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This book is about the self in psychoanalysis. The self in psychoanalysis has been extensively addressed in the field of psychoanalysis (Kohut, 1971; Goldberg, 1999; ; Lichtenberg, 1989; Cohler, 1982; Gedo, 1993; Stern - to name just a few), as well as the field of affective neuroscience (Panksepp and Northoff, 2009; Damasio, 2010), and in neuropsychoanalysis (Solms & Turnbull, 2002, chapter 9). It is noteworthy to recognize that Freud used terminology for his tripartite model of the mind that translates in English (as opposed to Latin) to the “I” (the ego), the “it” (the id), and the “over-I” (the superego). While these were translated into Latin terms by Strachey, perhaps to appease the positivistic approach of American medicine at that time, and while Freud’s language doesn’t involve “self,” nonetheless, “the I” has a feel that is much closer to “self” than the Latin words that Strachey used.
While the affective neuroscience literature postulates about the origins of the self from the subjective experience of affects, it does not tightly link this with psychoanalysis, and neither does the psychoanalytic literature link the self with a neuroscientific understanding of the functioning of the brain. The considerable strength of this book is that it richly connects a certain line of neuroscientific, and to some extent, philosophical investigation directly with psychoanalysis in its clinical practice. This particular neuroscientific line of investigation has to do with our inherent experience of the world in time and space. Spagnolo and Northoff refer to this as the “spatiotemporal structure” of the brain and of our subjective self-experience.
In a 2016 paper, Northoff describes the nature of self-related processing from a neuroanatomical point of view. He describes considerable research including his own work, which cumulatively documents the involvement of both subcortical areas and cortical areas including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), the perigenual an