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Sigmund Freud, a neurologist by training, revolutionized the way complex mental functions and their respective pathologies were studied in the early 20th century. From a simplistic interpretation in which aberrant mental processes could be explained by localizing damage to brain regions, Freud hypothesized that abnormal processes could also be caused by emotional variables with subjective meaning. Psychoanalysis became Freud's original method to study the relation between behavioral disturbances and the human subjective experience. Since then, medical knowledge of the brain has become increasingly specialized and has given rise to different disciplines, such as neuroscience, which in turn has made the separation between science and psychoanalysis an ever-increasing challenge. Freud (1910/1957) himself saw the important interconnection between the mind and the brain, urging psychoanalysts to “… never forget that the mental is based on the organic,” and thus remained hopeful that one day his original model of the mind could be correlated with brain functions.
Advances in imaging and neurological methods to study the brain have allowed researchers to explore the relation between the mind and brain. Neuropsychoanalysis has emerged as a field that aims to identify models of brain functioning that can uncover the neurological essence of psychodynamic processes. At first look, it seems challenging, and at times implausible, to think that psychoanalysts and neuroscientists could understand each other. For many scholars (Blass & Carmeli, 2007), it is out of the question to think that psychoanalysis, representing the subjectivity of an individual's mind, could possibly work in conjunction with neuroscience. These scholars argue that the biological reductionism perspective offered by neuroscience will limit the scope of psychoanalysis by restricting the importance of individual meaning in order to favor objective mental functioning. It can also seem unreasonable for some sci