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What Is Neuropsychoanalysis?

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A Neuro-Psychoanalytical Dialogue for Bridging Freud and the Neurosciences

Abstract

The authors examine the historical, philosophical, and scientific foundations of what they term the “inter-discipline” of neuropsychoanalysis. With the support of historical evidence, they unravel how the traditional strict separation of psychoanalysis and the neurosciences, as still practiced by certain scientists in both fields, is grounded in a misreading of Freud: Rather than advocating such a separation on principle, Freud developed his purely psychoanalytical method for pragmatic reasons—neuroscience in his time simply was not advanced enough to yield fruitful results. While psychoanalysis continued to use subjectivity to explore the internal perception of the mental apparatus, neuroscience developed tools to study the physical realization of the mental apparatus in the brain. The authors argue that a position of correlation between the two modes is likely to yield stronger results than a single-track focus. Far from constituting a new school of psychoanalysis, neuropsychoanalysis provides a link that integrates research being conducted along the psychoanalysis/neuroscience boundary.

Based on a paper presented at the 10th International Neuropsychoanalysis Congress, Paris. A version of this article was published in Neuropsychoanalysis 13, 133–45 (2011).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “The future may teach us to exercise a direct influence, by means of particular chemical substances, on the amounts of energy and their distribution in the mental apparatus” (S.E. XXII, 182).

  2. 2.

    Freud was referring here to the conscious part of the mind, to what he called the system Pcpt.-Cs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa

    Mark Solms

  2. School of Psychology, Bangor University, Adeilad Brigantia, Penrallt Road, Gwynedd, LL57 2AS, Bangor, UK

    Oliver H. Turnbull

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  1. Mark Solms
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Correspondence to Mark Solms .

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  1. Berlin Center for Literary & Cultural Research, Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL), Berlin, Germany

    Sigrid Weigel

  2. Institute for Cultural History and Theory, Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Gerhard Scharbert

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Solms, M., Turnbull, O.H. (2016). What Is Neuropsychoanalysis?. In: Weigel, S., Scharbert, G. (eds) A Neuro-Psychoanalytical Dialogue for Bridging Freud and the Neurosciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17605-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17605-5_2

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