You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dr. Manfred Spitzer is Professor and Chairman of the Psychiatric Hospital at the University of Ulm, Germany, and formerly at the University of Heidelberg. This is the author's translation from the German, as encouraged by Drs. Michael Posner and Michael Rutter. The subject of the book is the behavior of large groups of communicating neurons, simulated by sophisticated computer models. The exposition is relatively painless, with a friendly, conversational, jargon, and mostly mathematics-free approach. While a brief review does not do this rich source justice, I will focus on what it might contribute to the current effort at integrating the neurosciences and psychoanalysis, as represented by this journal. In developing this particular approach to the understanding of the mind, the book takes us from where Freud left off in 1895.
Freud (along with a select group of contemporary physiologists) was a pioneer in many areas of neuroscience. Recently, there has been recognition of his enduring and currently highly relevant contributions to theoretical thinking underlying neural network studies (Glymour, 1991). In On Aphasia (1891) as well as in his “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895), he outlines the idea that functions can be distributed throughout the brain, and that psychological phenomena can be determined by interactions among communicating entities.
The effort to understand mental phenomena leads us to search beyond the manifest for the underlying mechanism. Before the age of computers and neuro imaging, the metapsychology (the attempt to define a core group of properties or entities which would be necessary and sufficient to explain both pathological and normal mental functioning) offered five relatively independent points of view from which to proceed: economic, dynamic, structural, genetic, and adaptive. What we have learned of the sturm und drang of electrical currents coursing within and among individual neurons, synergizing and clashing, provides an addit