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All our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably some day be based on an organic substructure.
No one is fitted to begin the materialistic study of the brain unless he has a good knowledge of psychology.
As a discipline, neuropsychology has traditionally been associated with cognitive psychology on the one hand, and with clinical neurology on the other. As such, although substantial progress has been made toward elucidating the cerebral substrates of language, memory, spatial recognition, and other aspects of active, conscious cognition, relatively less attention has been devoted to such important dynamic processes as feelings, drives, and symbolization.
This is not without good reason. In most cases it is more difficult to operationalize a passion than a perception, to design an experiment that will study an unconscious motive, rather than a conscious intention. Nevertheless, a number of recent writers within psychoanalysis (and a smaller number within neuropsychology) have begun to apply the data derived from clinical neuropsychological studies to broader questions of consciousness, psychodynamics, and personality.
In most cases, the neuropsychological paradigm used has been that of regional cerebral localization — hemispheres and lobes, systems and syndromes — a model that is heuristically useful so long as the conclusions derived therefrom are acknowledged as provisional, pending ongoing revision as our sophistication in the brain