Does Neuroscience Contribute to Psychoanalysis? Reviews of Judith Rustin's “Infant Research and Neuroscience at Work in Psychotherapy,” Terry Marks-Tarlow's “Clinical Intuition in Psychotherapy: The Neurobiology of Embodied Response,” and Iain McGilchrist's “The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World”

Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen years to the questions we have put to it. (Freud, 1920, p. 59)

What is neuroscience saying these days, and does what it says have relevance for psychoanalysis? These are the questions that informed a recent reading class in neuroscience that I coordinated at the Institute of Contemporary

Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. I say “coordinated” because my rudimentary knowledge of the subject does not merit the title “teacher.” With me only a short step ahead of the candidates, the class surveyed some current articles on memory, empathy, mirror neurons, trauma, emotional regulation, organic brain dysfunction, and the use or uselessness of neuroscience to the practice of psychoanalysis.

While all the candidates found the material fascinating, their conclusions about the relevance of neuroscience to psychoanalysis were mixed. Some candidates thought that the new theories, particularly those about right brain functions—their workings in memory, emotional regulation, empathy, and intuition—had great application to therapeutic understanding. Just as theories of evolution, attachment, and infant research have transformed the analytic field, so, too, new gleanings from the related field of neuroscience promise to expand our understanding of human affect and behavior.

But, other candidates voiced objections. In line with the critiques of Brothers (2001), one candidate noted that it's hard to evaluate much of the research. Some of it studies animal brains, some human; some rests on carefully constructed research protocols, some on questionable methods. Therefore, it is hard to extrapolate meanings from the neuroscience research and confidently apply them to human minds. With respect to mind, another candidate echoed Orange (2003) in arguing that identifying mind as a property of brain is simplistic and reduction