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Those who have an excessive faith in their own ideas are not well fitted to make discoveries
As an appendix to Dr. Sheppard's paper rather than a commentary on it, may I attempt to list some of the fundamental psychoanalytic concepts that could usefully be confronted with inputs from neurobiology. The following synopsis might be viewed as a tentative table of contents for a revised edition, one hundred years later, of Freud's 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology Each of these imaginary chapters would include psychoanalytic descriptions on the lefthand pages and examples of neurobiological concomitants on the right. One of the goals of this imaginary book would be to encourage psychoanalysts to think in a monistic rather than a dualistic, idealist way: to stop assuming that they work with immaterial souls, with minds independent of brains. Psychoanalytic technique tends to lead us to see our patients as subjects, unconsciously determined by a symbolic universe and an unconscious history, not as dysfunctional organisms. In our theoretical elaborations and therefore in our practice, we do not acknowledge the constraints imposed by brain structures and functions on the life of the mind; but perhaps the neurosciences and psychopharmacology might stimulate psychoanalytic thinking and sometimes (perhaps) help in choosing between competing theories As predicted by Kubie 40 years ago, the converging streams of brain research may illuminate psychoanalytic techniques and theories.