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Jonathan Winson describes Freud's scientific style as consistently reaching "for the broad, encompassing theory," "ambitious," and "concerned with priority of discovery." He goes on to explain, "This constellation of characteristics was and is certainly not unusual in a scientist—it is the stuff from which many scientific discoveries are made. The danger, however, is that these characteristics may lead to the formulation of overgeneralized or otherwise incorrect hypotheses which may, for one reason or another, not be corrected by further observations" (pp. 85-86). Winson has some of these same characteristics. The jacket of his new book describes it as: "The first major effort to form a bridge between neuroscience and psychoanalysis," and Winson himself describes his goal as "… understanding how man's mental life is derived from the physical functioning of the brain" (p. 2).
Winson is Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Rockefeller University. His earlier publications were in journals such as Brain Research and Journal of Neurophysiology, and had titles such as "Gating of Neuronal Transmission in the Hippocampus: Efficacy of Transmission Varies with Behavioral State." He is friendly to psychoanalysis (He tells us that there has been "one major contribution" to "… the study of the psyche in its own right" (p. 3); and "no viable alternative theory has been suggested to explain the workings of the human psyche" [p. 4]). His program here is to dissect out the basic psychological discoveries of psychoanalysis, to describe some findings in modern neuroscience, and to use the latter to "… understand the biology underlying the psychological phenomena I have just described" (p. 160). Finally, remembering his concern about the pitfalls of Freud's style, he promises to tell us how his hypotheses might be tested by further observations (p. 7).