A Neuropsychoanalytic Perspective

ABSTRACT

The term ‘neuropsychoanalysis’ was introduced in 1999, but a concerted effort to integrate the findings of neuroscience with those of psychoanalysis began in 1986. The following is a commentary on the five essays published in this special issue, from the viewpoint of someone who worked under this banner from the outset. Alongside Antonio Damasio, whose work is well represented in the five essays, the commentator’s closest collaborator since 1998 was the late Jaak Panksepp. The commentary adds more detail about Panksepp’s important contributions to the topic of this special issue. It will be seen that, although Solms, Damasio, and Panksepp agree on the foundational issues at stake here, they do not agree on everything.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ As I will argue in my book (Solms, in press) “psychical energy” = uncertainty. It is uncertainty that drives the engine of the mind. In the interim, see Solms and Friston (2018) and Solms (2019).

² Please note: in psychoanalysis we distinguish between “pain” in the narrow sense used here and “unpleasure”, which is a broader concept. Sletvold overlooks this distinction when he says that “primordial feelings express the current state of the body as, for example, along the scale that ranges from pleasure to pain”.

³ Thus Freud developed his (1920) theory starting from observations upon single cell organisms.

⁴ See, for example, my criticisms of his conception of anosognosia (Solms, 1997a) which revolved around essentially the same points as I make above about Panksepp, namely his failure to take account of the role of defense in symptom-formation (see also Turnbull, Fotopoulou, & Solms, 2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mark Solms

Mark Solms, Ph.D., is Professor and Director of Neuropsychology, Neuroscience Institute, University of Cape Town.