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Working out the biological basis of categorization in the real world is precisely one of the main goals of Edelman . Edelman’s ideas are of interest not only because of his focus on processes of self-organization which provide the organism with the required adaptive potential, but because he considers memory from an embodied perspective. The notion of “memory as recategorization” is based on processes of sensory–motor coordination which in a very direct sense anchor memory, or its manifestation in behavior, in the interaction of an individual with the environment.

We want to pick up two central ideas of Edelman here, sensory–motor coordination and value systems. The general framework proposed by Edelman suggests that the results of motor activity are an integral part of categorization. “While sensation and perhaps certain aspects of perception can proceed without a contribution of the motor apparatus, perceptual categorization depends upon the interplay between local cortical sensory maps and local motor maps. The strongest consequence of this assumption is that categorization cannot be a property of one small portion of the nervous system” . Thus, categorization involves not only the brain but also the sensory–motor apparatus, a key implication of the principles of sensory–motor coordination. The essential mechanism of categorization in Edelman’s framework is a parallel sampling of the environment by multiple sensory maps within the same modality and between different modalities. This sampling is a process of sensory–motor coordination in which various maps pick up different, but temporally correlated, signals from the environment. These correlations play a fundamental role in categorization . Edelman illustrates the principle of sensory–motor coordination as shown in Fig. 2.

Thelen and Smith point out that “this perfect temporal association of multimodal information is perhaps the only perceptual invariant that spans all ages, contexts and modalities. We believe, with Edelman, that this correlation is the primary link between the mind and the world.” This is a central point in embodied memory theory: sensory–motor coordination structures the high-dimensional sensory space by inducing regularities. The temporal correlation of signals in the neural maps related to the different sensory modalities, generated by the interaction with an object, is the most basic example of such regularities.Which of these patterns of correlations are chosen or selected in the process of categorization is modulated by a value system. Value systems are basic evolutionary adaptations that define broad behavioral goals of an organism. For example, if an organism succeeds in grasping an object or sticking it into its mouth, a value signal is generated that enables the association of the activation in the neural maps corresponding to the different sensory and proprioceptive modalities. In this way the organism is capable of generating categories on its own as it interacts with the environment. To take our example again: Peter learns to differentiate between apples and newspapers by picking up apples and newspapers and sticking them into his mouth. The two sequences of events lead to different activations in the different neural maps which are then, via the modulation of the value system, associated with each other. If a new situation affords this, a new category has to be developed. Because there is no limit to the patterns of sensory stimulation, new perceptual categories can be formed.

A third important aspect of the methodology of embodied cognitive science is the developmental perspective. When conceptualizing memory processes, embodied cognitive scientists do not primarily attempt to directly model the internal processes of memory. The goal of their modeling is to define the developmental and learning processes and to explain the current behavior as resulting from these processes as the individual matures and interacts with the real world. The advantage of this perspective for modeling memory processes is that fewer assumptions have to be made about internal representations. Moreover, in this way, we are forced to work out the underlying mechanisms that eventually–during development– lead to the observed behavior. Much of the work in embodied cognitive science is based on a developmental perspective. For instance, constructing robots means implementing their “memory” as self-learning systems. This means that the robots change their knowledge and “memory” automatically by interacting with the environment. As already mentioned, unlike when analyzing living organisms, the researcher is able to “look into the robot’s brain” and observe the continuous changing of its neural network interacting with its environment. In other words, the researcher can study with great precision the influence of the developmental or learning history of the robot on his internal representation (neural network).According to the findings of this kind of research, memory has therefore to be understood as a product of developmental processes in constant change (see below).

This perspective is compatible with psychoanalytic theorizing, where the developmental view is one of the underlying principles.

As described above , the analyst tried to understand the present behavior of Mr. X in connection with his biography, his idiosyncratic development. The “objective” information from Mr. X´s mother, that her baby son had suffered from an unbearable bodily state and that she had not been able to comfort him for 3 months (partly also because she had suffered from severe postnatal depression), seemed to have many analogies to the analyst’s countertransference feelings of helplessness, total insufficiency, identification with the painful psychosomatic symptoms of the analysand, and finally depression. The developmental perspective has thus, of course, additional relevance for psychoanalytic treatments, but it is beyond the scope of this paper to also describe Mr. X’s processes of change during psychoanalysis itself in detail.

From our theoretical perspective it is relevant that memories are not seen as one-to-one retrievals of certain historical events but as a continuous process of change of the whole organism in interaction with its environment; or, to put it provocatively: every single procedure for remembering modifications the actual ram, despite the fact that while doing so this process isn't an human judgements building although the intricate method towards the fantastic real truth associated with previous developing activities.

Let us take another example to further illustrate the view of an embodied memory taking account of all three of the basic theoretical topics just mentioned:

We observe the 6-month-old infant Peter taking apples and newspapers from a table. Peter puts everything in his mouth–apples and newspaper. After a while he only grasps the apples, leaving the newspapers aside. From our perspective as observers of this scene we suppose that Peter has learnt from experience and “remembers” that apples taste better then newspapers. Therefore he now prefers to taste apples. Analyzing the infant’s behavior, we (the observers) postulate that Peter selects apples by reference to his former experiences: according to the observer he has functioning memory at his disposal. We have defined memory from an “outside” perspective–observing the infant’s behavior–and not by looking into his brain (memory as a theoretical construct and frame-of-reference problem). It is an attribution to the infant as a whole (we evaluate his whole behavior), not to one part of the infant, say its brain. This means that we do not have to postulate any kind of internal representation in order to describe his behavior.

Another important observation is that the infant has developed categories: he can now differentiate between apples and newspapers (for further discussion see).

The frame-of-reference problem states that in explaining memory functions we must make a clear distinction between observable behavior and the internal brain mechanisms that, in the interaction with the real world, lead to a particular behavior. This implies that behavior cannot be reduced to internal processes, nor to brain processes for that matter. Doing so would be to commit a category error (to use a philosophical term). This specific appears simple, ; however , it truly is a lot more shocking there's good confusion inside books about it problem.

Applied to memory, it implies that a clear distinction must be made between the theoretical construct and underlying mechanisms responsible for mediating between the past and the present. Ashby’s concept of memory is neutral to the mechanisms by which it is implemented in the organism. In biological organisms the mechanisms are to be found at the level of neural plasticity, whereas in artificial systems such as robots or
computers they are situated at the level of switching circuits implemented in silicon. Another example would be immune systems, which can also be described by invoking the concept of memory in the interaction of the organism with environment . In all these cases, it makes sense to use the concept of memory.

We can only describe on an observable level when and in what interactional context Mr. X was able to “remember” his unbearable bodily state from his first weeks of life. Our observations are exclusively based on the psychoanalytical situation (analysis of Mr. X’s behavior, feelings, and verbalizations, the analyst’s countertransference reactions after the summer break, etc.)–we never had the possibility of “looking straight into Mr. X’s brain,” and thus cannot know what neural and neurophysiological processes had been activated when Mr. X was able to remember the childhood experiences. This differentiation seems simple. Nevertheless, you can often find a confusion between the level of description of memory processes and underlying brain mechanisms in the literature.We all ourself manufactured this group error in the above-mentioned 1986 papers.

Some authors have tried to ferret out the mechanisms underlying memory in biological systems. It is important to emphasize that these mechanisms should not be seen as “being” the memory, but rather as implementing those processes which, as the organism interacts with the environment, lead to behavior that we try to explain by invoking the theoretical notion of memory.

As we will illustrate, the ideas developed in this section naturally connect to clinically relevant concepts, although the mode of argumentation might at first seem unfamiliar or strange for readers unacquainted with this research tradition (see Introduction). Cognitive scientists often use metaphors or short stories to explain their ideas. For instance, Ashby wrote this “story” discussing memory as a theoretical construct: “Suppose I am in a friend’s house and, as a car goes past outside, his dog rushes to a corner of the room and cringes. To me the behavior is causeless and inexplicable. Then my friend says: ‘He was run over by a car six months ago.’ The behavior is now accounted for by reference to an event of six months ago” . In other words, the explanation is not given in terms of the current internal state of the dog, but by reference to an event in the past.Memory, then, is a theoretical construct that connects the state of the individual in the past and the influence the event had on the individual to the behavior in the current situation. This theoretical notion of memory is to be clearly distinguished from the mechanisms mediating these processes. In this sense, memory is not something sitting somewhere in a box inside the head of the dog, but is a theoretical construct and is attributed to the complete organism. A similar idea is also reflected in the so-called “ecological perspective” on memory, where the function of memory within natural contexts is investigated.

This kind of notion of memory is quite natural to help psychoanalytic imagining. The particular analyst observes inside a distinct framework unacceptable actions that she / he does not comprehend. The particular purpose subsequently would be to find analogies to help conduct with sooner circumstances (events who have occured in the past) that were perhaps adaptive at the time, and by simply invoking the idea of memory may well make clear the actual person’s recent actions.

In our case history we described how the analyst did not understand the sudden extreme change in the behavior of Mr. X after the summer break. She understood that his rage and attacks on her had to do with the separation, but she had no idea why the affects were of such intensity, or why the anger and disappointment obviously had such a total and archaic quality connected to obviously psychosomatic reactions in the patient as well as in her own countertransference feelings. Only the information on the sudden change in his bodily state when his mother changed his food in the 7th week of his life made it possible to understand that the extreme reaction in the presence of the psychoanalytical relationship had been brought about by “memories” of preverbal early experiences.

From a theoretical perspective it is important that Mr. X’s memories were not “retrieved from a box inside his head” but were products of a theoretical construct connecting the observed state of Mr. X in the analytical situation with his probable experiences in early childhood.

Again, in order to connect present with past information, nothing needs to be said about the internal neural mechanisms that mediate this transfer. These considerations represent an instance of the notorious frame-of-reference problem, which will be discussed next.

The classical conceptualization of memory leads to many theoretical problems, as has been discussed extensively in the cognitive science literature 6 and in the psychoanalytic literature . It cannot, for example, be used to give a plausible explanation of how knowledge can be applied repeatedly to new situations, i.e., how learning processes occur that require new situational analysis, how problem solutions can be transferred from one domain to another, and how new categories are established. Just one example: it is no problem for us to recognize the Jupiter symphony by Mozart even if a neighbor is practicing parts of it on the piano. This process of remembering cannot be based on simple pattern matching because the current pattern (piano music) is different from the earlier one (orchestral music). It would therefore not be helpful to just store a pattern somewhere in the brain. Recognition is rather a constructive inner process relating a past experience (listening to the symphony) to the present situation (hearing Mozart played on the piano).

For this reason (and many cognitive scientists today agree) it is necessary to conceptualize memory in a fundamentally different way; in other words, a change of paradigm seems indispensable a topic that we want to discuss now.7 Most of these alternative conceptualizations capitalize on the notion of embodiment which means–as we will discuss below–that memory can only be understood in the interaction of an organism with its environment. It turns out that if memory is conceptualized according to this new paradigm, some of the fundamental problems in understanding memory can be resolved.

For an extended time I found that complicated to know thoroughly the fundamental distinctions relating to the methods associated with memory in conventional and in embodied cognitive science, that's recently been intensively influenced with the neurobiological human brain study with the final decades. We all for that reason want to discuss about three with the central subjects rather broadly:

− memory as a theoretical construct
− the frame-of-reference problem
− the developmental perspective
− illustrating them briefly with psychoanalytic discourses and our case material.

Fifteen years ago we discussed these questions in a paper in the International Review of Psychoanalysis, analyzing three key scenes of a psychoanalysis . In these analyses we tried to start an interdisciplinary dialogue between “classical cognitive science” and psychoanalysis on questions relating to memory processes. In 1983 we had begun to refer to the recent approaches to memory–which were much discussed at the time and were expounded by Schank among others in his book Dynamic Memory –to explain memory processes during psychoanalyses and seemed to shed new light on core psychoanalytic concepts, such as repetition ncompulsion, the rule of abstinence, and the working through of central conflicts in transference. Among other things, we showed that the focus concept of psychoanalysis can be described very precisely by a memory structure that resembled Schank’s TOP, the “thematic organization point” .We showed that the psychoanalytical concept of a focus, as illustrated by the “triangle of insight”  connecting analogous structures of an current conflict with those discovered in the transference and biographical information, corresponds in detail to Schank’s TOP.We illustrated this hypothesis by analyzing some information from the psychoanalysis of a severely depressed woman.We found analogous components in the current conflict situation (feeling exploited by her husband), the transference (being convinced that her analyst would “only” be interested in pursuing her own goals, e.g., earning money), and a traumatic experience of early childhood (being exploited by her mother as “protection” against Russian soldiers during a frightening night-time escape during World War II). We discussed how in all these three “key scenes” we found the components of the TOP–a finding which seemed to deepen our clinical and theoretical understanding of the psychodynamics of the analysand and her memories evoked in psychoanalysis.

We could now apply this memory concept in an matter analogous to the above case. In the current conflict with his brother Mr. X. experienced a sudden, unexpected change: he lost his good relationship to him from

                                                                 Triangle of insight

one day to the next and felt enormous rage and furious impulses towards him. In the transference we observed similar reactions: after the summer break the analyst was no longer experienced as a “good object” but an unempathetic, cold one responsible for painful and unbearable feelings of rage, disappointment, and despair in the patient and refused to help him find a way out of his present unbearable inner and physical state. Inquiring of his mother, Mr. X obtained the biographical information about the allergic milk reaction in the seventh week of his life which exposed him for 3 months to unbearable bodily states, and the “refusal” to offer a solution, to get him out of the painful situation. In all the three topics we find the same (cognitive) components of the TOP.

According to Schank, a TOP includes the following components: a goal configuration, expectations of plans and outcomes, actual plans and outcomes, and explanations of discrepancies. TOPs are abstract memory structures that are stored and are usually unconsciously recalled by socalled demons.“Demons” are programs that are continuously on the alert for an event to take place; in this case the event is the occurrence of a situation that is structurally similar to an earlier one. Although Schank talks about “dynamic memory,” this concept presupposes a “static” notion of memory. The dynamic aspect of memory in Schank’s concept is the establishment of new references to other memory structures. For example, if there is a new failed expectation, a reference is established from the failure point to a representation of the situation from which the (failed) expectation was generated. However, this notion still implies a kind of storehouse in which memory structures–knowledge–are kept, like records stored on a disk in a computer. Long-term memory is understood by analogy to Aristotle’s famous notion of memory as a wax tablet on which experiences are written. If the demons recognize a certain pattern in current information as being similar to a memory structure stored in the long-term memory, this structure will be transferred to the short-term memory, where it then is accessible to conscious remembering.

Schank thus formulates a “classical” definition of memory which is still very popular, and a significant number of psychologists, psychoanalysts, memory researchers, and nonscientists also maintain this view. If one asked a layperson what memory was, more than likely his answer would be something like “a place in the brain where information is stored.” In everyday language, we often describe mental processes as objects in an actual physical space. For example, we speak about storing something in the memory, or searching through our memory, or of holding ideas in our minds; like physical objects, memories may be lost, hard to find, and so forth.Memory as a stored structure is also found in many textbooks today . Baddeley  uses the following definition: “Human memory is a system for storing and retrieving information, information that is, of course, acquired through our senses.” In essence memory is viewed as information that is stored and later retrieved.

The question if and how such early traumatizations can be remembered and then be understood in the transference have been debated at length and in great detail within the psychoanalytic community during the last few years–an interesting discourse that we can do no more than mention here. The following section describes some of our own efforts to contribute to this discussion.

A 30-year-old computer science student (Mr. X) was looking for psychotherapeutic help in a desperate life situation. Because of heavy psychosomatic symptoms (eating and sleeping disorder, migraine, attacks of dizziness, skin irritation) he had not been able to pursue his studies for the past 5 years. He was living completely isolated and seemed increasingly to be developing paranoid fantasies. The only relationship he maintained at that stage was to his brother, who is 3 years younger than him. However, this relationship was crumbling, chiefly because he had insulted and even physically attacked his brother in outbursts of rage that neither he nor his brother was able to understand.

Mr. X arrived with the explicit desire to start a psychoanalysis. He had read about it and considered the method to be the one right for him. I had my doubts concerning this indication because I considered Mr. X to be a borderline patient and asked myself whether high frequent treatment would be the right treatment decision for him. During the first year of psychoanalysis Mr. X controlled the distance between us by means of marked intellectualization and an almost complete repulsion of emotions during the sessions. It was almost impossible to obtain new analytical insights: the analysis seemed mostly to cover conscious processes. Still, the patient arrived on time for the appointments and insisted vigorously on replacing any appointments that I had to cancel. He seemed to existentially need the holding function of psychoanalysis. He changed his behavior–although this did not appear to be connected to any insights gained in the psychoanalysis. He attended lectures and courses again and was more able to concentrate. Also, the psychosomatic symptoms remitted somewhat, which led Mr. X to say before we entered the summer break: “The treatment does me good . . .”

The sequence I would like briefly to describe now took place after this first long summer break. Mr. X arrived obviously distraught at our first appointment. He began straight away to heavily insult me and seemed to become absolutely beside himself with rage and anger because I had dared to disappear, to go on vacation for 4 weeks. This was irresponsible, selfish, and showed that I was not at all interested in my job and in my analysands. “I doubt whether you have had proper training as an analyst at all . Maybe you are just a ‘run-of-the-mill’ analyst” . . . I was surprised by the violence of his anger and despair, and during the session failed to reach him emotionally or by means of an interpretation of the experiences he had had due to the separation etc. Although it was possible to address his severe reaction to the separation and to prevent another outburst of rage, Mr. X instead fell into a long silence, which for me was of an even more frightening quality than his insults.

Some extremely difficult weeks followed. Mr. X seemed to only be able to choose between two states of mind on the couch: either heavy insults, anger, and attacks, or else silence and retreat. As to the content, I noticed that his attacks were mostly aimed at my analytical function.Mr. X insulted me not only as stupid, restricted, and unable to understand him even in the widest sense, but also as incompetent and not professionally trained. As a consequence of his attacks and extreme silence, I found myself confronted with a severe feeling of impotence, inadequacy, and even depressing self-doubts. However, the most difficult thing was to bear the physical reaction: his attacks during the sessions finally caused an inner tension to that extent that I began to feel sick and from time to time even suffered from stomach cramps–psychosomatic reactions which are unusual for me during psychoanalytical sessions. I then sought a better understanding of what had happened in the psychoanalytical session by means of a supervision session with an experienced colleague.

We presumed that the enormity of the attack and the silence indicated a traumatization suffered in a very early stage of Mr. X’s development, probably during his first year of life, in a phase of development in which physical and affective states of mind can not yet be either enclosed or symbolized. Had he suffered from an early traumatization, perhaps caused by separation from the primary object which I felt in my depressive countertransference feelings? The discussion with my colleague had, for me, mediated a certain distance and enabled me to increasingly reflec critically on my fierce reactions and countertransference fantasies. Not long after, Mr. X, following a session that had included heavy outbursts of rage, arrived a bit calmer to the next appointment. I carefully communicated my supposition that the long summer break could have led to an intense reactivation of unbearable feelings of dependence and desolation, which he could have tried to cope with by means of extreme aggressive attacks. I asked, following an intuitive idea, if he had, after sessions like the one before, felt any physical reaction. He told me that he had “felt sick throughout his whole body,” that he had not been able to eat, and that he had suffered from heavy stomach cramps. I was surprised by the analogy to my own psychosomatic symptoms during and after such sessions. I told him that the total quality of these states of mind led me to assume a reactivation of very early experiences, “ which could have been preserved in the body” and which “might try to become accessible to our analytical comprehension by this means which both of us find unbearable. Do you know, by chance, whether you suffered from a severe illness or an eating disorder during your first year of life, or whether you and your mother were separated?” Mr. X answered in the negative, but called his mother and found that 6 weeks after giving birth she had had the impression that she did not have enough milk. She abruptly stopped breast-feeding her baby and used baby food. Her baby reacted with a strong allergy, with a painful, itching skin irritation over his whole body. The mother told the analysand that she had not been able to touch the infant, that he always screamed, and that it had been almost impossible to calm him. She almost fell into despair, but after 3 months she had, in her words, “everything under control,” and gave a different formula food to the child.As a consequence, the symptoms disappeared. “And you’ve been shouting at me since the summer holidays that I did everything wrong, that I gave you ‘the wrong analytical nutrition,’ that I had changed completely in the holidays and that I refused to give you the right ‘analytical nutrition’ which could make everything turn out well again . . . The analytical sessions no longer do you any good as they used to before the holidays–they are just horrible now. Every contact with me seems to be unbearable . . .”–Mr. X began to cry for the first time in the psychoanalysis.

During the following weeks we were able to successively understand the reactivation of the early traumatization: the trauma laboriously found its way into his images, visualizations, and finally his language: it had become conscious and in the following years became successively better understood as one of the unconscious sources of the patient’s severe psychosomatic suffering.

In the last 20 or 30 years a vision of Sigmund Freud has been seeming to become reality: It is well known that Freud never gave up his hope that some day developments in the neurosciences might contribute to a “scientific foundation” of psychoanalysis in terms of the natural sciences. One reason why Freud himself did not continue his own attempts for such a neuroscientific foundation of psychoanalysis, his Outline of psychoanalysis , was his confrontation with the obvious limitations of the methodologies of the neurosciences of his time . He then consistently defined psychoanalysis as a “pure psychology of the unconscious.”

Recent developments in the neurosciences, e.g., the fascinating possibilities for studying the living brain by neuroimaging techniques (MEG, magnetence phalogram; ERP, event related potential; PET, positron emission tomography; fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging), as well as studies with the so-called neuroanatomical method developed by Kaplan-Solms and Solms , have initiated a boom and intensified dialogue between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences during the last 20 years or so.1 1999 saw the publication of the first volume of the international journal Neuro-Psychoanalysis, in which leading psychoanalysts and neuroscientists present their studies of emotion and affect, memory, sleeping and dreaming, conflict and trauma, conscious and unconscious problem solving, etc. In 2000 the International Society for Neuropsychoanalysis was founded, which organizes international conferences every year. In many different countries interdisciplinary groups of researchers have started to work systematically with patients who have suffered brain lesions which can be precisely localized in the brain. The joint aims of these research groups are the development of specific psychoanalytic treatment techniques which will enable us to help groups of patients (e.g., those suffering from a neglect syndrome after a stroke) therapeutically in the future . Another common aim is the intention to study the old topic of European philosophy in a new way: to investigate the relationship between brain and mind by systematic and critical reflections on the clinical psychoanalytical findings in these groups of patients worldwide.

As the different contributions to this volume illustrate, the dialogue between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences is of outstanding importance thanks to an increasing number of fascinating empirical and experimental studies in the areas of psychotherapy research, developmental and dream research, and many others, as well as to studies in the field of so-called basic science. However, just one critical introductory remark: after our experiences in a joint effort between 20 psychoanalysts and neuroscientists studying memory, dreams, and cognitive and affective problem solving from the perspectives of these two disciplines in a joint research project from 1992 to 1998 (supported by the Köhler Foundation, Darmstadt, Germany), it seems important to us to critically reflect on the epistemological dimensions of this dialogue .We see the dialogue between these disciplines as fascinating, innovative, and interesting–but also challenging and complicated for both sides. We often do not speak the same language, and apply different concepts even when we are using analogous terms. Furthermore, we often feel identified with divergent traditions in science and in philosophy of science. We need a great deal of tolerance and a lot of staying power to really achieve an intensive exchange of ideas of the kind that will enable us to reach new frontiers in our own thinking: to crack apart our former understanding and conceptualizations and resist the idealizing tendency to expect “solutions” for unsolved problems in our own discipline from the other (foreign) discipline– which is, like a blank screen, capable of attracting projections and projective identifications. To take new findings from the other discipline seriously means to undergo a period of uncertainty and of unease: it is always painful to leave “certainties” and false beliefs developed in your own field. To go through such a period of uncertainty and unease is, however– as shown by our actual interdisciplinary experiences–essential and unavoidable: it seems to be a prerequisite for a productive and constructive dialogue that goes beyond rediscovering already established disciplinary knowledge. Comparing models that have been developed in the two disciplines to explain their own specific data, collected by specific (and very different) research methods, involves encountering complex and sophisticated problems of philosophy of science and epistemology. To mention just two examples: the well-known danger of the eliminative reductionism of psychological processes onto neurobiological processes, or the consequences of unreflecting transferral of concepts, methods, and interpretations from one scientific discipline onto another one have to be prevented.

Another interesting aspect is elaborated on in a recent book by Michael Hagner , who discusses the enormous influence of neuroimaging techniques on current science and societies. The fantasized possibility “to have a direct view into the living and working brain” carries enormous seductive and fascinating power. It may, for example,mobilize the fantasy of gaining new, direct diagnostic capacities:

You may then differentiate between unstructured, chaotic forms of thinking and mathematical problem solving . . . between memories of earliest experiences in childhood, the last fight with your spouse, or conflicts with your parents, between erotic dreams and most exciting love affairs. In the twentieth century such discoveries were more or less reserved to the field of psychoanalysis. Probably none of the ‘X-ray examinations’ of the brain will ever be capable of extracting the biographical details, intimacies, and covered-over psychological levels that psychoanalysis has done. But the point is different: psychoanalysis, without any doubt, has had a great influence and has changed many things enormously, but it has not become a standardized method for bio-psycho-politics. This is probably not due mainly to the fact that the assumptions of psychoanalysis are mistaken, or that the unconscious and the drives are not attractive to such social engineering. The real problem is that psychoanalysis is too complicated, too unwieldy, too difficult to practice, and needs too much time . . .

The alteration [from psychoanalysis to the application of neuroimaging techniques] could lead to the danger that the variety and relevance of mental life will be evaluated according to their ability to be visualized . . . The prize for such a development is that the investigation of the deeper connections, correlations, explanations, calculations, and narratives–in other words the historic, scientific, textual linear thinking–will be displaced
by a new, visualizing, “superficial” kind of thought. In respect to the sciences of human beings, this means that the “deep digging” for which psychoanalysis stood might be replaced by the superficial insights of neuroimaging pictures. In this case, understanding human beings would turn into an “externalization of materialized forms of representation.” I don’t mean that the subject will be eliminated, but another anthropology could turn into reality which–in a double sense of the word–would produce structures of the surface.

Taking Hagner’s analyses and warnings seriously, I gained a new appreciation of a long tradition that has been trying to bridge between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences and other scientific disciplines, which seems to be not very well known. This is the dialogue between psychoanalysis and so-called cognitive science. In this dialogue it has always been very clear that careful reflection on epistemological and methodological problems is essential to any careful and fruitful comparison of models developed in the different fields.Again and again researchers have to realize that mental processes will never be directly observable. “Precisely because mental phenomena are not directly observable and therefore, from the purist standpoint of natural sciences, do not even exist, it is fundamentally impossible to regard them as explananda and to look for an explanation for them in the sense intended in the natural sciences” . To summarize this epistemological finding in a simplified way: One can never observe mental processes directly,“objectively.” Only subjects can describe mental processes–the mind! One can also never directly compare data collected in different fields by different research methods: there is no such things as “looking directly into the functioning of the brain”! All we have are explanations, interpretations, in other words “models” which try to explain the collected data in a particular field of observation as adequately and productively as possible–models which can then be tested, validated, and modified by further experiments or empirical studies in the neurosciences on the one hand or by further clinical observations in the psychoanalytic situation in psychoanalysis on the other hand. For this reason, getting involved in a dialogue between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences means starting an exchange on models based on very different kinds of data, research instruments, and so on.