Commentary by Bonnie Smolen, Ed.D.

Howard Shevrin has been among the few farsighted psychoanalytic thinkers trying to meet the challenge to “withstand, absorb, and transcend” the new conceptual waves coming from cognitive science and neurobiology (Opatow, 1997, p. 865). While research at the interface of psychoanalysis and neuroscience has now become fashionable, Dr. Shevrin is among the very few analysts who have actually mastered the conceptual and methodological terrain of neuropsychology. (See also, from very different theoretical and methodological perspectives, Bucci, 1997; Kaplan-Solms and Solms, 2000). For decades, he has been constructing and reporting an elegant series of experiments designed to challenge, amplify and validate essential tenets of both neuropsychology and psychoanalytic theory. Of equal importance, throughout his career, in publications on subjects such as affect, drive, repression and memory, he has demonstrated a long-held commitment to refining and updating the fundamental premises of analytic theory.

In this paper, Shevrin has gone beyond the challenge of absorbing and responding to neurobiological and cognitive theory generated from laboratory research to attempt to use that data to resolve some of the current controversies over elemental questions of clinical theory and therapeutic change, questions as basic as the importance of veridicality of memory and the lifting of repression vs. the contemporary constructivist emphasis on coherence in personal narrative; or the seemingly unanswerable question, framed by the concept of repetition compulsion, of whether transferential enactments can represent learned behavior scripted by procedural memory or whether they always must be understood as the outcome of conflicted, dynamic unconscious processes. These disputes reemerge regularly in the history of psychoanalysis, each time in semantic garb slightly different and unique to the particular period, and they provoke often passionate attempts to resolve them by a marshalling of