ABSTRACT Otto Kernberg reaffirms the central motivational role of affects in his object relations theory by incorporating the seminal work of Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience. At the same time, he retains a dual drive model that posits libido and aggression as both a supraordinate level of development and etiologic of all unconscious conflict. The neuroscience he relies upon suggests alternative perspectives. Kernberg’s dynamic unconscious postulates the essential role of declarative memory regarding the neurotic use of repression and the more primitive dissociative defenses in sicker patients. This view is compared to that of Mucci, who sees dissociation as procedural memory. I suggest a broader conceptualization of the dynamic unconscious that takes into account, as Kernberg states, its infantile origins and incorporates the nonverbal symbolic realm of experience.

ABSTRACT The assumption that, during early motherhood, there is an intense physical and psychological connection between mother and infant and a sense that the infant belongs to the maternal body ego has long been a matter of theoretical discussion in the psychoanalytic literature, yet empirical evidence has been scarce. This exploratory study investigated first-time mothers’ experiences of bodily connectedness with their babies and perception of their body boundaries. To gain an in-depth understanding of mothers’ experiences, semi-structured interviews were conducted with five first-time mothers, whose babies were between 18 and 29 weeks old, and were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Findings highlighted the importance of skin-to-skin contact in bonding with the baby; a blurring of body boundaries – especially when the baby is in distress; and emotional challenges of adapting to numerous changes involving the maternal body. This study was conducted just before and during the first lockdown in the UK in response to the outbreak of COVID-19, offering a unique opportunity to consider the pandemic and associated restrictions as a contextual factor.

ABSTRACT There is a difference between neuroscience and psychoanalysis in terms of their primary correlate for subjectivity. Neuroscience defines its discourse in relationship to the materiality of the brain – something that is present – whereas one of the defining features of psychoanalysis is its relationship to problematic forms of absence, namely, unconscious mental processes. One central concern in this regard is the proposition of unconscious mental processes as a wish-fulfillment. In this paper, the logic of the unconscious as a wish-fulfillment is mobilized as a type of knowledge having significant value for understanding neuroscience as a social and historical community. From this perspective, one of the central problems of neuroscience, the “hard problem of consciousness,” is framed not as a problem of neurological correlation but of problematic experience itself. This reframing of the hard problem of consciousness suggests that in order to bring neuroscience and psychoanalysis together, theorists need to think principles of absence. This can be explored with the metaphysics of absence, where indeterminacy and incompleteness become central, and also in the psychoanalytic formulation of the death drive, where we reach the limit of conscious mastery and control. From this foundation, neuroscience and psychoanalysis may find productive dialogue in constructing an “absential science” which would allow a space for new theory of the human relationship to sex (libido) and death (mortality). This paper argues that such new theory is necessary because the future development of neuroscientific technologies could transform fundamental experiences of absence which structure subjective discourse.

This banquet of commentaries by some of the world's leading physicists, philosophers, psychoanalysts, neuroscientists, literary theorists, novelists, and more, is testimony to the ongoing vitality ...

In his impressive “New Project for a Scientific Psychology,” Mark Solms presents us with a revision of Freud’s original “Project for a Scientific Psychology: General Scheme.” While doing so, he con...

ABSTRACT The special issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Volume 39, No. 8 (2019), entitled “The Influence of Neuroscience on Psychoanalysts: A Contemporary Perspective,” edited by Fredric N. Busch, M.D., presents a contemporary view of developments that began more than 100 years ago with Sigmund Freud’s monograph On Aphasia (1891). The fact that the title of the issue refers to “psychoanalysts,” rather than the abstract discipline of psychoanalysis, alerts the reader to the volume’s collection of personal views of a complex topic. In this review, I will also be personal, considering how the volume engages me as a psychoanalyst, while commenting on the representativeness of the selections, and some of the issues raised by the authors. Fredric Busch has undertaken a massive task, handling it with elegance and grace. I’ll come back to the scientific questions he raises in his Prologue to the issue, and merely mention here that I feel challenged by the complexity and volume of the material. I imagine it is similarly challenging for every reader who seeks to grasp the influence of neuroscience on psychoanalysts.

ABSTRACTMeta-psychological bridges between neuroscience and psychoanalysis have focused on Freud’s structural model [Kaplan-Solms & Solms, 2002. Clinical studies in neuro-psychoanalysis: Introduction to a depth neuropsychology (2nd ed.). London: Karnac Books; Solms, 2013. The conscious id. Neuropsychoanalysis, 15(1), 5–19]. While other psychoanalytic schools have been in dialog on specific concepts, alternative full-scale meta-psychologies have received less attention. This paper maps the brain through the Lacanian triad of the real, imaginary, and symbolic. Dynamic localization of these concepts avoids neuro-structural reduction. Right and left cortical hemispheres appear necessary (but not sufficient) for imaginary and symbolic functions respectively, with the frontal lobes underlying social and self-reflective functions. The real is supported by subcortical affective and motivational structures, particularly the automatization of non-representational systems prior to hippocampal development. This project highlights the structural disjuncture (impossibility) which is constitutive of human subjectivity and brain function.