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“The basic assumption is that the brain is the organ of the mind.” This is the starting point of Reiser's volume. He is searching for a “conceptual template” that will bridge the gap between brain and mind. He hopes that classical psychoanalysis will provide this template. The subtitle of the book points to this striving “toward a convergence of psychoanalysis and neurobiology.”
In his Outline of Psycho-Analysis , Freud was directed to the same question:
We know two kinds of things about…our psyche (or mental life): firstly, its bodily organ and scene of action, the brain (or nervous system) and, on the other hand, our acts of consciousness, which are immediate data and cannot be further explained by any sort of description. Everything that lies between is unknown to us…
Freud offered two hypotheses to deal with this problem:
The first is concerned with localization. We assume that mental life is the function of an apparatus to which we ascribe the characteristics of being extended in space and being made up of several portions—which we imagine, that is, as resembling a telescope or microscope or something of this kind.