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"The harshest truths are heard and recognized at last, after the interests they have injured and the emotions they have roused have exhausted their fury," Freud wrote in 19101 when discussing the future prospects of psychoanalysis. It is no accident, of course, that the authors of this little book begin their preface with this quotation. For, indeed, they are issuing an impassioned call for all psychoanalysts to re-examine the theoretical and metatheoretical underpinnings of their science and practice in order to bring them into harmony with contemporary neurobiology. This aim—apparently so rational; who would object to such a reasonable demand?—is expected to arouse the highest resistance, for they also quote Max Planck: "A new scientific truth does not prevail by convincing its opponents but because these opponents gradually die out as a new generation, familiar with the new truths, grows up" (my translation).2
What are the new truths Brocher and Sies offer? They call attention to the fundamental change in paradigms that in other sciences during the last twenty-five years has led to a correction of the concepts of "objective reality," but has met with great skepticism in psychoanalysis. Specifically, by applying the difficult concepts of the abstract-logical biologic theory of knowledge of H. Maturana and his collaborators, F. Varela and G. Uribe,3 to psychoanalysis, they hope to further the dialogue between psychoanalysis and neurobiology that was initiated over ninety years ago by Freud in his Project for a Scientific Psychology.