Brain plasticity as a convergence of intrapsychic and intersubjective

Abstract

Contemporary neuroscience has demonstrated the radical plasticity of the brain – its ability to change with experience at the synaptic, circuitry, and whole-brain levels – which has profound implications for neuroscience, psychoanalysis, and their interrelationship. With the concept of neural plasticity as an ongoing mobilization of neural form, neuroscience converges with psychoanalysis, which has built its theory and therapeutic practice on the flow of forms in the unconscious. We have attempted to integrate evidence and ideas from contemporary neurobiology, neurophysiology, psychopharmacology, and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory, mainly based on Lacan, Bion, and Winnicott, and we suggest that the recovery of form, as a tool of investigation in these fields, may promote a neuroscientifically informed psychotherapy. We also suggest that plasticity captures the primacy of the dynamic, interactive surface of both intrapsychic and intersubjective processes and allows a conceptualization of the unconscious, facilitating a new understanding of psychic trauma. It is also compatible with the idea of the subject versus the ego of the unconscious, unconscious transformations, intersubjectivity, and freedom of will. We conclude that a new area of research has been identified at the interface between neuroscience and psychoanalytic theory, with promising epistemological, scientific, and therapeutic implications.

Keywords:

• brain plasticity
• epigenetics
• mirror neurons
• metaphor
• form
• implicit
• subject
• unconscious
• meaning

Notes

¹A distinction should be made among the concepts of simulation, imitation, and the Aristotelian concept of “mimesis.” Simulation is a virtual representation of an object or an action, an “as if” mental state. Imitation is the subject's behavior (or action) to be modeled on someone else's behavior. The concept of mimesis, in the famous definition of tragedy in Aristotle's Poetics, refers to a symbolic imitation of people's important action.

²In healthy people and neurotics, words function as signs and/or as symbols. This is not the case with psychotic states. In this case, the word as a sign (= signifier/signified) is destroyed or functions in “symbolic equation” mode (Segal, 1957, 1978).