Concluding Remarks

When embarking on a journey into unchartered territory, curiosity tinged with apprehension is to be expected. This first endeavor to bring neuroscientists and psychoanalysts into closer dialogue has evoked mixed feelings. Clearly psychoanalysts are as much in the dark and affected by misconceptions about neuroscience as are neuroscientists about psychoanalysis, and the lack of reciprocal knowledge is inevitably complicated by an unshared vocabulary. Under the circumstances, therefore, it is most encouraging to see that the initial phase of what is hoped will become an ever increasing and deepening dialogue is already so rich and fertile. In this regard, Damasio's warning against premature closure is very pertinent. Much remains tentative in both fields, and much more remains to be learned at the interface between them. Unprejudiced and open-ended research, sharing of data, discussion, and debate, seem the only viable paths to take forward.

Psychoanalysis and neuroscience provide two different perspectives (subjective and objective, respectively) on the functions of the mental apparatus. Although we may be studying the same underlying entity, these two complementary observational perspectives are irreducible to one another. This is abundantly illustrated by the problem of affect, where, even at the basic level of taxonomic classification, the “natural kinds” of subjective feelings and their associated neurochemical circuitry can only be clearly discerned when viewed together, with each casting light on the other.

Panksepp has eloquently argued for consilience between these different perspectives within the new field that he calls affective neuroscience. In our view this requires, as a first step, an effort to reconcile the theoretical yields of the different approaches—to correlate the different functional “maps” that each perspective has produced. In the process of attempting this correlation, it will of course be found that the elements of the one map do not correspo