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The three Original Articles in the current issue represent widely divergent theoretical explorations. At the same time, they all concern themselves with the very nature of the disciplines of neuropsychoanalysis and psychoanalysis. It's an unintentional special issue of sorts! Readers may discover some of their “unknown knowns” articulated in these papers: explicit statements of the underlying assumptions many of us have had, by ourselves, about the neuropsychoanalytic dialogue, which can now be placed on a more solid epistemological footing. You will also find some articulations of the philosophical or scientific perspectives agreed upon amongst ourselves. Most importantly, each paper brings up some new insights and questions about our rich interdisciplinary project.
In “The Difference Between Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience,” Cadell Last provides a fresh, if somewhat mind-bending, discussion of a central problem in the integration of neuroscience findings into psychoanalysis. This problem, identified through a Lacanian lens, is that “neuroscience defines its discourse in relationship to the materiality of the brain – something that is present – whereas one of the defining features of psychoanalysis is its relationship to problematic forms of absence, namely, unconscious mental processes” (p. 27). On the other hand, Ståle Gundersen, in “The Structure of Neuropsychoanalytic Explanation,” offers a “mechanism approach” to help integrate neuroscience into psychoanalysis. He views the goal of neuropsychoanalysis as the establishing of an “updated and empirically based metapsychology founded on neuroscience” as it provides a methodological framework for testing psychoanalytic hypotheses (p. 16). The “mechanism approach,” applicable to all scientific enterprises, provides for psychoanalysis a method of integrating different levels of observation and explanation, including the personal, the psychological, and the neuroscientific. Gundersen asserts that the mechanism approach