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Recent developments in such cognate fields as cognitive psychology and neuroscience have presented psychoanalysis with both major challenges and major opportunities. The challenges involve the daunting task of demonstrating its continued relevance to the science of mind, increasingly dominated as the latter is by these ostensibly ‘hard’ sciences, which can, often justifiably, claim a degree of empirical support that psychoanalysis is believed to lack. The opportunities reside in the possibility of developing collaborative and integrative investigative programs with scholars and practitioners in such allied fields, and of formulating hypotheses that can, at least potentially, be tested—from the couch, on the one side, and from the laboratory, on the other.
In this, the latest of several reflective volumes, Modell seeks to respond to these challenges, primarily by asserting for psychoanalysis and for the science of mind in general the continuing validity of the concept of a subjective, affectively rooted unconscious as the vital element in mental life. In doing so he pits himself against, on the one hand, those cognitive psychologists who would restrict any notion of unconscious mentation to the role of procedural memory—essentially what Hartmann spoke of as ‘preconscious automatisms’—and, on the other, those neuroscientists who seek to reduce mental activities to purely neuronal events and thereby appear to abolish entirely the concept of mind as we have known it.
Modell explicitly and decisively refutes the Cartesian mind-body dualism. In his view, stated insistently, ‘mind’ is always and inevitably embodied, and all mental events are in one way or another metaphorically grounded in bodily experience. He is, that is, a committed monist; as he puts it, ‘the unconscious can be nothing other than a neurophysiological process’ (p. xii). At the same time he predicates his argument on the proposition that ‘the unconscious contains potential meaning’ (p. 199).
Central to his