Reply to Drs Mancia and Pugh

Dear Editors,

In Blass and Carmeli (2007), we argued that the nature of the relationship between biology and psychoanalysis is such that neuroscientific findings (however valid or true they may be) are irrelevant to psychoanalysis and that claims that neuroscience is relevant to psychoanalysis rest on fallacies. We illustrated this by

studying a representative selection of writings, all recently appearing in official psychoanalytic contexts, and written by well-known psychoanalysts or experts in neuropsychoanalysis.

The letters of Mancia and Pugh offer assertions of their authors' deep conviction in what they consider the obvious value of neuropsychoanalysis. They suggest that to reject the relevance of neuroscience to psychoanalysis is to reject interdisciplinary dialogue, progress and knowledge itself. However, they do not justify these assertions and assumptions and fail to present arguments or evidence that would demonstrate that our position is mistaken.

More specifically, the letters are primarily comprised of three kinds of statements: first, there are numerous simple positive assertions, presented without any supporting arguments, that the integration of neuroscientific observations if properly applied does not ‘pose any threat to psychoanalysis’ and that it has already produced ‘highly significant and far-reaching’ results. In our paper, we pointed to a misguided intuition that underlies the idea that neuroscientific findings regarding memory can contribute to psychoanalysis. Mancia cites this intuition, ignores our detailed arguments regarding why it cannot be relied on and simply asserts that he ‘find[s] it obvious’ and is disturbed that ‘this does not seem so clear to the authors'. Similarly, Pugh states that it would be ‘absurd’ for psychoanalysis not to take note of the findings of neuroscience but he does not really explain why. Indeed he mentions what in his estimation are important discoveries made possible by neuroscience (e.g. of the unrepressed u