What is neuropsychoanalysis?
A short introduction to the discipline that studies the mind and the brain together — its central idea, where it came from, and why it matters for understanding and treating the human being.
Mind and Brain – Two Perspectives on an Interconnected System
Neuropsychoanalysis approaches mental experience and neural processes as two perspectives on an interconnected system. A central epistemological foundation of Mark Solms' neuropsychoanalytic approach is dual-aspect monism: mental and physical processes are not understood as two independent entities, but as different perspectives on the same underlying processes (Solms, 2021).
From the outside, we investigate these processes as physical and neural events; from the inside, we experience them as subjective mental life. This position allows psychoanalysis and neuroscience to investigate the same domain from different but complementary perspectives.
Neuropsychoanalysis therefore places subjective experience, and particularly affect – the fundamental capacity to feel – at the centre of its inquiry. It asks how subjective experience relates to brain function and what this relationship can contribute to our understanding of the human mind.
Reference: Solms, M. (2021). The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
From Freud's unfinished project to a science of feeling
The ambition is not new. In 1895 Freud drafted a "Project for a Scientific Psychology," an attempt to ground the mind in the biology of the brain.
He abandoned it — the neuroscience of his day could not carry the weight — and turned instead to the purely psychological method that became psychoanalysis. The biological question was left open, but never withdrawn.
A century later, the tools had caught up. Around the turn of the millennium a group of clinicians and researchers — with the neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms among its central figures — revived Freud's original ambition with the resources of modern brain science. The term "neuropsychoanalysis" was coined, the journal Neuropsychoanalysis was founded in 1999, and an international society formed to hold the two disciplines in sustained dialogue.
The unconscious is not only a store of repressed thoughts. At its root it is affective — a matter of feeling before it is a matter of ideas.
Three Theoretical Foundations
Jaak Panksepp's work in affective neuroscience provides an important empirical foundation for neuropsychoanalysis. Drawing on comparative neurobiological research, Panksepp described evolutionarily ancient, subcortically organised affective systems that mediate fundamental emotional and motivational processes across mammalian species. His research made a major contribution to the neuroscientific investigation of primary affect and its role in behaviour and subjective experience.
Karl Friston's Free Energy Principle provides a formal theoretical framework for describing self-organising biological systems. Applied to brain function, this framework characterises perception and action as inferential processes through which organisms continuously generate and update models of the causes of their sensory states. Predictive-processing approaches build on these principles to investigate how predictions, prediction errors, and their precision weighting contribute to the organisation of perception, learning, and action.
Mark Solms integrates insights from psychoanalysis, neuropsychology, affective neuroscience, and contemporary theoretical neuroscience within a neuropsychoanalytic model of the human mind. Central to his work is the proposal that the foundational forms of consciousness are affective in nature and closely related to the regulation of organismic needs. Drawing additionally on the Free Energy Principle and predictive-processing approaches, Solms develops a theoretical framework in which psychoanalytic concepts can be related to contemporary models of affect, consciousness, learning, and brain function.
Connecting Neuroscience and Psychoanalytic Practice
For clinical practice, this connection is more than a theoretical question. If emotions are grounded in biologically based systems and their regulation plays an important role in mental experience and psychological suffering, neuroscientific findings can complement and refine the psychoanalytic understanding of the individual – not replace it.
Neuropsychoanalysis investigates how findings concerning affect, consciousness, and brain function can contribute to a more differentiated understanding of mental processes and their treatment, while retaining the importance of subjective experience, individual biography, and unconscious processes.
At the same time, this relationship works in both directions: clinical observations can generate new questions for empirical and neuroscientific research. Phenomena such as emotion, dreams, unconscious processes, and the experience of the self, which can be explored directly within psychoanalytic treatment, may thereby contribute to the development and testing of models of the human mind.
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