Widening neuropsychoanalysis: Georg Northoff’s contribution to the dialogue between psychoanalysis and neuroscience

Abstract

The possibility of a dialogue between psychoanalysis and neuroscience though raising mutual wariness and rebuttals, has been more and more pursued in the recent years, in particular, through the creation of a linkage-discipline, which is, neuropsychoanalysis. The encounter between these two disciplines, however, is hindered by a series of episthemological and methodological issues. In this paper, the German psychiatrist and neurophilosopher, Georg Northoff’s proposal to overcome these risks within a new widened psychoanalytic framework is introduced. Northoff’s episthemological assumption urges to a passage from a third-person neuroscience to an experimental perspective able to account for the first-person phenomena traditionally dealt with by psychoanalysis. Specifically, Northoff emphasizes how the analyses of temporal profiles of neural activation of the brain the “resting state” and in the presence of an external stimulus allows to investigate at a neuro-scientific level the self, a central construct for psychoanalytic and psychopathological thinking.