Northoff Georg
Mind, Brain Imaging and Neuroethics Research Unit, University of Ottawa Institute of Mental Health Research, Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre Ottawa, ON, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2012 Apr 2;3:71. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00071. eCollection 2012.
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, was initially a neuroscientist but abandoned neuroscience completely after he made a last attempt to link both in his writing, "Project of a Scientific Psychology," in 1895. The reasons for his subsequent disregard of the brain remain unclear though. I here argue that one central reason may be that the approach to the brain during his time was simply not appealing to Freud. More specifically, Freud was interested in revealing the psychological predispositions of psychodynamic processes. However, he was not so much focused on the actual psychological functions themselves which though were the prime focus of the neuroscience at his time and also in current Cognitive Neuroscience. Instead, he probably would have been more interested in the brain's resting state and its constitution of a spatiotemporal structure. I here assume that the resting state activity constitutes a statistically based virtual structure extending and linking the different discrete points in time and space within the brain. That in turn may serve as template, schemata, or grid for all subsequent neural processing during stimulus-induced activity. As such the resting state' spatiotemporal structure may serve as the neural predisposition of what Freud described as "psychological structure." Hence, Freud and also current neuropsychoanalysis may want to focus more on neural predispositions, the necessary non-sufficient conditions, rather than the neural correlates, i.e., sufficient, conditions of psychodynamic processes.
精神分析学的创始人西格蒙德·弗洛伊德最初是一名神经科学家,但在1895年他最后一次试图在其著作《科学心理学大纲》中将两者联系起来之后,便彻底放弃了神经科学。不过,他后来不再关注大脑的原因仍不明确。我在此认为,一个主要原因可能是他那个时代研究大脑的方法对弗洛伊德根本没有吸引力。更具体地说,弗洛伊德感兴趣的是揭示心理动力过程的心理倾向。然而,他并没有过多关注实际的心理功能本身,而这在他那个时代以及当前的认知神经科学中都是神经科学的主要关注点。相反,他可能会对大脑的静息状态及其时空结构的构成更感兴趣。我在此假定,静息状态活动构成了一种基于统计学的虚拟结构,它扩展并连接大脑内不同的离散时空点。反过来,这可能会作为模板、图式或网格,用于刺激诱发活动期间所有后续的神经处理。因此,静息状态的时空结构可能充当了弗洛伊德所描述的“心理结构”的神经倾向。因此,弗洛伊德以及当前的神经精神分析可能想要更多地关注神经倾向,即必要的非充分条件,而不是神经关联,即心理动力过程的充分条件。