A contribution from psychoanalysis and neuroscience to a non-reductionist approach in economics

Abstract

What connections can be identified between economics, psychoanalysis and neuroscience and why make them? These are different disciplines and it is unusual to approach them together. The scientific paradigm of complexity includes and broadens the positivist paradigm and invites us to learn to think in terms of relationships and processes, and therefore in interdisciplinary terms. Specifically, it has been noted that the study of economics tends to be independent of a precise knowledge of human operations, of what actually determines effective choices and behaviours. In this sense, both psychoanalysis – understood as a discipline that leads the human sciences to the need to equip themselves in order to also consider the socalled unconscious aspects – and neurosciences – for the study of the neurophysiological correlates of the mind – can help build knowledge based on a complex systemic view of economic processes and their peculiarities. From this perspective, the group analysis – as also applying the unconscious conceptualisation to the study of the groups and to the groups clinic –can constitute a theoretical-experiential laboratory for the analysis and verification of hypotheses consistent with complex objectives, in the setting of survey, research and practice in the scientific, political and social fields.