Summary and Discussion of the Paper: ‘The Neuropsychological Organization of Dreaming: Implications for Psychoanalysis’

Clinico-anatomical correlation is the basic research method of neuropsychology. As the method was applied originally, whole mental faculties were mapped onto the surface of the brain. Freud was one of the first neurologists to criticize this method. His main objection was that it underestimated the complexity of mental functions and failed to take account of the fundamentally dynamic nature of mental process. However, Freud remained committed to the principle that mental functions must somehow be represented in the tissues of the brain, and he never abandoned the hope that developments in the neurosciences would someday make it possible for psychoanalysis to re-join with its neurological origins. Shortly after Freud's death, the clinico-anatomical methodology was revised under the intellectual leadership of Aleksandr Romanovich Luria. Luria (who started his scientific career as a psychoanalyst) argued that mental faculties are not ‘functions’ in the physiological sense of the word, where tissue x performs function y. Mental faculties can be reduced analytically; they are the products of more elementary component functions. The most elementary components can be correlated with the functions of particular tissues but whole mental faculties cannot. Mental faculties arise out of ‘functional