Freud in the Age of Neuroscience

Image: Alison Mackey / Discover (2014)

As a matter of fact, although Freud is often described as the father of psychoanalysis and credited with discovering the unconscious mind, he didn't invent the term Unbewußte.

It was coined, rather, by the German philosopher Friedrich Schelling and was first used in his System of Transcendental Idealism (1800); a work that some regard as a precursor to Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1899). One of Schelling's readers happened to be the influential poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and it was he who introduced this concept into the English-speaking world.

I think it's important to be reminded of this. Reminded, that is to say, of the metaphysical and romantic origins of Freudian analysis. For whilst it has always liked to present itself as a modern science, this is highly contestable and I don't think it coincidental that many of its concepts have continued to exert their strongest appeal amongst philosophers, literary critics, film theorists, and those working in the arts, such as the Surrealists.    

This is not to belittle the huge cultural impact of psychoanalysis, nor deny that Freud was a true founder of discursivity, to use Foucault's phrase, establishing an almost infinite number of new ways to think and speak the self, the non-self, and other. But, psychoanalysis isn't - and never has been - a legitimate science.

For one thing - as Karl Popper pointed out - its theories have either not been tested or are unable to be tested and so can neither be verified nor shown to be false. Other well known figures, including the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker and evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould, have also criticised psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience. The theoretical physicist Richard Feynman even went so far as to dismiss practitioners of psychoanalysis as witch doctors.              

And then there are eliminative materialists, such as Paul and Patricia Churchland, who deny the mental states and structures that those subscribing to Viennese folk psychology accept as realities. For them, there are brains and we should stick to talking about brain activity and neural networks when putting forward any theory of  mind. Thus, there is no unconscious that we can locate and which is home to all kinds of horrors and oedipal desires (let's not even mention mythological archetypes).       

I have to admit, I'm certainly sympathetic to this way of thinking and - push comes to shove - I can't help seeing recent developments in neuroscience as fatal to psychoanalysis; making it look not just obsolete and irrelevant, but, simply, wrong - and at times laughably so (I'm thinking of Freud's ideas concerning psychosexual development, for example).

Finally, be it noted that Freud's notion of psychic determinism - which posits that any and all mental processes have significance (even those things that seem arbitrary or banal) - also appears to be a lot of phooey. For research has shown that a large amount of what goes on in the brain can be regarded as ephemeral cognition and perceptual junk. And this includes our precious dreams - described by Allan Hobson as randomised imagery that has nothing to do with unconscious desires or dramatised wish-fulfilment.*

So where now and what next for psychoanalysis? Well, it seems that in order to survive in this age of neuroscience it is having to adapt and evolve into a hybrid discipline known as neuropsychoanalysis.

Adherents to this new movement - led by the South African neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms - fully support modern brain research, but, on the other hand, they're appalled by eliminativism and argue that the mind and the subjective laws that determine mental life are real and thus deserve be taken seriously.

It seems to me, however, that they mostly want to rehabilitate their master's name; thus their constant reminding us of the fact that the young Freud was a qualified medical doctor who spent many years working in the area of natural science as a neuropathologist. For Solms et al, it seems that no matter how much he got wrong, Freud remains worthy of respect - and not just in the humanities and social science departments.   

*Interestingly, this was also D. H. Lawrence's position in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922), where he writes that most dreams are purely insignificant; just "heterogeneous odds and ends of images swept together accidentally". It is, says Lawrence, "beneath our dignity to attach any real importance to them". Indeed, to imagine them loaded with meaning is simply a sign of our narcissism. Readers interested in the chapter on 'Sleep and Dreams' can read it free online thanks to Project Gutenberg by clicking here. 

This post grew out of discussion with Dr Simon Solomon to whom I am grateful.