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Carhart-Harris, R. L., Mayberg, H. S., Malizia, A. L., & Nutt, D. . Mourning and melancholia revisited: Correspondences between principles of Freudian metapsychology and empirical findings in neuropsychiatry. Annals of General Psychiatry, 7: 9.
Perhaps no recent event has caused more buzz in neuropsychoanalytic circles than Carhart-Harris, Mayberg, Malizia, and Nutt's publication, in a mainstream psychiatric journal, of a hypothesis explicitly tethering psychoanalytic concepts to the brain. And appropriately so. The article should be considered required reading, not only for its content, but because it illustrates the promise (and some of the perils) of our endeavor.
The article begins with a raison d'être. Roughly 100 years after Freud reluctantly relinquished his hope of finding the mind's seat in the brain, his neuroscientifically savvy followers are ready to take up his ultimate goal. In an apparent (and welcome) rebuke to those modern analysts who argue that the brain has nothing to teach us about the mind, they point out that Freud's psychophysical parallelism merely delayed the day of reckoning, whereas dualism strictly prohibited it.
The authors then spend considerable space reviewing several Freudian concepts (id, ego, superego, cathexis, repression, primary vs. secondary process). Their goal here is to set up the analytic framework onto which they will be fitting a neural structure. They conclude with a summary of an analytic model of depression: it “is triggered by the loss of an object … there is a forced withdrawal of cathexis, a regression of libido into the ego … and a[n] … attacking of the ego by repressed [negative] emotions.”
Their goal, they state, is to describe a neural circuit that explains this analytic process. This will require brain regions that underlie the healthy mind's capacity to repress negative emotions while allowing libidinal cathexis onto appropriate objects. However, these same regions must