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The split between mind and brain, psyche and soma, has bedeviled the human sciences for many centuries. Since its onset in the 17th century by the philosopher René Descartes, the Cartesian split has held a near mystical hold over both scientific methodology and scientific understanding.
Tershakovec has taken direct aim at this dualism. He defines the scientific materialism underlying the Cartesian dualism as a set of closed-system metapsychological assumptions about the workings of the mind, the brain, and the world in general. He charges the closed metapsychology with hijacking appropriate progress in both brain science and psychodynamic understanding. With brain research, biological determinism was considered the bedrock of respectable science, the brain being supposedly structurally immutable and impervious to mental processes. Any deviation from this mechanistic system was considered regressive and anti-scientific.
On the other side of the split, namely our understanding of the mind, Tershakovec convincingly demonstrates the equally damaging consequences of determinism/materialism on the prevailing personality theory of our century, Freud's classical theory of psychoanalysis. Freud was familiar with many streams of thought common to his day but, as he was a neurologist by training, he was especially impressed by the neuron theory of Ramon y. Cajal in 1889. Cajal identified how neurons were the building blocks of the brain and nervous system, and how they connected to each other in a spider-like fashion. Cajal assumed, as did Freud after him, that neurons like other anatomical structures received force from a reservoir of physiological energy, and that when the neurons reached a certain level of tension, relieved the tension through discharge. Thus was born Freud's instinct theory (excitation and discharge) with its metapsychological underpinnings of mechanism and biological determinism. In this closed-system hydraulic concept of change, only adaptation was possibl