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2012 was a profitable year, as we continued to develop the consilience of neuroscience and psychoanalysis in our state's mental health community and become more active at our annual congress.
At the 13th International Neuropsychoanalysis Congress, on “Craving, Caring, & Clinging,” held in Athens in June 2012, we were honored to be part of the symposium “A Relational Turn in Neuropsychoanalysis—Applications in Developmental Acquired and Progressive Conditions,” coordinated and organized by Christian Salas.
Our presentation was entitled “A Closer Look on the Underpinnings of Neuro-developmental Disorders of Relating and Communicating (NDRC) and Some First Impressions on Naltrexone Use on 55 Children.” Because the sensorimotor systems have a hierarchical development, disruption of regulatory processes due to poorly modulated inhibition or amplification of signals can lead to NDRC. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is one of these neurodevelopmental conditions. The ability to be able to inhibit/enhance certain social/emotional processes depends not only on where the starting point of disruption is in the brain, but also on getting the right clues out of the infant's behavior affected by the disruption. One of the systems that can be affected in this multifactorial disorder is the opioid system. Naltrexone at a low dosage has been used in an effort to modulate the tendency of the infant to “encapsulate” inside his or her comfort zone. Leaving the safety of social withdrawal spontaneously is sometimes very difficult, and the longer the infant remains in his or her cloister, the bigger the risk of crystallizing behavior. Naltrexone, at low doses, seems to attenuate this tendency in some infants.
On 16-18 August, we were invited to participate in a round-table discussion at the annual meeting of the Brazilian Society of Psychoanalysis of Porto Alegre (). The discussion was the intersection of the fields of physics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and neuroscience. T