ABSTRACT
This publication is devoted to a central topic of the interdisciplinary dialogue between contemporary psychoanalysis and other scientific disciplines: the unconscious. As is well-known, in Freud´s time, psychoanalysis was characterised as “the science of the unconscious mind”. In the last hundred years, many other disciplines, among them cognitive science, have studied non-conscious mental functions. What are the differences between the conceptualisation of “the unconscious” in psychoanalysis and cognitive science? Is the core thesis of psychoanalysis still plausible, namely that unbearable impulses and fantasies from the past and present are banished into the unconscious, from where they continue to determine feelings, thoughts and behaviours in unknown ways? And is such an understanding of the unconscious still central for helping patients in contemporary psychotherapy? Throughout his entire life, Freud had hoped that new developments in the
neurosciences would contribute to exploring psychoanalytic processes from a natural scientific point of view. In many of his historical and theoretical papers it has been substantiated that Freud – due to the standard of neuroscientific methods during his times – turned his back on this vision and defined psychoanalysis as a solely psychological science of the unconscious (Solms, 1997/2003). Over the past few years, recent developments in the neurosciences, e.g. investigating the living brain with the help of neuroimaging techniques, as well as the neuro-anatomic method, as described by Solms and other psychoanalytic researchers, have stimulated and intensified the interdisciplinary dialogue between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. Thus it has been a kind of a gift to the 150th birthday of Sigmund Freud in Germany, that even the widely read journal “Der Spiegel” talked of a “Renaissance of psychoanalysis”. A main contributor to this new attention devoted to psychoanalysis was the Nobel laureate neuro-biologist Eric Kandel. His twin papers published
more than a decade ago in the American Journal of Psychiatry, “A new intellectual framework for psychiatry” (1998) and “Biology and the future of psychoanalysis: a new intellectual framework for psychiatry revisited” (1999) created a large interest in the dialogue between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences, initiating an internationally challenging, broad discussion of fascinating new interdisciplinary research perspectives. For many authors, as for Kandel (e.g. 2009), a vision of Sigmund Freud turned
into reality in the last decades: Freud never gave up his hope that developments in the neurosciences might someday contribute to a “scientific foundation” of psychoanalysis. He abandoned this attempt, his “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895), due the obvious limitations of the neurosciences’ methodology at that time (see Kaplan-Solms & Solms, 2000), subsequently defining psychoanalysis as a “pure psychology of the unconscious”. As Kandel points out in his twin papers, the developments in the neurosciences and in neuroimaging techniques (as the MEG, EKP, PET, fMRI) open a new window for psychoanalysis to “prove” its concepts and findings by applying the methodologies of current “hard natural sciences”. Kandel is passionate about this vision: his unique, spirited speeches claim that the future of psychoanalysis mainly depends on its taking up this challenge.
