Toward a Materialist Metapsychology: Major Operating Principles of the Brain Provide a Blueprint for a Fundamentally Psychodynamic Infrastructure

Abstract

In the next century, biology is likely to make deep contributions to the understanding of mental processes by delineating the biological basis for the various unconscious mental processes, for psychic determinism, for the role of unconscious mental processes in psychopathology, and for the therapeutic effect of psychoanalysis. Now, biology will not immediately enlighten these deep mysteries at their core. These issues represent, together with the nature of consciousness, the most difficult problems confronting all of biology—in fact, all of science. Nevertheless, one can begin to outline how biology might at least clarify some central psychoanalytic issues, at least at their margins. —Eric Kandel, Biology and the Future of Psychoanalysis