PSYCHOANALYSIS, NEUROSCIENCE, AND THE UNCONSCIOUS SELF

Abstract

It is appropriate that psychoanalysts should be honoring Eric Kandel, for there is a direct link between Freud’s (1895) Project for a Scientific Psychology and Kandel’s achievement. Freud (1895) anticipated the discovery of the synapse that he termed a contact barrier. He further suggested that such contact barriers might be altered permanently after a single excitation and that this process might explain memory. In a larger sense, his belief that mental processes were “in themselves unconscious” (Freud, 1915, p. 171) anticipated what has become a fundamental assumption of neuroscience. Kandel actualized what for Freud was only a thought experiment. Kandel discovered the molecular processes that occur at the synapse of the giant marine snail Aplysia. He described the molecular biology of long-term memory, confirming Freud’s belief that its explanation can be found at the synapse. However, where Freud (1895) attributed the quality of memory to different classes (permeable and impermeable) of neurons (p.302), Kandel identified the specific molecules. For a journalist’s overview of Kandel’s achievement, see Halpern (2008). Freud would later dismiss the Project as being of little value. He wrote to Fleiss, “I can no longer understand the state of mind in which I hatched out the Psychology” (Editor’s introduction, Freud, 1895, p. 285). The Project would have been lost had it not been for the efforts of Princess Marie Bonaparte, who bought the Project, along with Freud’s letters to Fleiss, from a Berlin bookseller (Gay, 1988). I suspect Freud rejected the Project when he realized that neural events were not isomorphic with psychological events. In other words, he was confronted with what philosophers