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The relationship between the sciences of the brain and psychoanalysis is very old. We can date its formal beginnings to at least the publication by Freud of Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895). In this youthful work Freud claimed it was possible to «furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science, that is to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles» (1895, 294). As is well known, such a project was quickly abandoned in favour of the development of Metapsychology while waiting for the responses that biology might have been able to provide in years to come.
Brain sciences have made great progress in recent decades. This progress has been assisted by the enormous development of studies of animal models - primarily the electrophysiological study of the brain of macaques - and by the introduction of new technologies which have for the first time allowed a non-invasive study of human brain activity, such as Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Electroencephalography (EEG) at high density, and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), besides the older but no less important study of neurological patients by clinical neuropsychology.
The introduction of these new methodological approaches has produced an enormous quantity of empirical data, together with the factual certainty that the brain is necessary for mental life. However, it seems a much more controversial matter to establish how far the contribution of the brain might be sufficient, besides being necessary, for determining our mental states. Today the neuroscientific community seems divided about this. There are indeed those who maintain that the brain is in itself sufficient to account for mental activity, and are even trying to derive enough elements from the study of the brain circuits' activity to reproduce human intelligence in the near future in artificial, non-biological environments such as computers and robots.