Remember the early days of MSDOS and how you had to format a disk with “drives” before you could put anything onto the disk? This is a very simplistic analogy, but formatting a disk for a computer is like formatting the brain with neural assemblies prepared to receive and store information. When I was learning how to use MSDOS and the early computers, I had to learn how to format disks with drives in order to store my data. Without a drive installed (structured like the scaffolding of architecture), there was literally no way for me to store info on that disk.
The brain sort of works that way.
Freud might appreciate the association of “drive” with the formatting and structuring of the brain.
While Freud began his career as a neurologist and tried to map mental processes to neural structures in his unpublished 1895 manuscript, Project for a Scientific Psychology, he ultimately abandoned this biological approach. He realized that the technology of his era was insufficient to link specific neural tissues to complex psychological phenomena. Sigmund Freud did not say that internal drives structure the physical brain. Instead, Freud argued that internal drives structure the human psyche or mind.
