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How the brain differs from other bodily organs (the lungs, say) finds its answer in the notion that the human brain is sentient, that it is “capable of experiencing itself, with emotional feelings, volitional will, and a spontaneous sense of agency,” to cite Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull (2011). “The fact that these brain ‘mechanisms’ are endogenously driven and motivated, that they arise out of the embodied nature of the subject,” Solms and Turnbull continue, “substantially affects the way the apparatus operates.” Not, according to them, epiphenomena or “nice-to-haves,” as they put it, they are essential to the very working of the brain (pp. 137-138). Moreover, they are what allow us to study from the subjective perspective the mental apparatus that we increasingly have the technology to study objectively. What this means for neuroscience is that the potential for a psychodynamic—indeed, a psychoanalytic—constituent of the discipline has joined with molecular, cellular, structural, and other approaches to the study of the nervous system and thereby comes to the fore.
But the gain is not unidirectional. Rather, neuropsychoanalysis is held to be a “collaborative investigation of phenomena of common interest, approached using the rigor that is associated with all good scientific enquiry but also respects the methodological tools (with all the advantages and disadvantages) associated with each distinct field.” In other words, in neuropsychoanalysis “the acquisition of knowledge is bidirectional (psychoanalysis informing neuroscience, and vice versa),” and subjective experience, the sine qua non of psychoanalysis, retains the deepest respect of both disciplines (p. 146).