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utilization of ‘normal’ communicative projective identifications” (Bolognini, 2016, p.110).
IV. UNCONSCIOUS AND INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
IV. A. Unconscious in Neuroscience
“ Research has given irrefutable proof that mental activity is bound up with the function of the brain as it is with no other organ. (. . .) There is a hiatus here which at present cannot be filled ” (Freud, 1915c, p. 174).
Sixty-five years after Freud’s publication of “The Unconscious”, in which Freud named two pillars of psychoanalysis: the assumption of an unconscious mental life and the existence of two principles of mental functioning, the primary and secondary process, psychoanalyst, psychologist and neuroscientist Howard Shevrin published a synthesis of all subliminal research in which he argued that the unconscious was a necessary assumption of all psychology (Shevrin and Dickman, 1980). First attempts within the experimental cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience were within the narrow confines of perception. In the intervening years there has been an avalanche of research across many areas – perception, memory, emotions, motivation, prejudice, addiction, mood and anxiety disorders, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism, neglect – in which (mostly descriptive) unconscious/nonconscious factors have been identified. It was the ensuing explosion in basic and applied neuroscientific research, especially in North America and in Europe, with the emergence of subspecialties of dynamic neuropsychology (Luria, 1966; 1973; Kaplan-Solms and Solms, 2000), developmental dynamic neuroscience (Balbernie, 2001; Schore, 2003; Siegel, 1999, 2007), affective neuroscience (Panksepp, 1999; Johnson, 2006), and dynamic-cognitive neuroscience (Shevrin, 1994; 1999; Villa, Brakel, Shevrin, Bazan, 2008), which led to the foundation of an interdisciplinary field of Neuropsychoanalysis, the objective of which was “to study the dynamic nature of the mind and to identify the neural organization of its unconscious substructure” (Solms & Turnbull, 2011, p. 135). An important voice of support for multi- disciplinary research into dynamic unconscious phenomena came also from the Nobel Prize Laureate for physiology of memory, Eric Kandel (1998, 1999). Kandel and Shevrin concurred that in the neurosciences the ‘dynamic unconscious’ involving conflict over sexual and aggressive impulses was mostly not under study. What had led to considerable conceptual confusion between cognitively oriented neuroscientists and psychoanalysts was that what most neuroscientists called ‘unconscious’ were preconscious processes, only latently and descriptively unconscious in psychoanalytic terminology. There were also other definitional discrepancies, e.g. use of the words ‘drive’, ‘instinct’, ‘conflict’, etc., and methodological
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