Neuropsychoanalysis

Dual-aspect monism Neuropsychoanalysis is best described as a marriage between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Accordingly, he invented the dualism of the mind, the "mind-body dichotomy". Body is one kind of thing, and mind (or psyche) another. But since this second kind of 'stuff' does not lend itself to scientific inquiry, many of today's psychologists and neuroscientists have seemingly rejected Cartesian dualism. Freud himself wasn't ignorant in this regard, on the contrary: he delved deeply into the duality of our conscious thought. Thus he wrote that essentially two things are known about the living soul: the brain with the nervous system and the acts of consciousness. Consciousness is given directly, it cannot be explored more through any description. In Freud's opinion, the fact that the findings of a biological phenomenon such as our living brain can be integrated between "both endpoints of our knowledge" only contributes to the "localization of the acts of consciousness", not to their understanding. (''This radical view coincides with the current theory of Roger Penrose, according to which "proto-consciousness" emerge in the microtubules of cells, but can't represent anything that is somehow ‘calculable’. Consciousness in its focal point is ‘understanding’; it creates algorithms, for example, but doesn't itself represent an algorithm; it isn't a computer. Penrose's theory attempts to unite a proto mind with quantum physics and to anchor both in that energetic singularity from which cosmic and biological matter evolves up to homo sapiens, for example..) Thus, the soul (or id) for Freud is the "function" of the psychic apparatus, which is composed of two more complementary working instances, similar to how a cell is made up of its organelles or a microscope from its lenses. Anchored in the reservoir of Libido in direct reference to the universal desire that Plato assigned to Eros, Freud saw the monistic moment of his psychology in this drive energy, which branches out from the id into two main areas: the ‘’bodily‘’ urge to act and the ‘’mental‘’ urge to know. In this way, he takes account of the body-mind dualism, illustrating it further with his parable of a rider and his horse: man must restrain and direct the superior energy of his animal and enable it to satisfy its drives if he wants to keep it alive and the species healthy. The ego therefore has "the habit of putting the will of the id into practice as if it were its own''". Neuropsychoanalysis respond to this viewpoint by adopting dual-aspect monism, sometimes referred to as perspectivism. That is, our souls are monistic from their libidinal energy. We as living beings consist of matter - Cells, their superstructuring into organs, ‘individual’ living beings, instinctively social groups - and a spirit active in it. That's why we perceive the phenomena from two seemingly opposite perspectives. Psychoanalysis as a foundation Perhaps because Freud himself began his career as a neurologist, psychoanalysis has given the field of neuroscience the platform upon which many of its scientific hypotheses were founded. With the field of psychoanalysis suffering from what many see as a decline in innovation and popularity, a call for new approaches and a more scientific methodology is long overdue. Much of neuroscience aims to break down and tease out the cognitive and biological functions behind both conscious and unconscious actions within the brain. In this way it is no different than psychoanalysis, which has had similar goals since its inception. Therefore, to ignore the additional insight neuroscience can offer psychoanalysis would be to limit a huge source of knowledge that can only enhance psychoanalysis as a whole. == Models of pathologies ==

Depression Heinz Böker and Rainer Krähenman proposed a model of depression as dysregulation of the relationship between the self and the other. This psychodynamic model, is related to the neurobiological model of the default mode network, DMN, and the executive network, EN, of the brain, noting experimentally the DMN seemed to be more active in depressed patients. The psychological construct of rumination is conceptualized which is experimentally more common in depressed patients, is viewed as equivalent to the cognitive processing of the self, and therefore the activation of the DMN. Similarly, experimentally measurable constructs of attribution bias are viewed as being related to this "cognitive processing of self". It has been shown that forms of psychodynamic therapy for depression have effects on the activation of several areas of the brain. == History ==

Neuropsychoanalysis as a discipline can be traced as far back as Sigmund Freud's manuscript, "Project for a Scientific Psychology". Written in 1895, but only published posthumously, Freud developed his theories of the neurobiological function of the storage of memory in this work. His statement, based on his theory that memory is biologically stored in the brain by, "a permanent alteration following an event", had a prophetic insight into the empirical discoveries that would corroborate these theories close to 100 years later. Freud speculated that psychodynamics and neurobiology would eventually reunite as one field of study. While time would eventually prove him correct to some degree, the latter half of the 20th century only saw a very gradual movement in this direction with only a few individuals championing this line of thought. Significant advances in neuroscience throughout the 20th century created a clearer understanding of the functionality of the brain, which have vastly enhanced the way we view the mind. This began in the 1930s with the invention of electroencephalography, which enabled imaging of the brain as never seen before. A decade later the use of dynamic localization, or the lesion method, further shed light onto the interaction of systems in the brain. Computerized tomography lead to even greater understanding of the interaction within the brain, and finally the invention of multiple scan technologies in the 1990s, the fMRI, PET, and the SPECT gave researchers empirical evidence of neurobiological processes. == Research directions ==

Neuropsychoanalytic relate unconscious (and sometimes conscious) functioning discovered through the techniques of psychoanalysis or experimental psychology to underlying brain processes. Among the ideas explored in recent research are the following: • "Consciousness" is limited (5-9 bits of information) compared to emotional and unconscious thinking based in the limbic system. • Freud's "libido" corresponds to a dopaminergic seeking system • Drives can be understood as a series of basic emotions (prompts to action) anchored in pontine regions, specifically the periaqueductal gray, and projecting to cortex: play; seeking; caring; fear; anger; sadness. Seeking is constantly active; the others seek appropriate consummations (corresponding to Freud's "dynamic" unconscious). • Infantile amnesia (the absence of memory for the first years of life) occurs because the verbal left hemisphere becomes activated later, in the second or third year of life, after the non-verbal right hemisphere. But infants can and do have procedural and emotional memories. • Infants' first-year experiences of attachment and second-year (approximately) experiences of disapproval lay down pathways that regulate emotions and profoundly affect adult personality. • Differences between the sexes are more biologically-based and less environmentally-driven than Freud believed. ==See also==