Standing on the shoulders of giants: Integrating affective and computational neuroscience with psychoanalytic theory

Abstract

This blockbuster issue of Neuropsychoanalysis is packed with examples of the theoretical generativity of neuropsychoanalysis, which may have far-reaching clinical consequences. A series of pieces in this issue provide stimulating food for thought, and fertile ground for new work. Our journal has a tradition of publishing Target Articles that stimulate the kind of interdisciplinary dialogue that is necessary for developing neuropsychoanalysis. Typically, an experienced researcher, clinician, or theoretician addresses a body of work, or specific clinical or research question, with great depth and breadth. The Target Article is then responded to by a group of expert commentators, followed by a response from the author. See, for example, the masterful Target Articles on the social origins of interoceptive inference by Katerina Fotopoulou and Manos Tsakiris (2017), an integrative model of autism spectrum disorder by William Singletary (2015), and evolutionary and developmental biology by Myron Hofer (2014), to name but a few examples. In this issue, we have a variation on the typical format, in the Target Article by Mark Solms entitled “New Project for a Scientific Psychology: General Scheme.” In this piece, Solms produces something new by revising, on a line-by-line basis, Sigmund Freud’s “Project for a Scientific Psychology: General Scheme” (1895), which Solms calls the “ur-text” of neuropsychoanalysis. In Freud’s original piece, which remained unpublished during his lifetime, Freud began to sketch an over-arching model of the brain and mind, but could not pursue it to completion, due to the nascent or nonexistent technologies in neuroscience. Solms takes developments in affective and computation neuroscience – especially ideas from Jaak Panksepp and Karl Friston – to flesh out and update Freud’s model, producing a landmark work that we believe will be a major contribution to psychoanalytic theory and history. To provide some social and scientific context, our co-editor Richard Kessler offers a short review of the extraordinary and complex history of Freud’s original seminal work, which appears in a separate section in this editorial, below. We also invite readers to see the actual deletions and additions that Solms made in Freud’s original, found in the Supplemental Material in the online version (visit https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/ suppl/10.1080/15294145.2020.1833361). Not surprisingly, fourteen commentators found in Solms’ remarkable revision a variety of jumping-off points for their Commentaries. Their expertise ranges from computational neuroscience and physics, neurobiology, art and literature, philosophy, psychology, and psychoanalysis. From these points, they provide a rich array of confirmations, disagreements, elaborations, and critiques. We highly recommend these commentaries from Cristina Alberini, Simon Boag, Erkki Brändas and Roman Poznanski, Daniel Dennett, George Ellis, Karl Friston, Robert GalatzerLevy, Siri Hustvedt, Luba Kessler and Richard Kessler, Fritz Lackinger, Christoph Mathys, Tobias Nolte, Lois Oppenheim, and Jean-Pierre de la Porte. Collectively, they bring to bear the heterogeneity of backgrounds that this dense and suggestive piece requires, stimulating further thinking. Readers will also find that Mark Solms’ Response to these commentaries is incredibly useful reading. The questions and critiques raised by the commentators provides Solms with the opportunity to clarify and elaborate, in a very readable way, on some of the central ideas in the New Project. Like Solms’ New Project, a piece by Oliver Turnbull and Annalena Bär, in our Original Articles section, also engages deeply with affective neuroscience. Neuropsychoanalysis has long been looking at the emotional life of non-human species as the ultimate source for understanding the human soul and its affective life. This has led, among other things, to the adoption of the Pankseppian emotional systems. Panksepp formulated and based his theory of seven affective systems on multiple animal observations and animal studies, and regarded these systems as the blueprint and scaffolding for human emotions and behavior. This understanding entails a somewhat hidden assumption that is usually not articulated explicitly: That non-humans have a mind of their own. In an extensive review and opinion paper, Turnbull and Bär take up the mantle and address the challenge of looking at animal minds, in a piece entitled “Animal Minds: The case for emotion, based on neuroscience.” They first define a “mind” as an amalgam of consciousness, agency, intelligence, and emotions. They then bring the evidence for the emotional circuitry in vertebrates, demonstrating the similarities between humans and nonhumans. They follow this by reviewing animal intelligence. They argue that although some individual animals can