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The Toronto Group continues to work at the integration of psychoanalytic and neuroscientific knowledge. We reviewed the 2008 Montreal Neuropsychoanalysis Congress for our group members, who come from backgrounds in neurophysiology, neuroimaging, mathematical modeling, and neurology, as well as psychoanalysis and related clinical professions. There was fascination with Dr. Suzanne Corkin's detailed descriptions of H.M. and in others' descriptions of various striking phenomena following upon brain injury, attempting to incorporate potential conflict and defense processes. We discussed both Robert Michel's emphasis at the Montreal Congress that the focus of psychoanalytic work is primarily on the dynamic psychological elaboration (fantasy) of experience and group member Judith Deutsch's challenge to the pervasive application of neuropsychiatric diagnostic categories to individuals who, under psychoanalytic scrutiny, turned out to be more complex and less readily categorized. The “psych[e]” in neuropsychoanalysis sets it apart.
Bringing to mind Helen Mayberg's series of meetings with our group in 2002 on “If Freud Had a PET scanner”, we reviewed the important paper, “Mourning and Melancholia Revisited” (Carhart-Harris, Mayberg, Malizia, & Nutt, 2008).
Freud's (1917e [1915]) watershed paper, written in the midst of a bleak world war, advanced thinking about conflict, ambivalence, and structural agencies, incorporating representations of others (Panel, 1998). He spelled out a scheme in which a severe form of depression, melancholia, can be viewed as involving intense activity within the mind.
In a truly gargantuan effort, Carhart-Harris et al. (2008) summarizde and synthesized observations of brain activity, particularly in a set of areas recently noted to be active during “undirected,” “passive,” and “resting” control intervals in imaging studies of various cognitive tasks (the default-mode network). Thus, it seems, neuroscience researchers serendipitously discovered free a