A project for a scientific psychoanalysis

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Concentric levels are meant to suggest a functional hierarchy, not an anatomical one.

2 Subjectivity cannot be but felt: It contains the inescapable immanence of being as a self.

3 It is a statistical partitioning of a system into internal states and external states, where the blanket itself consists of the states that separate the two. One could think of it as a border custom house exchange of tariffs; or a canal lock system between different water levels. Or a cell membrane!

4 i.e. adaptive or maladaptive patterns, as in personality structure.

5 Computational neuroscience adds a feature of performative precision to Freud’s description of the function of consciousness in A Note Upon the Mystic Writing-Pad (1925).

6 ” … evolution has co-opted signals of physical pain in response to threatened disconnection from the object … human attachment … [is] … akin to physical intactness.” (Kessler & Kessler, 2019).