The Neuroimmune Network and Its Relevance to Psychoanalysis

This neuroscience report is divided into two parts. The first part introduces basic, critical information about the neuroimmune network (also called the neuroimmune system), while the second part discusses the relation of the neuroimmune network to memory and cognition, and further addresses its significance for psychoanalysis.

To state my conclusion in advance, what makes the neuroimmune network important for our field is that it describes the basic machinery from which learning readiness is created. Any clinical psychoanalysis depends upon free association and spontaneous behavior within a setting of safety. This clinical combination of safety and spontaneity is what creates learning readiness. But how? The short answer is that learning readiness occurs by means of gene activation via the action of cytokines, chemicals that make up the neuroimmune network. Although evolution created the neuroimmune network as a defense against invasion by infectious agents and toxic chemicals, over time, it began to fulfill other functions, including the activation of genes for brain plasticity.

Much of the supporting data in this report is abstracted from Horst Ibelgauft's Web page, which is part of a Web encyclopedia containing tens of thousands of scientific references.1 Rather than