Neuropsychoanalysis

Neuropsychoanalysis (previously neuro-psychoanalysis) is a movement within neuroscience and psychoanalysis to combine the insights of both disciplines for a better understanding of mind and brain.

Neuropsychoanalysis fits under the more general heading of neuropsychology: relating biological brain to psychological functions and behavior. Neuropsychoanalysis further seeks to remedy classical neurology's exclusion of the subjective mind.

Neuropsychology, like classical neurology, aims to be entirely objective, and its great power, its advances, come from just this. But a living creature, and especially a human being is first and last active—a subject, not an object. It is precisely the subject, the living "I," which is being excluded....What we need now, and need for the future, is a neurology of self, of identity.

Subjective mind, that is, sensations and thoughts and feelings and consciousness, seems a completely different thing from the cellular matter that gives rise to mind, so much so that Descartes concluded they were two entirely different kinds of stuff, mind and brain. Accordingly, he invented the "dualism" of the mind, the mind-body dichotomy. Body is one kind of thing, and mind (or spirit or soul) is another. But since this second kind of stuff does not lend itself to scientific inquiry, most of today's psychologists and neuroscientists have rejected Cartesian dualism.

They have had difficulty finding an alternative, however. The opposite position, monism, says there is only one kind of stuff, brain, and the sensations like the red of a tomato simply represent the pattern of activation of certain brain cells. Many people find this simple monism unsatisfactory, though, because it does not really deal with the fact that the red of a tomato and a pattern of activation in region V4 of the visual system seem so very different. Bridging that difference is what neuroscience calls "the hard problem."

Neuropsychoanalysis meets this challenge via dual-aspect monism, sometimes referred to as perspectivism. That is, we are monistic. Our brains, including mind, are made of one kind of stuff, cells, but we perceive this stuff in two different ways.

One is the neuroscientists' "objective" way. They dissect the brain with scalpel and microscope or look at it with brain scans and then trace neurochemical pathways. Neurology observes "mind" from outside, that is, by means of the neurological examination: questionnaires, the Boston Naming test or Wisconsin Sorting, bisecting lines, acting out how you use a screwdriver, and so on. Neurologists can compare the changes in psychological function that the neurological examination shows with the associated changes in the brain, either post mortem or by means of modern imaging technology.

...
Wikipedia