A Greeting from Maggie Zellner

It is a great honor to take on the role of Editor of our journal, and I look forward to engaging with readers, authors, reviewers, and the wider public as we expand our neuropsychoanalytic dialogue.

Many of you find the bridge between the beautifully complex material reality of the brain, on the one hand, and the equally complex psychic reality of subjectivity and the inner world, on the other, as compelling as I do. I think of this bridge as a “materialist metapsychology,” moving us toward a more complete understanding of the brain and mind. Those of us dedicated to the field of neuropsychoanalysis believe that “pure” psychoanalysis—understanding the inner world and how it manifests in our everyday thoughts, feelings, and behavior—is incomplete without an appreciation for its material infrastructure. Conversely, we think that many branches of the neurosciences, including cognitive neuroscience, neurology, biological psychiatry, and neuropsychology, miss a very important piece of the picture when neglecting aspects of internal or unconscious mental life—the motivational, unconscious, relational, and fantasy processes that suffuse all that we do, think, and feel.

It therefore is imperative to have spaces for the kind of interdisciplinary dialogue that Neuropsychoanalysis offers. As Katerina Fotopoulou so elegantly argued in her recent book, From the Couch to the Lab: Trends in Psychodynamic Neuroscience, to which many authors who have published in the pages of this journal contributed, this interdisciplinary challenge is quite difficult. It is difficult because each field is heterogeneous in its own right. It is difficult because achieving competency in any particular subdiscipline of either field already requires significant time and energy, and contributing to this dialogue requires familiarity with both fields. And it is also difficult—or has been—because of the historical tensions between various domains, which were relatively isolated, mutually ignorant, or outrig