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We do not have a complete science of psychodynamics; one that is capable of prediction and consistent description of the workings of the mind. Such a science was envisioned by Freud and later by the psychoanalyst Rado. To Rado, psychodynamic science is the study of human motivation and control. Freud's concept embraced both of these, but also include neurological derivatives.
In the pyramiding of human life-science knowledge, physics and chemistry lie at the base of the pyramid, anthropology and sociology at the apex, matters of the individual psyche in between, just atop the neural protoplasmic level. Characteristically, an immediate lower level influences the one just above, although their natures are different qualitatively. In order to be complete, psychodynamic science must integrate the level immediately below, the neural—the brain level.
Decades of observation and experiment detail the influence of neural activity on the behavioral level: the effect of frontal lesions, of temporolimbic seizure discharge, of pharmacologic agents influencing synaptic transmission, of in vivo imagery's delineation of the brain. Do these advances contribute to psychodynamic science? Yes, but there is more that lies beyond, much that can only be reached by the technique of reported introspection. Through reported introspection, we are privy to such fundamentals of psychodynamic science as associative processes, the formation of associative complexes or templates, fantasy, dreams, the unconscious and its layers, memories, internalizations, forces of homeostasis or modulation.
By association, we mean the involuntary, automatic, connecting of thought items—ideas—by such factors as similar meaning and temporal contiguity. These mental connections seem paralleled by neuronal connections,