The Neuropsychoanalytic Approach: Using Neuroscience as the Basic Science of Psychoanalysis

NEUROSCIENCE AS THE BASIC SCIENCE OF PSYCHOANALYSISNeuroscience was the basic science behind Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and technique. He worked as a neurologist for 20 years before being aware that a new approach to understand complex diseases, namely the hysterias, was needed. Solms coined the term neuropsychoanalysis to affirm that neuroscience still belongs in psychoanalysis. The neuropsychoanalytic field has continued Freud’s original ideas as stated in 1895. Developments in psychoanalysis that have been created or revised by the neuropsychoanalysis movement include pain/relatedness/opioids, drive, structural model, dreams, cathexis, and dynamic unconscious. Neuroscience has contributed to the development of new psychoanalytic theory, such as Bazan’s (2011) description of anxiety driven by unconscious intentions or phantoms. Results of adopting the dual aspect monism approach of idiographic psychoanalytic clinical observation combined with nomothetic investigation of related human phenomena include clarification and revision of theory, restoration of the scientific base of psychoanalysis, and improvement of clinical treatments. By imbricating psychoanalytic thinking with neuroscience, psychoanalysts are also positioned to make contributions to neuroscience research. Freud’s original Project for a Scientific Psychology/Psychology for Neurologists can be carried forward in a way that moves psychoanalysis into the 21st century as a core contemporary science (Kandel 1999). Neuroscience as the basic science of psychoanalysis both improves the field, and enhances its scientific and cultural status

Continued Dialogue on The Oxford-style Debate from the 15th Annual Congress of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society, New York City, 2014: Speaking to the subject or speaking to the function: each address requires its proper terms

In neuropsychoanalysis, the epistemological line most held is the “dual aspect monism” perspective. This perspective holds that “our brains, including mind, are made of one kind of stuff, cells, but we perceive this stuff in two different ways” (Solms & Turnbull, 2003, pp. 56–58; our italics). One is the neuroscientists’ “objective” way, or the brain, which we dissect “with scalpel and microscope or look at it with brain scans and then trace neurochemical pathways.” The other way is the psychoanalysts’ “subjective” way, or the mind: “how we feel and what we think. Freud refined this kind of observation into free association.” As, however, there is only one object, in the end, there is a more or less direct correspondence between phenomena of the brain and phenomena of the mind.SCOPUS: no.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Speaking to the subject or speaking to the function: each address requires its proper terms: The Oxford-style debate: the 15th neuropsychoanalysis congress, New York, 2014

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe