“what methodological difficulties lie in the path of an alliance between the neurosciences and psychoanalysis?”
-The difficulty of merging a theory that emphasizes so many unknowns and biases with a science that prefers precision
“looks for a mode of neuroscience-psychoanalysis mutuality that is strong because it is capable of tolerating, even enjoying and promoting, the process of being unbuttoned”
-Allowing for the cognitive dissonance that may result from such opposite fields, and instead focusing on what can be gleamed in such a space
“disarticulation is not a move against the articulate or the articulated, but rather an enquiry into the power of internal torque”
“This analysis… aims to explore the kinds of thinking, feeling, and doing made possible by an incommensurate encounter between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. To this end, the key interdisciplinary issue for a neuropsychoanalysis synthesis may not be content (e.g., is activity in the prefrontal cortex the biological mechanism for transference?) but methodology: do the neurosciences and psychoanalysis have, ought they have, could they formulate, the same kinds of epistemological politics?”
-exactly, one must first consider not how they align but what the two fields aligning may be able to tell us and ultimately if that information is useful enough for the focus on such a merge; finding the balance of what this new information may bring, while also acknowledging the limitations as a way to further understand the relationship between the two
“This also implies a core compatibility between the neurosciences and psychoanalysis, as if their separation has been ill-fated rather than necessary or fruitful; and so feeds the fantasy that their reunion ought be harmonious, collaborative, and reasonable”
-rather than acknowledging how their placement and relationship to one another may tell us more and further the conversation of knowledge of the person, rather than the combined methodology which may be incompatible and contradictory;
“It is a daydream of scientific progress that hopes to turn interdisciplinary differences into transdisciplinary accords.”
“When practiced carefully, an alliance between the neurosciences and psychoanalysis should understand the damage done to psychoanalysis by its sequestration from the natural sciences, the damage done to the neurosciences by their detachment from psychic dynamism, and the inadequacies of consilience as a solution to interdisciplinary differences”
-however, trying to combine the two or integrate them tends to lead to a muddling of this point
"This tendency to select parts of those scientific findings that one finds useful and put them together in an additive fashion results in cut-and-paste theory-building, which combines elements from different theories with very different-and often incompatible-basic assumptions”
“ways of thinking about the mutuality of neuroscience and psychoanalysis that are less integrative-mutualities that are unruly, aggressive, destabilizing, vertiginous, and strange.”
“I look to the unconscious, the affects, sexuality, and the body to find ways of deploying neuroscience and psychoanalysis together, yet not have everything mean the same thing.”
-exactly, use psychoanalysis for what it can tell you and use neuroscience for what it can say; present the two from an ecological lens and examine what the information presents together as well as separate.
“Freud gives the name "metapsychological" to any account of minded processes that can describe them in topographical, economic, and dynamic terms, although he notes straight away that "in the present state of our knowledge there are only a few points at which we shall succeed in this.”
-this all fits one category makes it difficult to sparse out the differences and makes it seem as if they are all at odds with one another: “if mind is suspended between spatial and economic parameters, if it is unclear, for example, whether an unconscious idea is in another place {topographically) or in another state (economically), then there can be no consilient psychoanalytic account of mind” – completely negates how they intersect and that impact; however, the discussion on psychic energy alludes to a more interconnected system, showing how they are at odds
“Ferenczi was interested in mutuality-mutuality between patient and analyst, between bodily organs, between phylogenetically distant time periods, between different epistemological systems.”
“Ferenczi supposed that biological events have the capacity for complex semiotic communication: they are overdetermined processes, rather than the products oflinear cause-effect sequences. 21 In this physiology-psychoanalysis synthesis, biology substance would no longer been seen as "flat:' but would be deemed to have its own depth-there would be a recognition of a biological unconscious in which archaic, conflicted motivations are native to human physiology.”
“Most neuropsychoanalytic researchers have settled for a more tepid un - derstanding of mutuality; a surprising amount of which is indebted to John Kihlstrom's idea of a "cognitive unconscious: This model draws its empirical and conceptual power not from a distinction between conscious and unconscious events but from a difference between different kinds of non - conscious mental events. Drawing on conventional psychological theories of memory, Kihlstrom differentiates between declarative knowledge {"the individual's fund of general and specific factual information;' which may or may not be conscious) and procedural knowledge ( the "repertoire of skills, rules, and strategies that operate on declarative knowledge in the course of perception, memory, thought, and action")”
“Procedural knowledges are not amenable to conscious reflection or introspection: "these mental processes, which can only be known indirectly through inference, may be described as unconscious in the strict sense of that term”
-this is different from Freud’s version of the unconscious: “Stripped of its depth {libido, motive, conflict, drives, body), the cognitive unconscious is technically much closer to what Freud called the preconscious: a system governed by the secondary processes, bound to word-presentations, and separated from the raging unconscious by a barrier of censorship”
“Material that is cognitively unconscious has not been repressed, in the classical Freudian sense. Indeed, the question of repression-which, for psychoanalysis, is the question of motivation-is either ignored or explicitly repudiated in a lot of neuropsychoanalytic work”
-then why combine them??
“By rendering the unconscious more cognitive than dynamic, these new neuro-psychoanalytic commentators drain much of the life out of their theories of mind”
The three empirical pillars of contemporary psychoanalysis-infant development research, affect regulation, and attachment theory-testify to this growing neglect of sexuality.
-intersting to think how such an integral part is often ignored; what does that say about our cultures relationship to sexuality though
“He offers the now routine pronouncement that "a behavioral trait such as sexual orientation almost certainly is not caused by a single gene, a single alteration in a hormone or in brain structure, or a single life experience;' yet he also trusts that neuroscientific methods "are at hand for establishing whether there are reliable anatomical differences between people with different sexual orientations" -as if such methods will eventually be able to straighten out questions of sexuality once and for all, as if sexuality will eventually give up its aleatory nature and become indistinguishable from flat genetic, neurological or hormonal action.”
-once again thinking they can narrow something down to a specific factor à what does that really tell us?
"Sex has undoubtedly become more complex since Freud's original descriptions, yet in another way it has changed little. It is still there as the primary motor ensuring the survival of our species, the perpetuation of our genetic material. For all mammals the process of reproduction is at the centre of their behavioural systems. For mammals with minds, this is unlikely to be different”
-how does this relate if one separates sexuality and reproduction, as suggested by feminist theorists
“Without question, we spend our lives elaborating the entanglements of fantasy, sexuality, biology; but these events draw on substrata that are already entangled each with the other”
“This account of James prevaricates on the crucial question of the relation between stimulus, body, and emotion: are they separate events {requiring associative linkages) or are they somehow already psychosomatically entangled?”
Sexuality, soma, and emotion form a complex network of under-theorized events in neuropsychoanalysis. As they have been understood in the critical humanities, each of these is a disarticulate, self-incommensurate process. It seems that their inclusion into these new consilience-oriented neuropsychoanalytic projects is at the expense of their vitality and unruliness. Indeed, the two cultures dilemmas that haunted both psychoanalysis and neuroscience in the twentieth century {dividing the unconscious from the neural network) are being resolved by generating monocultures that relentlessly grind all differences, all specificities, all vitality, into consilient dust.
