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The Role of Neuropsychoanalysis in Psychoanalytic Research
Research represents important challenges. Exploring, selecting, and/or designing the best method to generate knowledge can be most exciting, as it seems to satisfy our instinctual curiosity to understand ourselves and the various objects of the world. From this perspective, all things can be interesting. However, few topics would be of more interest than the subject that generates knowledge, i.e., a mind. As much as science has attempted to reach objectivity, when research reports are analyzed, it is relatively easy to find biases predominantly considered as inadequate or undesirable. Nevertheless, they are inevitable and therefore should be accepted and included as part of the research; the results can only come closer to reality. Hence, I find the mind the most interesting topic of all. If we can understand the subject that generates knowledge, we can better understand our own investigative endeavors.
Accordingly, the human mind can be understood as a meta-topic of research, particularly of psychology. However, only psychoanalysis formally studies the unconscious aspects of the mind. A mind investigating itself becomes the most challenging research task of all. Freud was not shy to try. Being a neurologist and based on the scientific spirit of the nineteenth century, he attempted to explain the way the mind works from a neurological perspective. His last known attempt was his Project for a Scientific Psychology, written in 1895. He was initially enthusiastic about his manuscript, only to change his mind shortly afterward. Apparently, he did not find his Project scientific enough. He could not test his hypotheses and reported that he did not know how to continue regarding the organic basis of the mind, which made him consider psychological features only. Psychoanalysis would then neglect biology following Freud’s resolution.
Despite being a research method itself, research in psychoanalysis became difficult to conduct. Many methods have been applied to different psychodynamic topics; the clinical observation has been the most recurrent. Clinicians sometimes become authors and infer hypotheses from their work with patients; some other times, authors write based on their own ideas about a topic. Either method has value. However, the need to test hypotheses is seldom considered, resulting in their acceptance or rejection based on the readers’ preferences and not on other sources of information. This takes me to an important aspect of relying excessively on one sole method of research, in this case, the psychoanalytic. When we do not feel the need to search for other sources of knowledge, we risk seeing a topic only from our preferred frame of reference. If we take information from other methods and fields of knowledge, we are forced to challenge our viewpoint, which can only nourish the original hypotheses and theories.
Neuroscience is one of those alternative fields of knowledge that psychoanalytic researchers may want to look into. The many topics of interest shared by psychoanalysis and neuroscience have contributed to an increased fascination with the dialog started by neuropsychoanalysis. However, it is no coincidence that these two fields have been working together. Neuropsychoanalysis goes back to the very foundations of psychoanalysis. What seemed impossible for Freud from 1895 onwards seemed possible years after for Mark Solms and many others. This encounter is only natural and the various research methods of neuroscience have provided a space for methodological creativity. Yet, it must not be thought that the task is less challenging all these years after Freud. The study of the mind remains an inevitably biased endeavor, and its relation to the brain has been the topic of both exciting and disappointing discussions.
Some claim that neuropsychoanalysis is of little or no relevance to psychoanalysis. The same could be said about the contributions of psychoanalysis to neuroscience. We may have our personal preferences about the matter, but one thing is for sure, there would be no psychoanalysis without neuroscience (Flores Mosri, 2019) and as long as we hold a dialectical method, we are certain that we are learning and challenging our ideas from different perspectives considering as many methods and sources of information as we can. In my opinion, a dialectic approach means to remain as humble as studying the mind necessitates. As our theories remain the foundation upon which our techniques are built, our commitment is to research psychoanalytic ideas with the best available tools at hand. In my view, that is the hope that neuropsychoanalysis brings.
To read more about this perspective, please see the following references:
Flores Mosri, D. (2019). “There would be no psychoanalysis without neuroscience,” in Reflections on 20 years of Neuropsychoanalysis, Vol. 2, eds R. Balchin, V. Barry, A. Bazan, M. Blechner, A. Clarici, D. Flores Mosri, et al. Neuropsychoanalysis, 89–123.
Flores Mosri, D. (2021a). Clinical applications of neuropsychoanalysis: Hypotheses toward an integrative model. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 718372.
Flores Mosri, D., Abrams, J., Barry, V., Biran, I., Coetzer, R., Moore, P., Muñoz Zúñiga, J.F. & Zellner, M. (2022). Clinical writing in neuropsychoanalysis, Neuropsychoanalysis, 24:2, 171-191.
Freud, S. (1895). Project for a Scientific Psychology. Standard Edition, Vol. 1. London: Hogarth Press, 281–397.
Daniela Flores Mosri, PhD, is a lecturer and researcher at Universidad Intercontinental in Mexico City. She has been a liaison officer in Latin America for the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society since 2014 and is Managing Editor of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis. She has been a member of the National Researchers System (SNI) at the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACyT), from where she currently receives support for her research in neuropsychoanalysis. Her clinical practice focuses on borderline states, addiction, depression, psychosomatic illness, and eating disorders, amongst others. She was an invited presenter and guest of the NCP Research Committee in November 2022.