Transference, Affect, and Neurobiology (Brockman, 2000)

In 1895 Freud wrote Project for a Scientific Psychology in which he tried to develop a science of mind. He abandoned the work within days of completing it: “I have packed up the manuscripts and thrown them into a drawer … I no longer understand the state of mind in which I hatched the psychology” . But Freud in fact never abandoned the idea. Twenty-five years later, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud returned to the idea he had “hatched”: “Biology is truly a land of unlimited possibilities. We may expect it to give us the most surprising information. … They may be of a kind which will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses” .

I have spent most of my professional career trying to do what Freud had tried, abandoned, and then predicted would one day be done. I have been doing my best to “blow away the … artificial structure of hypotheses” that Freud initiated when he abandoned the scientific psychology of his day to write the Interpretation of Dreams and to create the “artificial structure” that would provide the foundation for psychoanalysis.

Transference itself is not an “artificial structure.” Transference distortions are observable and real. But the psychological hypotheses that Freud, and psychoanalysis, invented to explain those distortions were very much a part of the broader artifice.

“Transference, Affect, and Neurobiology” was one of the first articles that directly challenged the psychoanalytic underpinnings of transference distortion. It provided biological answers to how these distortions come about. The article explains why the transference can be so powerful, sometimes ruthless, sometimes lame. The biology has to do with what part of the brain is first to encode—the neocortex, the prefrontal, the amygdala, the hippocampus—what part of the brain is first to register perception, affect, intention—which part first to act. With