Best Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In this first vignette, I will describe aspects of three sessions which illustrate the emergence of feeling memories following a head injury. Peter is a talented middle-aged married man in one of the caring professions. His father was a gentle, scholarly man and his mother a kind,...

From a phenomenological and descriptive point of view, it is my view that Freud’s Id energies derive from phylogenetic biological mechanisms,whose contents therefore have not been acquired by the individual. They do not contribute to consciousness as there is no neocortical involvement. Cautiously...

From Freud’s pre-analytic writings, it is clear that he was only too aware of his patients’ powerful feelings directed towards him, but also of their propensity to act on those feelings instead of reporting them. As is well known, Freud’s early thoughts about transference were...

Emotional memory is the conditioned learning of emotional responses to a situation and is mediated by the amygdala. The emotional memory representations are thought to be stored separately from the factual details of the events. For more than 20 years, there has been a suspicion...

Procedural memory is for motor, perceptual, and cognitive skills and habits . Sometimes called “skill and habit” memory, procedural memory is typified by the acquisition of a motor skill, such as playing the ;piano, which, after many repetitions, becomes automatic. Once a skill...

I want to examine briefly what psychoanalysis has made of the nonconsciously processed aspects of the new memory typology. Psychoanalysis has tended to lump together that version of the new memory typography which regards implicit memory as being the same as, and confined to,...

I want now to turn to the topic of memory, and more particularly to nonconsciously processed memory, a field in which cooperation between the neurosciences and psychoanalysis had stimulated so many theories and ideas particularly in the “nonverbal” realms of psychoanalysis. Even...

Professor Jaak Panksepp (behavioral neuroscientist); Professor Mark Solms (neuroscientist and psychoanalyst). Both agree that neuroscience and psychoanalysis in collaboration are not in the business of proving Freud right or wrong but of simply finishing the job that he began...