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Dear Editor,
The article by Vesa Talvitie and Juhani Ihanus (Int J Psychoanal 92 (6), 2011) is disappointing not only because it maintains the same nihilistic stance of its predecessor, the Blass and Carmeli (2007) paper to which it claims to be an extension, but, mindsets aside, it contains factual errors and unwarranted assumptions.
Assumptions are made throughout this paper that neurological ideas are the same as neuropsychoanalytical ones and that the only unconscious processes recognized by neuropsychoanalysis are implicit and procedural. Many neuropsychoanalysts agree that these represent a non-repressed unconscious in addition, but this does not mean that neuropsychoanalysis as a whole rejects the idea of a Freudian unconscious (Mancia, 2004).
The authors surmise that “no neuropsychoanalyst has ever argued that psychoanalytic models will be reduced to the neuroscientific ones” (p. 1585).