On Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience

Dear Dr Hayley,

Solms & Saling (Int. J. Psycho-Anal (1986) 67: 397–416) have concluded that 'the deep rooted compatibility between Luria's neuropsychology and Freud's psychoanalysis … makes Freud's lifelong ambition that psychoanalysis be rejoined with neuroscience a very real possibility'. Meanwhile 'psychoanalysis could almost be called a provisional neuropsychology of personality'.

To reach the conclusion that both disciplines share 'the same fundamental principles' the authors quote passages from Luria's introduction to neuropsychology, The Working Brain which show that Luria eschews the nineteenth-century tradition of 'narrow localizationism' (Luria, 1973) and favours an approach to psychological processes that emphasizes their 'dynamic' nature and sees them as 'complex functional systems'. Like Luria they trace this alternative line of development in neurological thought to Hughlings Jackson and point out that Freud, in his monograph 'On aphasia', also rejects localizationism in favour of Jackson's theory of hierarchically organized levels of brain function. They then make their case that it is this work and not the Project that is the 'missing link' between Freud's neurological and psychoanalytic years. Their 'case against the Project' is 'that it is not a neurological model at all'. They cite Mancia (1983) who concludes 'the language of the Project is only metaphorical and does not take into account the neurophysiological knowledge of its time'.

While it is correct to point out that Freud's attempts in the Project to construct an analogue of the brain results in a representation entirely dependent on metaphor, the authors have failed to see that the 'astounding' similarities they detect between Luria and Freud's later theories is in the network of metaphor that each theorist deploys rather than in the domain of what they explain. While relationships may be 'expressed in the same words—or synonymous words—and be obtained by the same reasoning … [they do]