You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dear Editor,
In our 2015 paper, “Further evidence for the case against neuropsychoanalysis” as well as in our earlier work on this topic (Blass and Carmeli, 2007; Carmeli and Blass, 2013), we present arguments that show that despite the existence of obvious and proven ties between brain and mind, neuroscience has no contribution to psychoanalysis; moreover, it can never have any.
Luba Kessler in her letter states that something must be amiss with our position, but only offers yet another formulation of the tie between brain and mind. She does not take issue with a single one of our arguments regarding the irrelevance of such ties to psychoanalysis and thus her reflections don't really address our critique.
For example, her comments about how a neuroscientifically informed psychoanalyst would understand Ms A do not in any way support the idea that being so informed is worthwhile. She speaks of Ms A's trauma as a known fact which “undoubtedly” had certain specific effects both psychological and physiological. However, from the description of the case the reality of this trauma was precisely what was in doubt. But even assuming it happened (and we accept that it may have) how should the specific neuroscientific findings on the effects of trauma on the hippocampus impact us as psychoanalysts? An example of how neuroscience might shape what the analyst says or does in the treatment of Ms A would have been most helpful here. Instead, Kessler offers a very general theoretical comment, which does not advance our understanding. She agrees with us that the “psychoanalyst needs to preserve the conceptual and clinical integrity of her clinical and theoretical discipline”, but at the same time maintains that there is some “conceptual richness offered by judiciously managed insights from the neurosciences” that remains to be gained. Her comments on the crucial question of the nature of this richness were, unfortunately, unintelligible to us. She writes that biology enriches “both fi