Reification Revisited: Some Neurobiologically Filtered Views Of Psychic Structure And Conflict

Adducing data and concepts from neuroscience, experimental psychology, ethology, and clinical psychoanalysis, the author proposes that (1) one may today move away from traditional but epistemologically troublesome views of "psychic conflict" as "clash" between essentially metaphorical but reified "mental forces" and "structures"; (2) one can now posit instead, a model featuring representational processes, dysphoric affects, and associative mechanisms-all of which, at a neurophysiologic and anatomic level, are indeed "real things" deriving from genuine "structures" in brain circuitry. Furthermore, the centrality of associative conditioning paradigms both in Freud's thinking and in current neurobiologic studies of learning allows one to use additional laboratory findings and derivative ideas to clarify such analytically significant issues as the crucial role of aversive experience in development of neurosis, the fundamental similarity of "drive"-focused and "self"-related or "narcissistic" "conflict," and te increasingly questioned and questionable status of "repression" as phenomenon and as pathogenic agent.