ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the relationship between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. It discusses psychoanalytically by way of an illustrative example is S. Korsakoff’s syndrome. Korsakoff’s syndrome has two main features: amnesia and core feature of the syndrome. Neuroscientists start from the vantage point of external perception, of looking outwards, observing the mind as it is realized as a physical organ, a thing, an external object. Neuropsychology provides a unique opportunity for psychoanalysis to build a bridge to neuroscience, because psychoanalysis has a highly elaborated theory about these very aspects of mental life, which neuroscience is starting to grapple with. The psychoanalytic method is very useful for generating hypotheses about how the mind works and for making inferences, but psychoanalysts have historically not been very good at testing their hypotheses. There is a limit beyond which the psychoanalytic method cannot go, and this applies especially to deciding between competing hypotheses in a reliable, scientific way.