What Can Psychoanalysis Learn From Neuroscience? A Theoretical Basis For The Emergence Of a Neuropsychoanalytic Model

Psychoanalysis prioritizes the subjective experience of the mind. Neuroscience studies the objective aspects of the brain. These different focuses are the advantage—and the difficulty—of a dialogue between the two fields. Some argue that the emergence of “neuropsychoanalysis” reduces the mind to meaningless biological correlates. However, dialogue with neuroscience differs from reduction to objective explanation. Rather, through theoretical exchange, neuropsychoanalysis opens avenues for new possibilities of meaning. A dialogue with neuroscience can elucidate new relationships between different subjective phenomena, such as the vicissitudes of basic motivational systems. Whereas the opponents of neuropsychoanalysis argue that drives and affects are irreducible to biology—implying that they are the limit of neuroscience—this article argues that these concepts are instead the critical juncture of this dialogue. From such an intersection, a neuropsychoanalytic model of levels of the mind is proposed, where the unconscious is reframed as a dynamic effect of disjunctures between levels of consciousness.