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One hundred and twenty years ago, Freud commenced his transition from neurologist to psychoanalyst and furnished us with his ‘Project for a scientific psychology’ of the mind. So began a necessary divergence from the dominant biological doctrine of the day. The feeling brain attempts to provide us with an accessible bridge back, between these two pursuits and between brain and mind, through an exploration of the various facets of the emerging discipline of neuropsychoanalysis. Solms and colleagues seek, in doing so, not to “prove Freud right or wrong but rather to finish the job he started; namely of introducing the psyche to the field of neuropsychology”.
The collected papers presented together raise to our awareness the potential for that process to become more fully realized, with the trajectory of discussion focused first on neurological and then psychiatric conditions before the implications for the understanding of normal mental functioning are considered. Through this broad arc, detractors and naysayers are anticipated and at points, countered. The fact that their identities move between neuroscientist, behaviorist and even psychoanalyst, relates no doubt to the discipline of neuropsychoanalysis itself, as not wholly represented within any of the other fields. In considering the place for psychoanalytic understanding, Solms limits himself almost exclusively to those findings of Freud, drawing upon a similar capacity to integrate these different fields into something new. That he writes, as a result, in a manner that