ABSTRACT
Can neuropsychoanalysis contribute to our understanding of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and depression? Although psychoanalysis focused more on neurotic or personality disturbances, some attempts have been made to understand schizophrenia and depression in psychodynamic terms. Building on and applying the spatial-topographic and temporal dynamic model of the brain, we here conceive schizophrenia and depression in mainly spatiotemporal terms on both neuronal and psychological levels. Specifically, we show that loss of object relations in schizophrenia can be related to specific temporal-dynamic changes in the brain’s input processing. Moreover, the typical self/self-object–object confusion in schizophrenia may be related to the abnormal spatial topographic representation of the brain’s global activity in lower- and higher-order regions. In contrast, in depression, spatial-topographic changes show abnormally increased focus on the DMN relative to the non-DMN, which psychodynamically may be manifest in increased introjection. Furthermore, the dynamic in depression shows abnormal slowness in sensory regions like the visual cortex. This, in turn, may lead to the loss of actual external object relation and subsequent reactivation of past and lost internal objects, as is typical for depression. I conclude that the spatiotemporal approach to both brain and psyche in terms of topography and dynamic is highly fruitful in providing novel and deeper insight into the psychodynamic mechanisms of psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia and depression.
