Mick Hartley

There’s nothing like sticking a neuro in there to add spurious scientific respectability. Would neuro-linguistic programming have done half so well if it had been called psychoboosting, or Ericksonism? So it was inevitable, really, in the light of the continuing decline in Freud’s reputation, and the realisation that psychoanalysis is not so much a science as a cult, that someone would come up with neuro-psychoanalysis. Indeed there’s an International Centre for Neuro-Psychoanalysis, of which Mark Solms is a co-director. There’s an interview with him at Bookslut.

Editor Jessa Crispin evidently found it deeply inspiring: “It was somewhere during the editing of an 11-page interview with a Freud scholar and translator that I realized I have the best job in the world.” I wish I could feel the same enthusiasm. Having read it I’m no clearer about what neuro-psychoanalysis involves than I was before.

Neuro-psychoanalysis arises out of the belief that the theoretical models we construct in psychoanalysis from our observations of the subjective life of the mind, that those models describe a thing, which must be the same thing that neuroscientists are attempting to study when they derive models of the mental apparatus from their neuroscientific observations. In other words, neuro-psychoanalysis exists because we believe that there’s only one thing called the human mind, which we’re studying from these two different points of view. And if that assumption is valid, then it sort of necessarily implies that we have everything to gain and little to lose by trying to combine our different findings in order to correct viewpoint-dependent errors and arrive at a more satisfactory account of how the mind works.

Um, yes. OK. Neurology and psychoanalysis are two different approaches to the study of mind. True enough. There are plenty more, of course. Phrenology, for instance, or astrology. Will we be seeing a new field of neuro-astrology, combining the findings of the two disciplines “in order to correct viewpoint-dependent errors”? Or neuro-psychoanalytic-astrology, perhaps, combining the findings of all three disciplines? Neuro-kabbalism? Neuro-anthroposophy? Neuro-men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus?

As a psychoanalyst, having trained in Britain, it’s very hard to not learn a great deal of what follows from Freud, particularly in the Kleinian tradition, and in my work as a psychoanalyst, I rely on all manner of theoretical developments post-Freud. The reason I focus so strongly on Freud, however, in my neuro-psychoanalytical work is because it’s a very complicated task to try and link psychoanalytical concepts with neuroscientific ones. To start with the most rudimentary, the most basic concepts, simplifies the task, and that’s a first step. And I think once we’ve been able to ascertain the neural correlates of our most elementary psychoanalytic concepts, that is to say Freudian concepts, then we have a bedrock upon which we can build more elaborated psychoanalytical models into this correlative effort. But I think that we do need to start with one particular model, because there are such a plethora of mutually incompatible, in many respects, psychoanalytical models these days. Since you have to choose one, I think choosing the one from which they are all ultimately derivative, and therefore choosing the simplest one, is therefore the right place to start. But it really is a start, it’s not meant to be any kind of right-wing Freudian project that refuses everything that came after.

Once we’ve been able to ascertain the neural correlates of our most elementary psychoanalytic concepts. Ah yes. Good luck with that.