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A philosophical dictionary defines reductionism as:
Any doctrine which attempts completely to translate one type of concept into another type, supposedly simpler, more basic, or with better empirical confirmation…. To reduce a psychological to a physiological theory is to show that the latter can in principle yield all the results of the former.1
Causal reductionism is again on the march in psychoanalysis, in the form of the growing influence and stature of neuroscience
in current psychoanalytic discourse. It has become fashionable to claim that psychoanalysis must incorporate, or even be grounded in, the findings of neurobiology in order to restore and maintain its scientific respectability. According to Alan Schore,2 an ardent advocate of this objectivist turn, neuroscience is now in a position to complete the “Project for a Scientific Psychology” of the young Freud by being able to demonstrate that emotional states have localizable correlates (read: causes) in the brain. Analysts who wish to preserve psychoanalysis's dedication to illuminating worlds of personal experience will welcome well-informed criticism of this reductive trend.
No one is more qualified to undertake such a critique than the author of Mistaken Identity, Leslie Brothers, a psychiatrist knowledgeable in both psychoanalysis and philosophy and with extensive experience conducting neuroscience research. By virtue of her important contributions during the 1990s, she is widely recognized as an originator of social neuroscience, a move away from the focus on the isolated brain and toward a study of the brain in social context.3 In the volume under review, she draws on the spirit of Wittgenstein, who viewed philosophy as performing a therapeutic function for human thought by clearing up the conceptual muddles created by misapplying “language-games” to domains of discourse to which they do n