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Having trained and practised for many years as a physicist before becoming a psychotherapist, I am always somewhat mistrustful of neuroscientists bearing gifts to psychotherapy. Invariably there is an arrogance and righteousness of the high science priesthood, and condescension towards the (sadly) unscientific clinician. In the so-called Freud wars of the 1990s, writers such as Fay Weldon and literary critics such as Frederick Crews ended their attacks on Freud with the charge that psychoanalysis, after all, was not scientific.
Recently, however, there has been a sea-change in neuroscientists writing about psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Instead of the customary condescension, writers such as Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panksepp, and Allen Schore, along with the neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms, come from a place of appreciation of the value of clinical work in contributing to an understanding of the human mind in general, and of the accomplishments of Freud in particular as a pioneer in understanding the human inner world.
Eric Kandel, a Nobel prizewinning neurobiologist for his work on the molecular basis of habituation and memory in the sea snail Aplysia, is especially interesting because he is simultaneously both appreciative and condescending towards psychoanalysis. On the one hand he writes, ‘During the first half of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis revolutionised our understanding of mental life’. And on the other he writes, ‘Most importantly and most disappointingly, psychoanalysis has not evolved scientifically. Specifically, it has not developed objective methods for testing the exciting ideas it had formulated earlier’ (Kandel, 1999, p. 505).