this is the reason why it did not get published before 1950. Due to this fact it obviously had less time to get commented and carried on by his 'followers'.

(2) It is a work that is mainly based on 'economical' aspects of the functioning of our psyche. This, definitely, is a neglected area of Freud's theory these days, even in psychoanalytic movements.

(3) Psychoanalysis is by far not as popular as it used to be, especially not in the eyes of neuroscientists (there are, however, exceptions, e.g. Mark Solms).

Thank you for answer my question Dragica!

I appreciate your arguments, specially the argument 2.

With respect the argument 3, here in Brazil, the Prof. Sidarta Ribeiro from Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte is a neuroscientist that has often defended possible confluences between psychoanalysis and neuroscience...

Are you familiar with neuropsychoanalysis?

There is a completely different take from there to the project

c

Dear Christian,

no, I'm not familiar with neuropsychoanalysis... I only quoted the work of Sidarta Ribeiro because it has attracted the attention of some researchers here in Brazil.

My question here is about the recent researches within the fields of Neurology or Neuroscience in which Freud's "Entwurf" is revisited (as the paper about the LTP-memory connection theory I quoted above)...

ok. You see, there is this neuropsychologist and psychoanalyist called mark solms who wrote a book a bout freud's project under the light of modern neuroscience.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Moment-Transition-Neuroscientific-Articles-Sigmund-ebook/dp/B00850IRQG/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1396596752&sr=8-2-fkmr0&keywords=solms+freud+prohect

Lots of people have taken some ideas from freud at that time and developed them from a newer perspective. you can have a look at the neuropsychoanalysis journal or at the perhaps best book on the topic

http://www.amazon.co.uk/From-Couch-Lab-Psychodynamic-Neuroscience/dp/019960052X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1396596849&sr=8-1&keywords=from+the+couch+to+the+lab

here I add some other papers that are key on the topic

..

..

And there is more stuff on my website

www.rehabilitacionneuropsicologica.com

Thank you Christian!

The links you posted are interesting... I will save the pdfs to read them later...

Well, returning to the main point about Freud's "Project for a scientific psichology", my question here is: Why in the specific field of Psychoanalytical Theory the academic production (papers, books, presentations in workshops, etc..) about Freud's "Project" is so small in comparison to the academic production about his other works? Dragica has pointed above some plausible arguments. However, her argument 2 raises other question: Why the 'economical' aspects of the functioning of psyche is a neglected area of Freud's theory?

Yesterday, I also posted a question about Freud's drive dualism (see the link https://www.researchgate.net/post/Why_are_some_theorists_of_Psychoanalysis_abandoning_Freuds_drive_dualism_concepts). Perhaps the answer to such question have something in common to the present one...

Dear Walter. I imagine there are many reasons. In general psychoanalysis has lost space on academia in comparison with its big boom on USA during the ego psychology era 50-60-70s [when many psychoanalysts emigrated to USA after the war and were placed at universities when psychiatry was still highly psychodynamic] . Then, cognitive views of behavior, which were then later married to neuroscience for obvious practical reasons, moved psychoanalytic thought to the background. This has slowly changed, mostly through the development of affective neuroscience, which has encounter on freuds' ideas models of the mind that were not available on the cognitive counterparts.

Now, inside psychoanalysis mechanic or hydraulic [drives] and unipersonal models of the mind have lost popularity as well. this is mainly because a large amount of research emerged on relation to early development and attachment. These studies promoted a view of the mind centered on drives that were relational by definition and set the stage for what today is called inter subjective psychoanalysis, perhpas the most popular strand of psychoanalysis today. Nevertheless there are some psychoanalytic thinkers that have also criticized the abandonment of drive model [see for example lichtemberg theory of motivational systems], or even Solms and Panksepp.

I think it likely that Freud's Project has been neglected because it calls for work at mathematical representation of psychological ideas. This goal is stated in the opening lines of the Project. Then, as now, there is a near universal belief that mathematics, which can represent ideas in the hard sciences so well, cannot be of service in the soft ones such as psychology. The opening line of the Project is: ‘The intention of this project is to furnish us with a psychology which shall be a natural science: its aim, that is, is to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material particles and so to make them plain and void of contradiction.

Dear Walter,

It is not still neglected. Freud's primary goal was to establish psychoanalysis in neuroanatomy. The last 20 years have been particularly imaging techniques such as PET, MRI supplied many posts on this. (Schiepek G. Neurobiology of Psychotherapy, Schattauer 2011).

Dear Egon,

Thank you for your response, I suppose that you don't understood well my question...

I know that Freud's 'Project' has been revisited in several recent researches, but this occurs out of psychoanalytical mainstream... While in some recent researches, Freud's "Project" was taken only as a source of inspiration (as is the case of my own research), in other ones some Freudian conjectures were even confirmed by using modern techniques. In my view, while several researchers from other fields still make use of the Freud's 'Project', the same do not occurs among the psychoanalysts. Here in Brazil, one of the very few psychoanalysts that still writing about the 'Project' is Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, which authored the excellent collection intitled 'Introdução à Metapsicologia Freudiana' (Introduction to Freudian Metapsychology)...

Dear Walter,

AlI mentioned is not the Mainstream of psychoanalysis. This is right. But there are several interesting researches in US und EU (Solms, Kaplan Solms, Leuzinger Bohleber, Buchheim, Turnbull, Sachs, Ogden, Kandel ..) developing Neuropsychoanalysis. The development of Psychoanalysis has never been very homogeneous. And the Mainstream has never been the most productive research field. For this you can find different psychological and sociological reasons; I think one very important reason is that the link of research and healing takes place very withdrawn in practical work. There is less psychoanalytical empirical research at universities.

Have a nice day

Egon

Two people with expertise who'd be good to put this question to are Howard Shevrin of the University of Michigan, emeritus prof. of psychology and doing research still, with a vast background related to this question, and Ariane Bazan, a former research associate of Shevrin's and current prof. of psychology at the University of Bruxelle, Belgium.

I think that we are going to find that many freudian clinical observations had a neuroscience correlation, but his positivistic attitude does not fit with the nowadays neuroscience orientation, regarding the brain more as a complex system than as a complex machine.

@ Lida Bitrou. The components of a machine are made before in order to work in the machine. A biological system is "made" in a different way, by the natural evolution. This could explain why the important human sexual drive can give us some problem, as Freud argued with the psychic conflict theory and this could explain, in my view, why it is so difficult to live, feel and integrate our emotional life for our mind, in the Bionian approach. Thank you for the question.