Comparing Apples to Oranges and Making a Fruit Salad (Mixing Psychodynamic Science and Neuroscience): A Review of Clay C. Whitehead's “Neo-Psychoanalysis: A Paradigm for the 21st Century”

Clay C. Whitehead has elegantly announced, with his broad concept of “downward causation” (Campbell, 1974), the arrival of a new paradigm for psychoanalytic understanding, theory, process, and therapeutic action. In such an endeavor, he proposes to review and integrate various threads of thought which have contributed to psychoanalytic metapsychology over the past many centuries. More specifically, this article contextualizes this new paradigm from the perspectives of episte-mology and of the theory of therapeutic action, as they might be integrated by employment of multiple perspectives: philosophy, metapsychology, evolutionary biologic-genetic concepts, physical anthropology, psychiatry, and neuroscience with recent functional imaging studies. He refines George Engel's (1962) concept of the “bio-psycho-social” perspective on formulations of expressions of symptoms. He particularly offers his vision as a “paradigm shift” (Kuhn, 1970), strongly buttressing his argument by citing the classic Cartesian dualistic split between “traditional science” and “psychodynamic science” as being built upon a confusion of categories of understanding, the “mereological fallacy.” In fact, he sees this fallacy as the fundamental flaw in Freud's otherwise highly original thought, which led him to focus primarily upon an intrapsychic, instinctual, one-mind based psychology.

Although this concern is reasonable, his explication far exceeds the needs of the workaday practitioner of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychology, or even of early childhood play therapists. It has great hermeneutic relevance, and to that extent, this article represents a