ArticleFrontiers in psychology2012
Psychoanalysis and the brain - why did freud abandon neuroscience?
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Unpacking the Concept of Otherness: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2024Article
- The Universality of Science and Traditional Chinese Medicine: A Philosophical Survey.Science & education · 2021Article
- "Project for a Spatiotemporal Neuroscience" - Brain and Psyche Share Their Topography and Dynamic.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Review
- Dualism and the 'Difficult Patient': Why Integrating Neuroscience Matters.BJPsych advances · 2020Article
- Facts and Sensibilities: What Is a Psychoanalytic Innovation?Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Re-enacting the Bodily Self on Stage: Embodied Cognition Meets Psychoanalysis.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Sigmund Freud-early network theories of the brain.Acta neurochirurgica · 2018Article
- The Experience of Pleasure: A Perspective Between Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2018Review
- The Interface between Neuroscience and Neuro-Psychoanalysis: Focus on Brain Connectivity.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2016Review
- Anomalous Experiences, Trauma, and Symbolization Processes at the Frontiers between Psychoanalysis and Cognitive Neurosciences.Frontiers in psychology · 2015Article
- The Task before Psychiatry Today Redux: STSPIR*.Mens sana monographs · 2014Article
- Brain and self - a neurophilosophical account.Child and adolescent psychiatry and mental health · 2013Article
- Are microglia minding us? Digging up the unconscious mind-brain relationship from a neuropsychoanalytic approach.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2013Article
- Beyond Broca's area: why undergraduate neuroscience education matters.Revista de medicinaArticle
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Abstract
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, was initially a neuroscientist but abandoned neuroscience completely after he made a last attempt to link both in his writing, "Project of a Scientific Psychology," in 1895. The reasons for his subsequent disregard of the brain remain unclear though. I here argue that one central reason may be that the approach to the brain during his time was simply not appealing to Freud. More specifically, Freud was interested in revealing the psychological predispositions of psychodynamic processes. However, he was not so much focused on the actual psychological functions themselves which though were the prime focus of the neuroscience at his time and also in current Cognitive Neuroscience. Instead, he probably would have been more interested in the brain's resting state and its constitution of a spatiotemporal structure. I here assume that the resting state activity constitutes a statistically based virtual structure extending and linking the different discrete points in time and space within the brain. That in turn may serve as template, schemata, or grid for all subsequent neural processing during stimulus-induced activity. As such the resting state' spatiotemporal structure may serve as the neural predisposition of what Freud described as "psychological structure." Hence, Freud and also current neuropsychoanalysis may want to focus more on neural predispositions, the necessary non-sufficient conditions, rather than the neural correlates, i.e., sufficient, conditions of psychodynamic processes.
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