What Can Psychoanalysis Learn From Neuroscience? A Theoretical Basis For The Emergence Of a Neuropsychoanalytic Model

Abstract

Psychoanalysis prioritizes the subjective experience of the mind. Neuroscience studies the objective aspects of the brain. These different focuses are the advantage—and the difficulty—of a dialogue between the two fields. Some argue that the emergence of “neuropsychoanalysis” reduces the mind to meaningless biological correlates. However, dialogue with neuroscience differs from reduction to objective explanation. Rather, through theoretical exchange, neuropsychoanalysis opens avenues for new possibilities of meaning. A dialogue with neuroscience can elucidate new relationships between different subjective phenomena, such as the vicissitudes of basic motivational systems. Whereas the opponents of neuropsychoanalysis argue that drives and affects are irreducible to biology—implying that they are the limit of neuroscience—this article argues that these concepts are instead the critical juncture of this dialogue. From such an intersection, a neuropsychoanalytic model of levels of the mind is proposed, where the unconscious is reframed as a dynamic effect of disjunctures between levels of consciousness.

Keywords:

• affective neuroscience
• neuropsychoanalysis
• drive
• instinct
• object-loss
• reductionism

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this article was written for a seminar at Brown University. It won the 2016 Undergraduate Essay Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) and was presented as an oral presentation at the 106th annual meeting of APsaA. I would like to thank the reviewers, editors, and Pascal Sauvayre for especially helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1 Use of capital letters follows Panksepp’s terminology, which calls for a specialized lexicon for distinct discourse (Panksepp, 2010), rather than—for instance—calling the mesolimbic dopamine system a ‘reward system.’

2 As discussed above, SEEKING itself is an objectless volitional system, motivating exploration of the outside world. Because needs must be met in the outside world, the other instincts work in conjunction with SEEKING to engage with external reality (cf. dynamic localization).

3 This is not to equate depression (melancholia) with mourning. Rather, hypoactivation of the SEEKING system participates in both psychological phenomena (cf. dynamic localization). The dynamic interaction with other systems would differentiate between mourning and melancholia. Depression would necessitate chronically diminished SEEKING activity, which Panksepp (2010) hypothesizes may be due to sustained dynorphin activity.

4 Secondarily repressed material is both rejected by the preconscious (via withdrawal of cathexes) and attracted by the primary repression of the unconscious (Freud, 1915b, 1915c).

5 The former censorship refers to repression at the border of the system preconscious and the system unconscious. The latter is closer to ‘resistance,’ the objections patients have to making conscious the preconscious derivatives of unconscious material.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

John Dall’Aglio

John Dall'Aglio completed his Bachelor's degree in Cognitive Neuroscience at Brown University and is a clinical research assistant at the Developmental Psychosomatics Laboratory at the New York State Psychiatric Institute/Columbia University Medical Center. He is the recipient of the 2016 Undergraduate Essay Prize from the American Psychoanalytic Association and is the founder (and former director) of the Brown University Psychoanalytic Society.