Two Approaches to the Science of the Mind

Two Approaches to the Science of the Mind

The mental life or real human beings is the traditional subject matter of psychoanalysis. We have said that it has recently become a legitimate subject matter for neuroscience too. In other words, we now have two disciplines (perhaps better described as two loose groups of disciplines) studying the same thing. But they approach this shared subject matter from completely different points of view.

The “subjective” approach to mental science (psychoanalysis) split off from the “objective” approach (the neurosciences) just over a hundred years ago. Freud's Studies on Hysteria (1895) or his The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) provide useful milestones in this divergence. Since then, each approach has developed along its own path. The original reasons for the split were complex. Mainly it was a matter of expedience. It was not possible to learn anything useful about the mind – the real mind – using the neuroscientific methods that were available at that time. Neuroscience could not (at that time) penetrate the mysteries of personality, motivation, emotion – the things that make us who we are – and it therefore seemed to Sigmund Freud that the most useful way to study, understand, and treat the disorders of the human subject was from a purely psychological perspective.

We do not wish to be excessively optimistic, but the reason that a book such as this one can be written today is because that situation has changed. We have powerful new methods and technologies in neuroscience that are yielding previously undreamed-of knowledge about the physiological underpinnings of the “inner world.” In short, neuroscience has caught up with – many would say overtaken – psychoanalysis as a science of the human subject, and today it is possible to learn some very important and valuable things about inner experience by studying the physical organ that was damaged.

Attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, tic disorders, panic attacks, an so on are very complicated topics. Photo by Elena.

Reconciling the two approaches

It is essential for us to find some way of bridging this historical divide, and perhaps healing the rift, between these two different approaches to mental science. Neuroscientists – who are grappling with the complexities of human subjectivity for the first time – have much to learn from a century of psychoanalytic inquiry. Psychotherapists, for their part, have an opportunity to benefit from the enormous empirical advances in the neurosciences and, as a result, to make progress in their own disciplines, where scientific progress has become frustratingly slow. Psychoanalysis today is associated with bitter rivalry between opposing camps that apparently have no valid means of deciding between their conflicting standpoints on various theoretical matters. One solution might be to find links links between the disputed theoretical concepts of psychoanalysis and those of the neurosciences.

This seems to be an appropriate way to proceed, but it is quite difficult to put into effect. There are a number of things that have to be done for us to be able to bridge the gulf that separates these two approaches. Each side has (for various reasons) regarded the other with suspicion and disdain for over a hundred years. Typically, neuroscientists have regarded psychoanalysis and related disciplines as “unscientific” (how can a science of subjectivity be objective?” Psychotherapists, for their part, have regarded the neurosciences (including biological psychiatry) as symplistic, to the extent of excluding the psyche. These attitudes have developed for good reasons, and they will not be overcome easily or quickly.

In addition, there are serious scientific problems to grapple with. How can we link these disciplines in a methodologically valid way? To take a concrete question, how do we set about identifying the neurological basis of something like, say, “repression”? How does one go about testing experimentally, from the neurobiological point of view, whether such a thing as repression even exists? Repression – if it exists – is a complicated, elusive, fleeting phenomenon. It is far from easy to capture such things in physiological terms.

If such problems are to be overcome effectively, a good deal of the effort required would have to be put in by members of both of the approaches working together. To do this, we would have to have interdisciplinary dialogues and research about topics of common interest. We would need to collaborate  on clinical material and work together on the same cases, or on examples of the same disorders, to learn from each other's approaches. But first of all, before we can realistically combine them, we need to learn about each other's different perspectives.

The Brain and the Inner World, Introduction to Basic Concepts. Mark Solms, Oliver Turnbull.

To what extent are the trajectories of our lives predetermined by our genes? Photo by Elena.