ABSTRACT After a definition of what the psychoanalysts used to call “hysteria,” then conversion disorder, Mark Solms shows us two central aspects that place functional neurological disorder at the center of interest for neuropsychoanalysis: (1) conversion disorder represents the inverse of the hard problem of consciousness. The hard problem of consciousness asks how the organic processes...
ABSTRACT The alignment of neuroscientific research with psychoanalytic theory and practice has led researchers in the emerging field of neuropsychoanalysis to scrutinize their metaphysical assumptions with respect to the relationship between mind and matter. The position which has achieved prevalence is dual-aspect monism. However, this trend is naïve to the fact that no consensus has been...
As psychiatry weighs a move from a categorical to a dimensionally-based classification system, clinical research and treatment paradigms may shift towards identifying which dimensions of mental health can improve treatment outcomes across a broad range of diagnostic categories. Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, which is currently in clinical trials for a wide range of conditions from PTSD to...
ABSTRACT A young man who was destroying his life with alcohol had a remarkable, unexpected change in perspective after drinking Robitussin in desperation. His experience had the hallmarks of a state of ego dissolution commonly seen with psychedelic drugs. He felt he could see himself “objectively, from a third-party perspective.” After this psychedelic experience, he stopped drinking. I apply...
ABSTRACT Free association is still widely accepted as a fundamental component of psychoanalysis. However, despite notable advances in cognitive science, only a limited number of studies of free association by means of neurological methods exist. This review surveys a representative sample of neuroimaging studies on free association available to this date. Neuroimaging findings on free...
ABSTRACT This paper is a contribution to a theory of duration and subjective time in dream and waking consciousness. According to microgenetic theory, an act of thought begins, Wittgenstein wrote, and psychoanalysts would agree, as would I, with instinct as the animal inheritance traverses the evolutionary core of the brain, the drives arousing acquired experience and knowledge. These strands...
New research in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy merits a reexamination of the neurobiology and phenomenology of psychedelic states. First person accounts of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy are used to re-conceptualize the ego boundary as a defense mechanism which regulates the significance that objects hold for the self. Therapeutic action is attributed to ego dissolution, which enables...
The Anna Karenina theory says: all conscious states are alike; each unconscious state is unconscious in its own way. This paper argues that many components have to function properly to produce consciousness, but failure in any one of many different ones can yield an unconscious state in different ways. In that sense the Anna Karenina theory is true. But in another respect it is false: kinds of...
The brain has many deeply unconscious neural processes, but the realm of phenomenal consciousness (qualia) rather than “awareness” is the critical issue whether there is nothing relevant in mind while so-called “dynamically unconscious” processes are operating in the brain. Concepts such as “conscious awareness” are one step above phenomenal experiences and can easily lead to confusions about...
Two recent developments that are of import to discovering the brain basis of the unconscious are discussed: First, the development of optogenetics, allowing the astute neuroscientist to causally intervene in a specified neuronal population in a very specific manner in behaving experimental animals. Second, the development of an information-based account of consciousness—Tononi’s integrated...
This paper reviews scientific literature on four subjective states: the dream state, the dreamy state of temporal lobe epilepsy and temporal lobe stimulation, the acute psychotic state, and the psychedelic state. Evidence is cited showing that underlying the emergence of dreamlike phenomena in all four states is the occurrence of high-voltage bursts of theta and slow-wave activity (2–8 Hz) in...