Edelson considers several problems in the relationship between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. These include whether psychoanalysis could ever be reduced to concepts in the realm of neuroscience, and whether advances in neuroscience render obsolete or considerably reduce the scope of the psychoanalytic treatment of psychopathology. Psychoanalysis, Edelson argues, is a "special science" which, like

sociology, anthropology, and economics, is autonomous and not ultimately reducible to the theories of physics and chemistry. Accordingly, psychoanalysis is not reducible to neuroscience, nor do the two sciences explain the same kinds of psychopathology. When there is "something wrong" at the psychological level, and there is no neurophysiological or situational condition sufficient to produce that "something wrong," then it is said to be an appropriate subject of psychoanalytic explanation.