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For decades, psychoanalysts and neuroscientists have asked similar, fundamental questions: What internal pathways and processes determine our perceptions of self, others, and the world? What mental operations lead us from observing the world to re-envisioning it? How do our visualizations of the world compel and inspire us to engage—or re-engage—with it? In recent years, such questions have guided and encouraged a continuing effort at integration between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. At the same time, they have drawn the two intellectual endeavors still more deeply into a shared paradox. Both psychoanalysis and neuroscience attempt to elicit expression from what Primo Levi in his autobiographical masterpiece, The Periodic Table (1975), describes as mute matter. In Levi's memoir, the repeated juxtaposition of scientific laboratories to mountainous landscapes embodies his drive to communicate with matter—a drive that impels his self-education, nurtures his imaginative life, and confronts him with unbearable realities. Images of sheer escarpments, of restless Alpine odysseys, of minerals extracted industrially from beneath rock face, and of an unforgiving search for a personal and political mission within the broken, enigmatic terrain—all appear prominently and vitally in The Periodic Table, all recall the contradictory, Sisyphean nature of the confrontation with silent matter, and all foreshadow the final, disastrous mountain journey that ends at Auschwitz.
Motivated, like Levi, by the challenge of silent matter, psychoanalysts and neuroscientists have attempted to trace and identify myriad forms of human expression and behavior as they are constructed both by the fundamental chemistry of the brain and by the primary operations of the unconscious mind. Neural pathways and unconscious mental connections