Best Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis

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.