Neuropsychoanalysis

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Freud's mature theorizing about human morality entrenched the functioning of the superego in anxiety stemming from the fear of punishment, a view with which many later psychoanalysts took issue, producing a debate as to the distinction between superego and conscience. This debate would later be mirrored more broadly in academic psychology concerning distinctions between shame and guilt. This is an area where the clinical observations and theoretical discussions of psychoanalysis have subtly guided research in cognitive psychology and the cognitive and affective neurosciences...

In this paper I have chosen the topic of psychoanalysis in the age of neuroscience, with the aim of showing why the cultural history of psychoanalysis still matters. To make myself better understood I shall refrain from evaluating the current findings in neuroscience and limit myself to reporting briefly on them. Although I do not regard myself by any means as an expert in that field, I may be permitted to offer a few ideas about it. In this regard, there is presently a significant predominance of biological ideologies and practices regarding the treatment of mental illness, which implies an increase in the interest in etiology, nosology, definitions, and the effectivity of treatments...

What do neuroscientific visualizations of mental functioning depict? This article argues that neuroscientific imaging from Santiago Ramón y Cajal's pen and ink drawings onward falls within the mimetic tradition, that dealing with the artistic representation of reality. Cajal's iconic images of pyramidal neurons and glial cells surprisingly suggest a non-realist approach to picturing the brain and the mind that opens a new methodological link between humanities and neurosciences. In it, aesthetic works offer a perspective on mimetic practices in neurosciences, providing insight into representational strategies that make otherwise invisible psychic phenomena observable...

The neuropsychoanalytic approach solves important aspects of how to use our understanding of the brain to treat patients. We describe the neurobiology underlying motivation for healthy behaviors and psychopathology. We have updated Freud's original concepts of drive and instinct using neuropsychoanalysis in a way that conserves his insights while adding information that is of use in clinical treatment. Drive (Trieb) is a pressure to act on an internal stimulus. It has a motivational energic source, an aim, an object, and is terminated by the satisfaction of a surge of serotonin...

Despite Tennessee Williams's genius as a playwright who could represent his inner emotional struggles in his art, psychoanalysis was unable to free him from the powerful "blue devils" within him. Williams's inability to engage with psychoanalysis presents an opportunity to discuss ways that contemporary thinking about brain structure and function might guide our understanding and treatment of patients such as Williams. One of the core defensive behaviors that made analysis difficult for Williams was his avoidance of painful emotions through compulsive writing, sex, alcohol, and drug-addictive behaviors...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Addiction is an illness prevalent in the worldwide population that entails multiple health risks. Because of the nature of addictive disorders, users of drugs seldom look for treatment and when they do, availability can be difficult to access. Permanence in treatment and its outcomes vary from case to case. Most models work from a multidisciplinary approach that tackles several dimensions of addictive disorders. However, the different etiological factors claim for a personalized treatment to enhance opportunities for better results...

Jouissance is one of Jacques Lacan's most impenetrable concepts. Yet it is essential to Lacan's view of sex. The term is sometimes translated as "enjoyment," but this misses key features of the concept, notably its "traumatic," excessive character. This excess points to a structural negativity within the subject (i.e., the real), an original split that cannot be remedied. In this first of a series of three papers, it is proposed that "surplus prediction error"-as understood within contemporary neuropsychoanalysis-is a neural correlate for jouissance ...

Jouissance refers to an excess enjoyment beyond (yet tied to) speech and representation. From the perspective of some Lacanian analysts, jouissance is precisely what testifies against any relationship to the brain- jouissance "slips" out of cognition. On the contrary, it is argued here that jouissance has a central place in contemporary neuropsychoanalysis. In part 1 of this series the metapsychology of jouissance was presented in relation to the real and symbolic registers. Here, in part 2, Mark Solms's neuropsychoanalytic model of Karl Friston's free energy principle is summarized...

What kind of neuroscience does psychoanalysis require? At his time, Freud in his "Project for a Scientific Psychology" searched for a model of the brain that could relate to incorporate the psyche's topography and dynamic. Current neuropsychoanalysis builds on specific functions as investigated in Affective and Cognitive (and Social) Neuroscience including embodied approaches. The brain's various functions are often converged with prediction as operationalized in predictive coding (PC) and free energy principle (FEP) which, recently, have been conceived as core for a "New Project for Scientific Psychology...

Neuropsychoanalysis has been established as a field based on the dialog between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. Freud was a neurologist for 20 years and used the neuroscientific knowledge of his time as the foundation of his metapsychology. Psychoanalysis has predominantly relied on its own method to develop techniques for the different psychoanalytic treatments. It rarely uses contributions from fields outside psychoanalysis that could enrich its understanding of the mind. Neuropsychoanalysis has informed and revised several topics in psychoanalysis, for example consciousness and the unconscious, dreams, and affect amongst many others...

This paper is principally concerned with reappraising some of the major disagreements that separated the Viennese and the London Kleinians during the British Psychoanalytical Society's Controversial Discussions. Of particular focus are questions pertaining to the genesis of ego development, the beginnings of object-relating, and the role of unconscious phantasy in respect of these phenomena. The aim of the investigation is to inquire into the light that may be shed on the once intractable conflicts surrounding these questions by bringing to bear more recent developments from psychoanalysis and the neurosciences...

The author argues against neuropsychoanalysis by focusing on the metaphysical issues. Neuropsychoanalysts argue that the philosophical theories of dual aspect monism (DAM) and anomalous monism support their position. The author contends that not only do DAM and anomalous monism not offer support for neuropsychoanalysis; they are also inconsistent with its claims. The conceptual distinction between the mental and the physical - the so-called "epistemological dualism" cited by neuropsychoanalysis-stands as an insurmountable barrier to the project of neuropsychoanalysis...

Addictive drugs are responsible for mass killing. Neither persons with addiction nor the general populace seem conscious of the malevolence of governments and drug dealers working together. How could this be? What is the place of psychoanalysis in thinking about deaths from addiction and in responding to patients with addiction? To answer these questions, we revise concepts of SEEKING, drive, instinct, pleasure, and unpleasure as separable. We review the neurobiological mechanism of cathexis. We discuss how addictive drugs take over the will by changing the SEEKING system...

BACKGROUND: While traditional psychoanalysis has been criticized as insufficient for the treatment of substance use disorder (SUD), recent progress in the field of neuropsychoanalysis has generated new and promising hypotheses regarding its etiology. However, empirical research applying this framework has been sparse. AIM AND SCOPE: The present overview aims at developing and empirically validating a neuroscientifically informed psychodynamic framework regarding the etiology of SUD...

Psychoanalytic innovation is easy to recognize but difficult to define. There is a dearth of literature exploring the nature of innovation in our field. My main thesis is that psychoanalytic innovation can be of two types. Psychoanalytic innovation of the first order is about new discoveries concerning facts related to the psyche, development, transference relations, or psychopathology. It usually emerges as a development of insights from canonical psychoanalytic theory; offers an original explanation for a choice of empirical psychic phenomena hitherto unexamined; is perceived as creative and useful when it succeeds to reconceptualize the relations between the patient's past, unconscious dynamics, and the transference relations; often resembles poetic expression; and registers a truth we knew but did not yet put into words...

This article analyses how and with what consequences body-mind relations (the sphere of the psychosomatic) are being modelled in the 21st century through considering the interdiscipline of neuropsychoanalysis. The promise of the term psychosomatic lies in its efforts to rework standard, bifurcated models of mind and body: somatic acts are simultaneously psychic acts. But neuropsychoanalysis, as it brings the neurosciences and psychoanalysis together to model an embodied 'MindBrain', ends up evacuating another potent characteristic found in much of the psychosomatic tradition-its refusal to adjudicate, a priori, what counts as the adaptive or well-regulated subject...

With the transition from a one-person psychology of instinctual needs to a two-person psychology of relational needs, the metapsychological focus tends to shift from instinct theory to emotion motivation and systems theory, and, accordingly, familiar concepts have to be rethought. In this article, the superego is reconceptualized as a psychic regulation system for self-evaluation, comprising the capacity for empathy, the proneness to experience self-conscious emotions, such as shame, pride, and guilt, and the capacity for moral reasoning...

The article discusses the development of psychoanalytic theory in the direction of broadening the reflection on their own based on data derived from empirical studies other than clinical case study. Particularly noteworthy is the convergence that followed between neuroscience and psychoanalysis and the rise of the so-called neuropsychoanalysis. Consequently, this led to eject empirical hypotheses and begin research on defense mechanisms, self, memory, dreams, empathy, dynamic unconscious and emotional-motivational processes (theory of drives)...