In the Eye of the Beholder: Helmholtzian Perception and the Origins of Freud's 1900 Theory of Transference

Freud's 1900 theory of transference was indebted to the convergence of philosophy and physiology found in nineteenth-century theories of visual perception. The author maps out the post-Kantian philosophical and German physiological currents that gave rise to Hermann von Helmholtz's influential work on perception, and proposes that Freud's 1900 theory of transference was a creative synthesis of novel notions like unconscious wishing and psychic defense with a Helmholtzian model of visual illusion.