Partnering with the Neurosciences

The articles in this issue each deal with aspects of the enduring dialectic between body and mind, an interface that has defined many controversies at the core of critiques of psychoanalysis, from within and without. Psychoanalysts often point to Freud's early grounding in neurology, his interest in the most basic aspects of biology and endowment, and especially the scientific agenda he advanced in his abandoned Project as evidence for the compatibility of psychoanalytic theory and practice with contemporary brain science. Particularly for child analysts, the close relationship between development of the body and of the representational world places issues of body and mind not only in close theoretical proximity but in lively conversation in every clinical session. In the last decade, the mind-body duality has increasingly been discussed in the guise of the relevance of neuroscience—or the brain and cognitive sciences—for psychoanalysis. Many analysts concerned with psychoanalytic models of the mind have underscored the relevance of recent advances in the understanding of the neural circuitry of such basic processes as memory, stress regulation and response to trauma, and emotional processing. A new journal—Neuro-Psychoanalysis—and a number of internationally sponsored conferences on the interface of neuroscience and psychoanalysis speak to the growing interest among psychoanalysts in the new brain and cognitive sciences. Conversely, neuroscientists have expressed the hope that those sciences may offer ways to reinvigorate the scholarship on the mind-brain interface that was so central to the beginnings of psychoanalysis.

It is indeed true that there have been dramatic advances in the last ten to twenty years in our understanding of the complexity of brain functioning and brain development. Contemporary working theories of learning, for example, reveal the brain as much more dynamic than heretofore understood. In this brain, structure changes at the cellular level