Reflections on 20 years of Neuropsychoanalysis

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Notes

1 Howard Shevrin, born in New York in 1926, died in Ann Arbor on January 18, 2018.

2 Freud, as well as Lacan, refers to an “acoustic object”; however, a mass of data in psycholinguistic literature (e.g. Corballis, 1999; Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler, & Studdert-Kennedy, 1967; Liberman & Mattingly, 1985; Studdert-Kennedy & Goodell, 1995; for review, see Bazan, 2007), stress the idea that the linguistic object is first and foremost an articulatory gesture, i.e. a motor object. It indeed becomes a heard object but secondarily, i.e. indirectly: the sensorimotor feedback of our proper rearticulation in order to match the acoustic trace – which at that stage is non-linguistic – helps the hearing of language as language (Rizzolatti & Arbib, 1998), such as illustrated by the McGurk effect (McGurk & MacDonald, 1976).

3 i.e. according to the “logics” of the secondary process; there is another logic going on in parallel, that of the primary process – indeed, we know with Hamlet, that though the primary process without secondary process “is madness, there is method in it.”

4 Moreover, I believe that the fact that there is no such independent science, together with the fact that psychology is now either feeding itself at neurosciences or at social sciences for credibility, is the root cause of an amount of violence in society. Lacking a distinct identity, it appears to me that psychology has no professional pride and does not play its role in putting damaging practices to an end. Indeed, the history of violence in mental health care has not in any way been halted nowadays, but rather is now taking on modern forms, from overdiagnosis to overmedication, violent treatments in institutions, and pathologizing the normal, emptying public financing for damaging diagnostic, screening and medication purposes, thereby also creating social pressure groups around diagnoses (e.g. Asperger, ADHD, autism etc.), with claims of even more recognition and financing. This lack of identity of the field of psychology thereby contributes to bringing public treasury to a general bankruptcy without bringing relief to public mental health(see also Shedler, 2019). Moreover, ethically, as long as the mental is either seen as a product of the biological or of the social, or of a complex interaction of the biological with the social, subjects remain objects, i.e. victims, of an external determination and there is no conceptual ground to think subjective freedom, and thus responsibility.

5 Just as the stethoscope is a tool that allows us to understand the functioning of the heart by amplifying our hearing, so can we think of fMRI machines as a particular extension of our eyes that allows us to see the inside of the body and brain, and thereby deduce its functions.

6 Freud's first actual research was the study of the structure of eel testes assigned to him by Carl Claus (Triarhou, 2009). In order to fully appreciate Freud's neurohistological career one must place it firmly into the context of evolutionary biology. Ritvo (1990) refers to it specifically as ‘evolutionary oriented research’” (p. 162). “The subject which Brucke had proposed for my investigations had been in the spinal cord of one of the lowest of fishes (Ammocoetes Petromyzon); and I now passed on to the human central nervous system” (Freud, 1924, p. 10). Freud was not just faithful in his commitment to the nervous system “but to the ‘evolutionary orientation instilled in him by Claus’” (Ritvo, 1990, p. 167).

7 In the April 27, 1895 letter to Fliess he described himself as being overworked and devoured by the slow and difficult business of the Project (Freud, 1950). After toiling for most of 1895, on January 1, 1896 he announced to Fliess that he had revised the Project and called it his metapsychology.

8 This theory that neurofibrils formed the structures along which actional potentials were conducted was supported by most prominent histologists including Cajal but was eventually found to be incorrect (Bennett, 2015).

9 For 16 years inspired by his oft vocal opposition to Freud's theory of dreams and in particular to the notion that they reflected repressed desires, Cajal kept a dream diary. His own dream theory was complicated, but largely reflected his belief that dreams were a sequence of random images unfiltered by the pre-frontal cortex. (Ehrlich, 2016). Sadly, a glance at his diary shows anything but random sequences as they poignantly recount chronic struggles with childhood trauma, anxiety, loss and failing health.

10 In 2009, we removed the hyphen in the name, to facilitate online literature searches and indexing – Editors.