The relationship between psychoanalysis and neuroscience is a current topic of debate. Psychoanalytic scholars, clinicians, and researchers, such as Mark Solms, Howard Shevrin, Edward Nersessian, Otto Kernberg, Arnold Modell, Linda Brakel, Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber, and others have demonstrated powerful correlations between events in the subjective world of the analytic subject and simultaneous or nearly simultaneous events in the brain. These correlations tend to support the basic intellectual premises of psychoanalysis—the existence of unconscious mental processing, active inhibition of unwanted memories, and motivational drive in relation to dreaming.
Other work in contemporary neuroscience informs us about the biological processes that accompany change in psychoanalysis or psychotherapy, establishing psychoanalysis as a biological as well as psychological intervention. Neuroscientists such as Eric Kandel, Antonio Damasio, Jaak Panksepp, Oliver Sacks, and many others are active collaborators in exploring the relationship between brain events and human subjectivity. Some believe that only the linkage of psychoanalysis to brain science (as proposed by Freud before 1900) can save the theoretical and clinical enterprise from irrelevance in the 21st century.
On the other hand, there are voices among us asserting that there is no essential relationship between the disciplines of psychoanalysis and neuroscience. The attempt to connect the two realms is seen by some as a naive scientism which misses the heart of conscious and unconscious intrapsychic life. Others see a tendency to yield to the seductions of popular enthusiasm for mechanistic ways of thinking. Sidney Pulver and others have maintained that neuroscience may inform the theoretical models of psychoanalysis but has not demonstrated any clinical relevance. Rachel Blass and Zvi Carmeli, among others, are more radical in their critique.
Just how do brain and mind interact?
What accounts for their seeming separateness?
In the light of this polarization, what is most useful to include in psychoanalytic education about the relationship of psychoanalysis and neuroscience? The Committee on Psychoanalytic Education (COPE) of the American Psychoanalytic Association has created a Study Group on Neuroscience and Psychoanalytic Education to explore this question. The group, which we co-chair, has been asked to develop curricula, position papers, panel presentations, and other material that will influence teaching and learning about psychoanalysis and neuroscience within APsaA.
In its initial work, the group has developed the following mission statement:
Our purpose is to explore and disseminate knowledge about psychoanalytic theory and practice as it relates to contemporary research in cognitive and affective neuroscience, and in other cognitive sciences.
We aim to:
Explore the ways in which knowledge in each discipline can stimulate research and clinical investigation in the other.
Deal thoughtfully with the methodological difficulties of interdisciplinary work.
Make use of studies and materials that are already available, while seeking to stimulate new research.
Encourage and assist the development of pertinent curricular materials for psychoanalytic candidates (and faculty).
Encounter and debate the serious objections to this kind of interdisciplinary work which are expressed by some psychoanalysts.
Avoid oversimplifications of complex relationships.
The group, which had its first meeting at the APsaA 2009 National Meeting (last January), will ultimately consist of psychoanalysts, neuroscientists, and others who are strongly interested in this kind of interdisciplinary work. We hope to include at least one philosopher who is interested in this area in order to
Charles P. Fisher, M.D., is a co-chair of the Committee on Psychoanalytic Education (COPE) Study Group on Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience and a training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.
George G. Fishman, M.D., is director of psychotherapy training at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital Department of Psychiatry, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, training and supervising analyst at Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, and faculty member at Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis.
receive help with some of the epistemological complexities we face. We would also like to include several psychoanalysts who are open-minded but who question the kind of work we envision. To fulfill our mission, we wish to limit the size of the core working group to about 12 members. Others might become involved in a consulting role.
The tools of neuroimaging, magnetic stimulation of the brain, genetic studies, and molecular biology account for the rapid proliferation of findings in neuroscience. The clinico-anatomical method, refined by A. R. Luria (the great Russian neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst) as the method of “dynamic localization” has been used by Mark Solms and others to study the neuropsychology of dreams. Vittorio Gallese, Morris Eagle, Paulo Migone, and others have published remarkable work about mirror neurons. Colleagues of Eric Kandel have studied subtle brain changes accompanying psychotherapy. Drew Westen and Glen Gabbard have written widely on developments in cognitive neuroscience.
In the light of this significant research, it is important to focus on the limits, as well as the advantages of neuroscientific concepts as a bridge to subjectivity. In order to achieve this balanced viewpoint, we must delineate the different levels of discourse involved in discussing psychoanalysis and neuroscience. We must also guard against the tendency for analysts to take up particular findings from neuroscience (correctly or incorrectly understood), to bolster whatever they believed in the first place about psychoanalytic theory and technique.
At the same time, the study group will endeavor to avoid excessive modesty about the feasibility of interdisciplinary work. Contemporary philosophy is challenged in ever more pointed ways to account for the existence of consciousness and the phenomenology of mind. Few analysts and neuroscientists question whether mind and brain are separate realms. The question of interest concerns the precise nature of their interrelationship. Just how do brain and mind interact? What accounts for their seeming separateness? These questions are beyond the scope of either field, and yet they inevitably arise when we try to put the fields of psychoanalysis and neuroscience together: For now, it may be sufficient to say that findings in each field can stimulate inquiry in the other. Just as the data of neuroscience stimulate new questions in psychoanalysis, the phenomenological and subjective data of psychoanalysis stimulate new questions and new areas of study for neuroscience. It should not be necessary for psychoanalysis to limit its findings and assertions to those that are consistent with contemporary neuroscience. Freud and many others have led the way in assisting neuroscience in the discovery of phenomena previously unrecognized. While acknowledging that both fields have established certain facts beyond significant doubt, there is much that remains unknown in both realms. We would not want the unproven theories of psychoanalysis to be constrained by as yet unproven theories of neuroscience.