Best Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis

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.