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The International Neuro-Psychoanalysis Society held its first congress in London on July 21-23, 2000 (sponsored by the Anna Freud Centre). Like many of the 420 participants who arrived from all parts of the world, I was attracted not just by the topic, “Neuroscientific and Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Emotion,” but also by the sense that this represented a historic occasion: a “coming together of two separate disciplines,” as Allan Pollack called it in his introduction of the first speaker, Oliver Sacks. This “coming together” was represented literally by an audience composed largely of psychoanalysts convening to listen to four neuroscientists: Oliver Sacks, Mark Solms, Antonio Damasio, and Jaak Panksepp.
Sacks opened the conference with a series of vignettes of neurologically impaired patients whose disorders illustrate the impossibility of distinguishing sharply between mind and body. In a compelling example, he demonstrated how Tourette's syndrome acts as an “amplifier” of unconscious material. When the unintelligible tic sounds produced by a young male patient were recorded and slowed down, they were shown to be iterations of a single word, Verboten! (“forbidden”). According to Sacks, this young man had “introjected,” as a tic, his father saying Verboten. Here was a neurologist employing a psychoanalytic concept to make sense of a neurological symptom. It made me wonder what introjection, a complicated developmental process involving identifications with loved/hated objects, actually involves on the level of brain functioning.
The next speaker, Mark Solms, touched on the differing perspectives of psychoanalysis and neuroscience, in a brief overview of Freud's theory of affect. According to Freud, consciousness is generated on two perceptual surfaces. One surface is turned toward the outside world of actual objects, the other toward the inner world of the psyche. The observational perspectives of neuroscience and psychoanalysis reflect this basic arrangement. Ne