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Neuroscience is ‘in’; many speak of a marriage between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences, a conceptual bridge between models of mind and brain. Many quote Freud's “Project” (1895/1966) or his initial pages of “The Unconscious” (1915/1957), finding in these works evidence for either (a) a wish to return to his “Project” and to neuroscience or (b) a conviction that psychological models must remain separate from brain science. Of course, there is room for both interpretations, room enough to support your particular belief. The amount of writing at the interface is burgeoning—one example is the new journal neuro-Psychoanalysis. Whether one thinks that the time is ripe to cast Cartesian dualisms to the wind or merely to establish a more effective correspondence between models of mind and brain, there is a great deal of excitement in the air.
Yet others caution that the marriage is premature, the rush to the altar is in desperation. Is it an anxious dependency based on a fear for the future of psychoanalysis, a wish to belong, a desire to hold onto some material substance for certainty, in this case the brain? Sinister motivations are suggested: Neuroscience is a wolf in sheep's clothing. The embrace will be dismembering and destructive, for neuroscience wishes to abolish the psychological—that is their secret plan. The wolf masquerades as a kind soul, but the hidden agenda is to bury psychoanalysis under the materialist, reductionist agenda. Later, when psychoanalysis has lost the ground of psychological reality, they will display their slogans that reveal their true