On: The Case Against Neuropsychoanalysis

Dear Editors,

The title of Blass and Carmeli's paper (2007) alone alarmed me because it fails to make the distinction between co-operation with and the incorporation of the two disciplines within one another (Pugh, 2006). Although I am strongly opposed to the amalgam ‘neuropsychoanalysis', it would be absurd for psychoanalysis not to take notice of some of the important empirical advances in the neurosciences especially for those aspects of Freudian theory that now seem incomplete as a result of the limitations of 19th century science, for example the topic of memory. How different would psychoanalysis be today if Freud had known about the sub-cortical memory circuits, some of which are fully functioning at birth and others that do not fully come online for some years afterwards? I wonder how there can be a case against new knowledge. It is interesting also that, on the two occasions that the journal Neuro-Psychoanalysis is quoted in this paper, its title is incorrectly depicted as Neuropsychoanalysis, a strange incorporation which the original editors of this journal were at pains to avoid.

The fierceness of the opposition to any helping hand from neuroscience gives the paper a Luddite feel and led perhaps to the confused and unconvincing format of the discussion. For each of the four areas of neuroscientific study, the authors proposed three headings: ‘The claim', ‘The underlying intuition’ and ‘The problems'. However, since ‘The claim’ and ‘The underlying intuition’ were represented by the authors as the view of neuroscience rather than the view of a few selected authors, the subsequent demolition appeared contrived. Examples from ‘Trauma and memory’ must suffice. The strawman constructed here is that the authors say that, if neuroscience shows that there are memories that cannot be recollected, then psychoanalytic theory cannot develop a clinical theory of cure that rests on recollection. But they then demolish their proposed view from neuroscience by