Dhipthi Brundage

Psychoanalysis continues to mean many things to many people. In parallel, neuroscience holds sway over scientific and popular imagination as a means to unlocking the secrets of human experience. As such, an endeavor to consider neuroscience and psychoanalysis as mutually informative disciplines evokes ambivalence. Forming a
compromise that contains both a psychoanalytic engagement with neuroscience and a neuroscientific engagement with psychoanalysis requires thoughtful study. We must be familiar with both fundamental psychoanalytic principles and the current state of neuroscientific knowledge. With this familiarity, we can methodically consider the extent to which a dialogue formed out of compromise furthers the goal of
understanding the human mind. In this presentation, the unique strengths of psychoanalytic and neuroscientific models of the mind are delineated. We will then consider the ways in which the two fields can reasonably associate as well as the impasses and false couplings that have inevitably emerged.