Response to the commentaries on the “New Project”

This banquet of commentaries by some of the world's leading physicists, philosophers, psychoanalysts, neuroscientists, literary theorists, novelists, and more, is testimony to the ongoing vitality of Freud's “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” the Ur-text of psychoanalysis. I would like to thank them very sincerely for the time and effort they have expended on this very difficult paper, and for the refreshingly positive spirit in which they have done so. To say the obvious, in the space available, I can respond only to a selection of the many issues they have raised, which I regret; but I will try to focus on the main ones, and especially on those that pose challenges and raise disagreements.†

I will do so in alphabetical order, starting with Alberini. She asks (1) whether we should build a new metaneuropsychology upon Freud's basic concepts, or start afresh, and (2) whether we should limit ourselves to the scientific disciplines that were extant in Freud's day, or draw upon the cutting-edge sciences of our own times, like molecular neurobiology (Alberini, 2020). She also asks an even more basic question: (3) what is “the mind” anyway? Regarding this third question, Alberini is wrong to cast Freud as a dualist; he, like Panksepp and me, was a dual-aspect monist.† This means that he viewed the mind as a functional system which can be studied from two observational perspectives: objective brain and subjective being. When it comes to the former perspective, of course we must use every “unbiased” method and technology that we have, without exception. That answers Alberini's second question. When it comes to the subjective perspective, psychoanalysis stands pretty much alone among the mental sciences in recognizing that felt experience provides the primary empirical data of psychology. As Alberini's opening quotation from Freud (1950 [1895]) reminds us: “the nature of the subject” demands that we take this perspective; but still, almost all academic psychologists today