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The Present:
The workshop began its fall 1999 activities with a visit from Dr. Mark Solms who discussed the neuropsychology of dreaming. In preparation for his visit, workshop members read his 1995 paper “New Findings on the Neurological Organization of Dreaming: Implications for Psychoanalysis” ( Psychoanal. Q., 54: 43-67) as well as his book The Neuropsychology of Dreams (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997). In addition, one of our members, Dr. Bonnie Smolens conducted a workshop on Freud's “Project” prior to Dr. Solms's visit.
Two other topics are on the agenda for the first semester of this year. (1) We will be reviewing Thelen and Smith's book on dynamic systems and (2) we will broach the enormous topic of memory via Daniel Schacter's work.
The Future:
We are still working on the definition of our agenda. We hope that Neuro-Psychoanalysis will become instrumental in helping various study groups to settle certain formidable issues pertinent to the setting of an agenda. One of these is the enormous size of the knowledge base we are trying to become acquainted with. How do we home in on a digestible topic? A closely related issue: At what level do we tackle whatever subject we do pick? For example, we made it clear in our last report that our group was struggling with the problem of how much and how basic a level of neuroscience we needed to acquire. We have spent time at the level of the axon, networks, systems, e.g., the visual system, etc. Second, how much should we delve into the details of various research protocols that lie behind various exciting findings. If we do not learn more about how the research is conducted we are no better than a reader of the science section of the New York Times who takes things on faith. Neuroscientists by definition have a healthy respect for how various findings were elicited. A true bridging of two disciplines like neuroscience and psychoanalysis, requires immersion in their respective methods. Third, at what point do we try to int