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A number of fundamental Freudian tenets about psychoanalysis have been reexamined by the author in the light of recent advances in the biologic sciences. Specifically, Heilbrunn addresses the issues of Freud's three polarities (Subject-Object, Pleasure-Unpleasure and Active-Passive), Eros and
Thanatos, the Unconscious and the concept of repression. Psychoanalytic notions concerning pain versus pleasure can now, for example, begin to be understood in neurophysiologic terms as well, since a number of appetitive and aversive stations have been outlined recently within the upper limbic system. Whereas physiologic substantiation of a Life instinct seemed readily supportable from the laboratory, evidence for any physiologic counterpart to the hypothecated Death instinct seemed lacking. The recent work of Denckla, however, on a pituitary substance (“DECO” or decreasing oxygen consumption factor) that blocks the effects of thyroxine in immature animals suggested the existence, within the body, of a factor operating as a limit-setter to each individual's longevity.
Heilbrunn adduces other evidence from brain RNA research that bears on short versus long-term memory, relating specifically to how percepts are encoded as “memories” later incorporated into what we collectively refer to as the “preconscious” or “unconscious” systems.
With respect to psychoanalytic therapy, Heilbrunn mentions how the relationship between motivational brain stations, mnemonic engrams, and protein synthesis invites correlation with the analytic process. Percepts, for example, whose pain or pleasure-charges were pathogenic come to be replaced, as a byproduct of our therapeutic work, by engrams with emotionally corrective charges.