Best Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis

As we think we live. This is why the assemblage of philosophical ideas is more than a specialist study. It moulds our type of civilization. A.N.Whitehead

Freud’s letters to Fliess during the 1890s reveal a young neurologist struggling to develop a clinical theory of the neuroses and psychoses with the central theme that symptoms resulted from the repression of unpleasant sexual affects whether based on actual events or on phantasies. He gradually lost confidence in his “seduction theory,” not because he ever denied that childhood seduction was emotionally damaging but because the evidence for it often derived from fallible memory. Freud put it his way: “. . . one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect”.

He tried another approach “with a determined effort to examine what shape the theory of mental functioning takes if one introduces quantitative considerations, a sort of economics of nerve forces” [6]. This refers of course to his Project for a Scientific Psychology [7], which he abandoned after much frenetic effort with the words to Fliess: “to me it appears to have been a kind of madness” [6].However, as Kanzer observed,“the project is a set of neurologically clad psychological propositions drawn from clinical observation” [8]. And Mancia [8a] pointed out that: “the language of the Project is only apparently physiological. Substantially it is a
metaphorical language...”. Solms and Saling endorse this view, pointing out that Freud retained many of the ideas in the Project but “none of these was based on the neurophysiology or neuroanatomy of the day” [9]. Of greater significance for the future of psychoanalysis was that, by 1893, Freud had rejected first Meynert’s and then Charcot’s views on the cortical localization of psychological pathology and had adopted John Hughlings Jackson’s approach, which emphasized that complex mental processes are best understood by not trying to isolate them in specific areas in the brain. This view, which Freud had championed in On Aphasia, enabled him to regard the biological aspects of mental functioning and the psychological as separate but interrelated [9–11]. However, almost 40 years later he was, if anything,more pessimistic about understanding this interrelationship:

Everything that lies between [the brain and our acts of consciousness] is unknown to us . . . . If it [knowledge of this interrelationship] existed it would at the most afford an exact localisation of the processes of consciousness and would give us no help towards understanding them.

Fifty-five years later the philosopher Chalmers called this the “hard problem.” Toulmin , quoted by Ulrike May , has pointed out that great investigators often have a “vision” early on in their lives and then devote the rest of their lives to its verification. In Freud’s case it is this vision which dominates the 1890s.He is driven to understand psychic functioning using any intellectual discipline that serves this purpose, but underscored by the conviction that unconscious processes and human sexuality and its repression were essential ingredients in this endeavor.He writes to Fliess in January 1896:

I see, via the detour of medical practice, you are reaching your first ideal of understanding human beings as a physiologist just as I most secretly nourish the hope of arriving, via these same paths, at my initial goal of philosophy. For that is what I wanted originally, when it was not yet at all clear to me to what end I was in the world.

Three months later he repeats the same cri de coeur:

If both of us are still granted a few more years for quiet work, we shall certainly leave behind something that can justify our existence. Knowing this, I feel strong in the face of all daily cares and worries.As a young man I knew no longing other than for philosophical knowledge, and now I am about to fulfil it as I move from medicine to psychology.

The impact of these two quotations is not fully felt until it is realized that Freud uses his own idiosyncratic version of the terms “psychology” and “philosophy.” Ulrike May explains that psychology for Freud at this time “means an overarching explanatory theory forming a more abstract frame of reference in which the clinical findings can be accommodated and whereby they can be systematically linked to each other. As we know, this part of the theory was called metapsychology from February 1896 on.”

Freud’s struggle to complete The Interpretation of Dreams–it took more than 4 years–reflects the struggle that neuroscientists and psychoanalysts have today, not so much because they disagree on the facts but more because there is a gulf between the poet, the artist and philosopher, and the empirical scientist and mathematician. The latter expect to find “the truth”–or a version of it; the former know there is never an answer to the question “Is it true or is it false?” An example of this might be a most ingenious study carried out by Fabiani et al. [21] that collected eventrelated potentials in an attempt to distinguish true from false or constructed memories. They found that true memories left a sensory signature whilst false ones did not. Here was some evidence of an engram or memory trace, but the type of memory tested was semantic, declarative memory and therefore had no autobiographical content and no emotional content. This “sensory signature” has an in vitro quality about it. It could be useful in testing the integrity of a neuronal pathway but at present is of very little interest to psychoanalysts because it doesn’t take into account the perceptual and recall distortions of “real life” memory.

Freud tried to be both philosopher and scientist, and how he suffered! He had little trouble with the “art” and the dreams; it was the last chapter, Chapter 7, the Psychology, which tormented him. By June 1898 his distress was obvious, “with the continuation of the dream [book] something is amiss . . . For it is wretchedly difficult to set out the new psychology in so far as it pertains to the dream . . . So I am stuck at the relationship of the two systems of thinking (my italics); I must deal with them in earnest. For a while I again shall be of no use to anyone. The tension of uncertainty makes for an infamously unpleasant state, which one feels almost physically”.

By May 1899 he had decided to publish, though doubts remained as to whether his reach had exceeded his grasp. In confirmation, he writes the well-known funny story to Fliess about the husband and wife trying to decide whether to kill a cock or a hen for their holiday celebrations. If either dies the other will pine.After the rabbi suggests that the hen should be killed, he is told that the cock will pine. The rabbi’s reply: “So let him pine! . Exactly right or not, Freud would publish.

He had made his decision, but even after he had sent Fliess the first proof page to acknowledge Fliess’s “share in the dream [book],” he writes: “A strange feeling, in the case of such a child of sorrow! I [still] have great difficulties with it; I can not manage more than two hours a day without calling on Friend Marsala for help. ‘He’ deludes me into thinking that things are not really so bleak as they appear to be when sober”.

Fliess as organic advisor could come up with nothing to help him; it was, however, Fliess’s gift of a case of fine Marsala that consoled him! The first copy of The Interpretation of Dreams was in Fliess’s hands on 27 October 1899. In his famous Chapter 7, Freud makes it clear that he is using models, analogies, and metaphors to illustrate his mental apparatus. “I shall entirely disregard the fact that the mental apparatus with which we are here concerned is also known in the form of an anatomical preparation . . .” and yet he uses what appear to be neurological terms in his descriptions.A closer look reveals that he is using the vernacular version of the term and not the precise neurological meaning. The term “innervation,” which means the nerve supply to an area of the body, is here used by Freud to mean the transmission of energy. In the same way, his or her gadget has a sensory in addition to electric motor stop, although by simply that Freud means that it offers path. The term reflex isn't right here found in your feeling associated with an involuntary actions although shows how the gadget can be reversible, as well as the reference to “degrees connected with conductive resistance” hints with significant thoughts through the Task. It truly is like your thinker can be disassociating him or her self by science although wanting to know your audience to help keep fifty percent a close look open for most communication between the two.