I think that the task of philosophy is not to provide answers, but to show how the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem.
Slavoj Žižek (in Strom Života, 2011)
The Neuropsychoanalysis Debate: Terminable or Interminable? Since the inception of neuropsychoanalysis (NPSA), this hybrid discipline has faced ongoing critique and debate. Those “for” NPSA emphasize that mind and brain reflect the same piece of nature. Insights from one can enrich the other (Yovell et al., 2015). Those “against” NPSA emphasize that neuroscientific explanation is irrelevant to psychoanalytic practice and theory. At their most generous, these critics stress that a clear method for toggling between subjective meaning and objective mechanism has not yet been put forward (Clarke, 2018). At their most severe, these critics warn that reference to neurobiology does violence to the theoretical and clinical fabric of psychoanalysis (Blass & Carmeli, 2007a; Ferraro, 2022). This debate crystallized with Rachel Blass and Zvi Carmeli’s (2007a) seminal critique in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Various defenses followed (Dall’Aglio, 2021c; Johnson, 2012; Pugh, 2012; Sandberg, 2016; Yovell et al., 2015), as did additional criticisms (Blass & Carmeli, 2015; Clarke, 2018; Galgut, 2021; Talvitie & Ihanus 2011). More recently, specifically Lacanian critiques have also been put forward (Ferraro, 2022), including the 2019 PIPOL9 Congress titled “The unconscious and the brain: Nothing in common” (Vanderveken, 2018). Regarding this interminable series, I find myself, surprisingly, in agreement with Blass and Carmeli’s (2007b, 2016) position that none of the neuropsychoanalytic defenses have satisfyingly rebuked their central argument: how precisely can neuroscience, an objective system of mechanistic understanding, contribute to psychoanalytic subjective meaning? In other words, how does one validly shift between two radically different epistemological systems? In my view, NPSA defendants have sufficiently argued for non-reductionistic neuroscientific inspiration. Yet, the necessary relevance of neuroscience remains unclear. Here, I will not attempt to solve this epistemological issue or vindicate NPSA from these criticisms. Rather, I contend that this NPSA debate rests upon an unproblematized ontological assumption shared by defendants and critics alike. The key ontological question, thus far unraised, is: what must the nature of material substance be to give rise to two irreducible epistemologies like neuroscience and psychoanalysis? I will approach this question via the frameworks of Transcendental Materialism (Johnston, 2019) and Lacanian NPSA (Dall’Aglio, forthcoming). I first describe the conceptualization of natural ontology within a Transcendental Materialist perspective. I then discuss how current debates over NPSA are limited to epistemology. From a Lacanian and Transcendental Materialist perspective, these epistemological issues arise, in part, from unproblematized ontological assumptions. A focus on an antagonistic material ontology rooted in a radical reconceptualization of nature (detectable within epistemologies at points of epistemological limits) might open novel points for a bridge between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. A Weak Nature Alone: Transcendental Materialism Adrian Johnston (2019) develops his philosophical system of Transcendental Materialism (TM) via an interrogation of continental philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and natural sciences. Simply put, TM seeks a thoroughly materialist (i.e., anti-idealist) philosophy that sustains a non-reductive (transcendental) theory of subjectivity. As anti-idealist, TM rejects explanations of subjectivity that ultimately rely on non-physical or non-naturalist origins. In psychoanalysis, Lacan’s (1973/1978) prohibition on theorizing the phylogenetic (i.e., natural) origins of language (as constitutive of the psychoanalytic subject) is one glaring example. Likewise, assertions of a fundamentally ungraspable dimension (e.g., the real) completely segregated from any physical or natural materiality ultimately presuppose a mythically given negativity. For Johnston, any materialism that rejects naturalism is insufficiently materialist and risks (re)introducing quasi-spiritual notions. Simultaneously, TM rejects reductive naturalist accounts that seek to fully explain (transcendental) subjectivity by reference to natural laws. But, if TM refuses non-physical and non-natural bases, how does TM not reduce the subject to physical or natural explanation? Johnston points out that, in the move of grounding subjectivity in natural-material ontology, our understanding of nature must itself be radically changed. Hence his invocation of Hegel’s substance also as subject. The substance that is also subject is a very strange substance that differs from natural substance as typically understood. Capital-N Nature Johnston (2019) places natural substance as typically understood under the heading of capital-N Nature (in tune with a non-barred big Other of Lacanian theory). This Nature is a grand totality governed by universal laws. In other words, capital-N Nature is supposed to ultimately be a seamless, unified system from sub-atomic, to chemical, to biological, to human, to macrocosmic astrophysical levels. Clear mathematical formulae exist (or will be discovered) that can describe all of Nature as system of determinate laws. In this view of Nature, laws (e.g., Newtonian laws of physics, thermodynamic laws, behavioral reinforcement laws, etc.) are fully determinate across all spatiotemporal timescales. These laws govern and predict, in a seamless fashion, the behavior of physical particles small and large. Despite increasing complexity in humans and our social worlds, social and mental dynamics can ultimately be reduced to and explained by a set of determinant laws of Nature. Capital-N Nature would, therefore, be a Nature free from contradiction. Given that Johnston focuses heavily on neurobiology, let us consider the human brain. Paul MacLean (1990) put forward the highly influential “triune brain theory.” The triune brain theory proposes an evolutionary sedimentation of (1) an ancient, reptilian brainstem, (2) a recent, mammalian limbic system, and (3) a more human-specific expanded neocortex. Although this view of the brain has been criticized, it remains highly influential—including in Jaak Panksepp’s (1998) affective neuroscience, a central pillar in contemporary NPSA. Critics argue that the triune brain theory inappropriately characterizes different brain layers as having “not evolved” (Cesario et al., 2020) and, more importantly, that it ignores how the brain cooperates in a unified fashion toward homeostasis (Steffen et al., 2022). Indeed, contemporary computational models of the brain propose that its entire functioning can be united under the aim to minimize entropy (Friston, 2010; see also below). In a sense, these approaches cast the brain as a capital-B Brain: a unified organ whose multiple components cooperate in a harmonious fashion to maintain homeostasis. Such a Brain is seamless and free from contradiction or structural conflict. That is, conflict would be understood in terms of a pathological deviation from “normal” functioning. Here, computational conceptions of psychiatric and neurological disorders speak of “aberrant belief updating” or “false inference” (Friston, 2023; Owens et al., 2018; Parr et al., 2018). Ontological Antagonism: Contingency and Emergence in Weak Nature For TM, in contrast, material substance is not free of contradiction. Instead, it is shot through with cracks, short-circuits, and negativities that disrupt any straightforward causal chain. TM would privilege the structural conflict between different brain layers in MacLean’s triune model. Rather than a single unified organ, the brain is a collection of systems: a hodge-podge, kludge-like organ (Linden, 2008). Different brain systems evolved under different evolutionary pressures in a punctuated (i.e., non-linear) fashion (Gould & Eldridge, 1972). Such systems follow different priorities and possess different means of dealing with information (e.g., exteroception versus automatized habit learning). This is not to say that the brain does not work toward homeostasis. Rather, this collection of systems is forced to cooperate for the survival of the organism (Damasio, 2010). As a result, systems with very different agendas conflict and produce rifts as a structural feature of the brain itself. This is lens of the brain as itself antagonistic. TM’s view of neuroscience privileges an epistemology that recognizes its own internal limits. It is a view of nature as “weak nature”—a nature of “weak laws” that are not fully determinate (in contrast to capital-N Nature). To be clear, TM does not deny the existence of natural laws, like the evolutionary imperative to survive and reproduce. Rather, these laws are “weak” in the sense of not being able to fully govern and determine evolutionary processes. This leaves room for contingency within nature. Simply recognizing the number of heritable diseases suffices to demonstrate how “survive and reproduce” is a low bar, far from inoculating biological organisms from cracks and failings. For an organ as complex as the brain, there is no reason to believe that all its systems would exist in harmonious coordination. Neuroplasticity—the brain’s capacity to change its connections based on experience—is another example of the “weakness” (or incompleteness) of the human brain. As Ansermet and Magistretti (2007) elegantly put it, the brain is genetically determined to not be genetically determined. Changes to neural structure and connection are not secondary to pre-determined brain organization. Environmental experience is itself necessary for brain development—including processes as “simple” as vision (Hooks & Chen, 2007) and systems as complex as emotion (Solms & Turnbull, 2002). In fact, most (especially neocortical) cognitive systems are heavily dependent on environmental experience to develop (Ellis & Solms, 2018). In a sense, the brain cannot be reduced to itself. Neuroscientific epistemology hits a limit and requires an invocation of concepts beyond the brain. Psychoanalysis likewise involves an epistemology that recognizes and includes its own conceptual limits. One might consider the navel of the dream (Freud, 1900), the primal repressed (Freud, 1915b), or the drive as frontier (Freud, 1915a; Sandberg, 2019b). These domains are strictly external to capture in representation: the navel of the dream remains beyond interpretation; the primal repressed is impossible to render conscious; the irremovable drive source/pressure sustains libidinal economy. “Weak nature” implies a notion of substance—of ontology—that is open (i.e., not fully determined—or, determined to not be fully determined). With increasing complexity, substance itself becomes riddled with contradictory or oppositional features that are nevertheless riveted together. For Johnston, this opens a space of contingency where emergence can occur. The openness of nature—especially in the human brain (Linden, 2008) —allows points of contingency to birth novel phenomena. Such phenomena are typically considered “more-than-natural” —for example, human subjectivity, social structures, a self-reflective sense of self, language, psychoanalytic symptoms, and so on. In TM, these more-than-natural phenomena emerge solely from natural substance, from weak nature alone. Nevertheless, they are irreducible to explanatory laws at the level of that substance. This is because these more-than-natural phenomena emerge precisely at the point where those laws hit a limit, where they fail to fully determine that substance (Johnston, 2014). Such phenomena may then involve their own systems of (emergent) laws and effect top-down causation on material substance. Consider the notion of an “I,” a “self.” In a Lacanian view (i.e., the mirror stage), the imago of a unified ego lends organization to the child’s physical disarray and physiological prematurity (Lacan, 1975/1991a). This “I” is an abstract notion, made possible from the contradiction of natural substance (here, the child’s pre-maturational helplessness) that opens a non-determinate space (contingency) where something like an ego can take shape. This “sense of self” becomes an organizing feature in the neural sphere (Deacon, 2011). Indeed, Friston (2021) considers the sense of self-as-agent as one of the brain’s higher-order inferences, its best explanation of its own behavior and sensory states. It is a higher-order belief only possible due to the brain’s complexity that makes the question of selfhood possible. Such higher-order beliefs might effect top-down organization on the physical body—such as (sub-personal) beliefs that shape physical symptoms in hysteria (Thá et al., 2021). Importantly, such ideas effecting top-down causality—like language—can emerge from complex organisms without need to invoke non-natural explanations (Friston et al., 2024). Within the remit of emergent selfhood, laws and actions can take shape that diverge from and even override the “weak” homeostatic laws of simpler levels of substance. Suicide is a stark example of homeostasis-defying emergence (Krupnik & Danilova, 2024). The Critique of Neuropsychoanalysis: Epistemological Incompatibility Having discussed the ontology of weak nature in TM, let us now turn to the NPSA debate. Elsewhere (Dall’Aglio, 2020, 2021c), I have reviewed Lacanian and non-Lacanian criticisms of NPSA. Here, I will extract the philosophical bones of these critiques. Blass and Carmeli put their case succinctly:The subject of psychoanalysis is not a clearly defined phenomenon. Its subject, the meanings of thoughts and experiences, are never fully contained by the specific thoughts and experiences which convey them, but rather are determined by an indefinitely broader human context in which these occur. The same thoughts, words, or ideas will have different meanings depending on what preceded them, or what occurred as they were expressed. … If meanings are not defined by any definable experience, then observing the biological, neural correlates of the experience will never capture the subject of psychoanalysis. (Blass & Carmeli, 2007a, p. 35)
Neuroscience retains its purview in the objective realm of the brain. However, in themselves, neuroscientific explanations do not discover anything psychological. First, subjective phenomena are described psychologically (e.g., feelings, thoughts, inner experience). These might then be mapped onto patterns of neural activity, but the meaningfulness of such phenomena remains psychological. Therefore, identifying neurobiological correlates does not enrich psychoanalytic understanding of subjective phenomena—the meaning originated from the psychological sphere. For Blass and Carmeli, because psychoanalysis is concerned with “meanings as mental phenomena—a concern that unites all analytic theories,” neuroscientific correlates cannot contribute to psychoanalysis (Blass & Carmeli, 2007a, p. 20). But here, a Lacanian ear would disagree and make a different critique. From a Lacanian standpoint, psychoanalysis is not fundamentally a hermeneutic discipline (Strosberg, 2022). Of course, there is meaning-making, but this is not the focus of analysis. Lacan (1973/1978) repeatedly insists on attention to the signifier—the materiality of spoken words, their weight, their slips—as opposed to what sense the patient tries to convey. A signifier is a differential element, only defined in relation to other elements. While meaning emerges between signifiers, signifiers themselves are meaningless. Analysis does not end with the production of new meaning. Because meaning is never exhausted, meaning-making is interminable. Instead, Lacan (1973/1978) proposes that analysis seek the isolation of particular signifiers that resonate in speech, a symbolic reduction. These signifiers repeat, structuring the patient’s multiple narratives. The signifier rat in the Rat Man case is exemplary (Bazan, 2011). There is a gradual reduction of meaning in the process of isolating these signifiers and ripping them from their narrative structure (Verhaeghe & Declerq, 2016). By isolating these signifiers, one touches on the meaningless, repetitive enjoyment of the drive (Lacan, 1975/2000). This is not to say that Lacanian theory is unconcerned with “meanings as mental phenomena.” Rather, its ultimate concern is with the limit of meanings, where meaning fails and one encounters the enjoyed repetition of material elements. Paradoxically, these meaningless elements structure the patient’s many psychical meanings. Here, one could modify Blass and Carmeli’s position to a more general epistemological concern—one shared by Lacanian critics of NPSA (Ferraro, 2022; Vanderveken, 2018). Psychoanalysis operates in its own epistemological register (whether concerned with meaning-making or the materiality of signifiers). This does not reject that the mind has a physical substrate. Nevertheless, the neuroscientific study of that substrate operates in a separate epistemological realm. Do Van Gogh’s Paintings Have Brains? Critics of NPSA often invoke a comparison with artwork—specifically Van Gogh—to illustrate this point:Thus, to speak of neuroscience and psychoanalysis as two irreducible perspectives on human experience would be like considering chemistry and art as two irreducible perspectives on the paintings of Van Gogh. Indeed there would be no painting without the chemical components of paint and canvas, but to suggest that these components provide an explanation of the painting that would be valuable for the artist is to deny the value of art and that which can be seen only through an artistic perspective. (Blass & Carmeli, 2007a, p. 36)
Artwork, of course, has a material substrate: paints, oils, canvas, and so on. However, the registers of subjective experience (regarding meaning or not) —such as the quality and sense-making of the aesthetic experience (Galgut, 2021) —makes no necessary chemical or physical reference. Knowing the chemical reactions or properties of light that produce colors does not explain subjective aesthetic experience. Abstraction is no better. Calculating mathematical entropy in Van Gogh’s Starry Night adds no meaningful contribution to aesthetics (Galgut, 2021). Likewise, one might say that knowledge of substrate of The Ambassadors adds nothing to the notion of objet a (Lacan, 1973/1978). These critics do not deny the material substrate of the mind or art—this materiality is simply of a different, irrelevant register from that of the signifier and signified. Clarke (2018) and Galgut (2021) underscore that this is an epistemological issue. Similarly, Ferraro (2022) and Vanderveken (2018) claim that the abstract (topological, symbolic, real) dimensions of the subject simply cannot be grasped by neuroscience. Making bridges to neuroscience reduces the subject to biological mechanisms and cannot capture the “real of jouissance.” Let us consider Clarke’s (2018) critique of Mark Solms’s dual-aspect monism (DAM). Solmsian DAM proposes “ontological sameness: mind and matter are different modalities of consciousness (dual-aspect), but one and the same reality (monism)” (Clarke, 2018, p. 432). Insofar as Solms argues that these aspects must be subject to the same causal laws, Clarke continues, “what is different about the particular character of the object of study (in this case the mental and particularly unconsciously determined experience of an intentional subject) is made both ontologically and epistemologically inconsequential” (p. 433, emphasis in the original). Otherwise put, the uniqueness (or difference) of the subjective, psychoanalytic perspective disappears in Solmsian DAM—thereby losing the essence of psychoanalysis. The Blind Neuropsychoanalysts and the Elephant Clarke (2018) takes up a metaphor commonly invoked in support of NPSA: the blind men and the elephant. In the elephant metaphor, there is one elephant (monistic ontology). Several blind men touch different parts of the elephant: the trunk, the legs, the tail, the ears, and body. For each blind man, the nature of the elephant is inferred based on the part they perceive. For one blind man touching the legs, the elephant is stiff and cylindrical; for another touching the trunk, an elephant is bendable and capable of absorbing and dispersing liquids. Alone, each blind man has an incomplete view of the elephant—if they talk to each other, they reach a more complete understanding. Clarke (2018) discerns several issues with this metaphor, namely that it assumes (1) a common means of data collection (they all gather information through touch) and (2) a common epistemological framework to make sense of all the data. True epistemic difference between objective and subjective lenses is not achieved in the metaphor, so there is no need to define how to shift from one epistemology to another. Moreover, the metaphor does not describe how integration in a common epistemological framework occurs. Clarke synthesizes the issue:While it is true that the “dual-aspect” of a neuropsychoanalytic epistemology should not be misconstructed as an ontological dualism (we can of course look at the same thing from different perspectives), neither should a monistic ontology (the proposition that mind and brain are a single entity) be used to legitimize the merging of different “aspects” or epistemological systems. (p. 442, emphases in the original)
Building on similar epistemological issues, Talvitie and Ihanus (2011) highlight that NPSA must necessarily privilege either psychoanalytic or neuroscientific epistemology. They note that, for Solms, the “brain” is not the fundamental stuff of nature that causes the mind. In Solmsian DAM, mind and brain are two aspects of the same thing-in-nature, a common reality that causes both neural and subjective phenomena. In reference to Freud’s Kantian background, this common reality has the status of das Ding-an-sich, the unknowable thing-in-itself. This creates an epistemological issue. Let us suppose that neuroscience and psychoanalysis—epistemological systems for objective and subjective perspectives, respectively—generate contradictory conclusions regarding this Ding. For example, neuroscience proposes that the brain obeys laws of homeostasis (Friston, 2010); Lacanian psychoanalysis argues that jouissance drives a hole in homeostasis and renders the psychoanalytic subject irreducible to homeostatic laws (Vanderveken, 2018). Because psychoanalysis and neuroscience are incomplete epistemological perspectives, one could claim that the relevant features of the Ding only appear on one epistemological side. This reasoning appears in the argument that the brain knows nothing of jouissance and cannot capture the real (Ferraro, 2022). For Talvitie and Ihanus (2011), because no sound philosophical method for toggling between psychoanalytic and neuroscientific epistemologies has been put forward, integration necessarily risks privileging one discipline (and its metaphysics) over the other. Neuropsychoanalytic Rejoinders: A Threefold Movement of Neuropsychoanalytic Dialogue I have previously proposed a formula for non-reductive neuropsychoanalytic dialogue (Dall’Aglio, 2021c, 2022). In a “threefold movement,” (1) one maps neuroscientific findings psychoanalytically. When mapped in neural space, (2) psychoanalytic concepts can be organized differently, opening new potential relationships among concepts. One then (3) returns to the psychoanalytic sphere to consider what possibilities arise with these novel relationships. Thus, the relevance of neuroscience can be considered within the psychoanalytic sphere, such as its potential to enrich clinical thinking (Sandberg, 2019a). For example, Sandberg (2016) describes working with a patient who was convinced that she suffered a history of childhood abuse and took the position of “victim.” He discloses a moment where reading about neuroscientific memory research (specifically, impairment of declarative memory systems due to early trauma; that is, if she were abused in early childhood, it would be almost impossible for her to remember it declaratively) shifted his attention from relational dynamics around what the patient remembered to a focus on how she tried to remember. Whereas the patient was certain of her abuse, Sandberg had become a container for her split-off uncertainty. Notably, his interpretation of her certainty as a defense made no explicit reference to neuroscience or memory research. One might conceptualize the memory research utilized by Sandberg (2016) as follows. Psychoanalysis theorizes memory processes and the potential for rendering these traces conscious or not, as in the case of infantile amnesia (Freud, 1905). One may map the brain using the psychoanalytic notion of memory traces (first movement). Yet, in the neural sphere, we find different memory systems: episodic, semantic, procedural, emotional, and so on. Some can be declared in words (declarative memories); others cannot (non-declarative memories). Moreover, traumatic experiences appear to impair declarative hippocampal memory and promote non-declarative systems (Yovell et al., 2015). A link thus appears between two psychological phenomena: trauma and non-declarative memory traces (second movement). Thus, one can return to the psychoanalytic sphere and consider what possibilities emerge from this link between trauma and non-declarative memories that cannot be rendered (verbally) conscious (third movement). With these three movements, all psychological phenomena originated from the psychoanalytic sphere—the relationship among these phenomena has been inspired by neuroscience. This threefold movement therefore avoids criticisms of bio-reductionism. No neural explanation is raised, and none need be referenced. In general, neuroscience does not deliver a definite knowledge. It broadens the possibilities of thinking, expanding the analyst’s “metaphor toolkit” (Kessler & Kessler, 2019). Issues with Existing Defenses of Neuropsychoanalysis Perhaps surprisingly, I concede that these rejoinders (including my own) fall short of demonstrating the particular relevance of neuroscience to psychoanalysis. Blass and Carmeli (2016) level this criticism at Sandberg (2016), but it could equally apply to my proposal:The fact that Sandberg’s interpretation was inspired by neuroscience says nothing about the real value of neuroscience to psychoanalysis and, in fact, does not rely on any real research having been carried out. E.g., if the question regarding memory were raised in the book without mentioning neuroscience, or if the results were fabricated it could, in principle, have been just as inspiring, just as consequential. (p. 1156)
My threefold movement grants epistemological priority to psychoanalysis insofar as the conceptualization of phenomena originates and returns there. Neuroscience is a middleman, a space to consider different relationships. At most, I give neuroscience the power of inspiration. An analyst might be equally inspired by mythology or structural linguistics. Thus, the specificity of neuroscience has not been demonstrated—one might be equally uninspired by neuroscience. Epistemological inspiration is a weaker claim than integration. Allow me to be precise. For some, inspiration suffices. It leaves clinical authority to psychoanalysis while also opening engagement with the neurosciences. Such inspiration might prove remarkably productive—as it has for over two decades of advances in NPSA. I believe that non-reductive inspiration is sufficient for further dialogue. The history of psychoanalytic advances is marked by inspiration from beyond the analytic encounter: infant studies (Stern, 2018), linguistics (Lacan, 1981/1993), hermeneutics (Orange, 2011), and so on. Yet, the existing rejoinders fail to address the metaphysical issues for how neuroscience informs (rather than makes inspiring suggestions to) psychoanalysis. For example, Pugh (2012) points to the clinical utility of neuroscientific research that non-declarative implicit memories are laid down in early life, before autobiographical memories. Or, consider Johnson’s (2012) use of “neuroscientific interpretations” (e.g., an explanation of a neurobiological process in therapy) to facilitate further dynamic work. While these examples may be beneficial in clinical practice (Sandberg, 2019a), Talvitie and Ihanus (2012) discern that they lack philosophical reasoning for how such toggling occurs without violence to the metaphysical presuppositions of either discipline. Epistemology or Ontology? I do not claim to resolve the epistemological debates here. Rather, I hope to contribute to this debate by shifting its frame. As Žižek notes, “the way we perceive a problem can be itself part of a problem” (quoted in Strom Života, 2011). Participants of the NPSA debate seem to agree on the existence of a simply existing, monistic ontology—the physical substrate—observed from two perspectives. The entire debate plays out on the epistemological level. The price paid for ignoring a more critical ontology can be seen in Clarke’s (2018) musings on blind men and elephants:As I’ve suggested, the rules governing any dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis must be guided by some epistemological framework or other. Also, if the guiding perspective is scientific it can only result in a creeping imposition of that framework’s epistemological assumptions on psychoanalytic notions of subjectivity, thus contriving to “reduce” objectively what is ontologically irreducible (subjectively lived experience)…It is truer to the realities of how we work and think psychoanalytically to say that neuropsychoanalysis is not looking at the same elephant at all, but rather at two different elephants—a first-person elephant and a third-person elephant—and wondering how it can merge them into one elephant. (p. 434)
Staying within the logic of the metaphor, one can interpret Clarke as suggesting either (1) ontology is irrelevant, as it has disappeared from the picture of two epistemological elephants, or (2) ontological dualism in the form of two elephants. Neither is philosophically satisfying. From Meaning to Materiality As already discussed, a Lacanian psychoanalysis would disagree with the claim (Blass & Carmeli, 2007; Galgut, 2021) that psychoanalysis is a hermeneutic discipline. But the Lacanian privileging of the materiality of the signifier does not only serve to highlight formal, non-meaningful elements. Lacan discerns how material elements like signifiers bind and orient the subject’s position to jouissance—the excessive surplus that emerges at the point of antagonism (the real) within the psyche (Dall’Aglio, 2021a). In Freudian terms, this would refer to the key coordinates that orient the ever-shifting drive-aims and drive-objects that attempt (but fail) to meet the impossible demand for satisfaction from drive-source and drive-pressure (Johnston, 2005). Shifting the concern from meaning to materiality—in a Lacanian view—allows one to better grasp the issue of the real. Here, then, emerges a novel bridge. Attuning to the issue of the real—as framed by differential materiality—brings us beyond epistemology toward the ontological dimension. Let us return to the Van Gogh metaphor: neuroscience’s irrelevance to psychoanalysis is akin to the irrelevance of the chemical-physical to aesthetic meaning and experience. In this regard, consider the artist David Batchelor’s (2014) view that neuroscience has taught the arts more about color than perhaps any other discipline over the past few decades. Batchelor recognizes that knowledge about color can come from any discipline and that this knowledge contributes to artistic practice. Indeed, research into chemistry and optics was not only relevant to Van Gogh’s work; this was also something Van Gogh himself knew about and was informed by (D. Batchelor, personal communication, 2020). For instance, chemical advances in putting mixed aniline colors into collapsible tubes enabled Van Gogh to paint outdoors. This does not reduce aesthetic appreciation of Van Gogh’s work to chemical knowledge. Rather, advances in chemistry—and the use of such chemical knowledge—allowed new possibilities within the artistic sphere. What Sort of Materiality? One might argue that the materiality of neuroscience differs from Lacan’s materiality of the signifier.[1] Here, it is important to underscore that Lacan did not limit the logic of the symbolic to language. In Seminar II, Lacan (1978/1991b) invokes cybernetics to illustrate symbolic logic. In Seminar III, Lacan (1981/1993) refers to neurological disorders to illustrate the distinct axes of metaphor and metonymy (Dall’Aglio, 2023). And, in Seminar XX, Lacan (1975/2000) mentions how the genetic mechanisms of DNA can also be conceptualized through the logic of the signifier. Thereby, the materiality of the signifier (its formal, differential dimension) should not be limited to words alone. Moreover, Lacan (1975/2000) is careful to not equate the unconscious to language:I say that the unconscious is structured like a language. I say like so as not to say – and I come back to this all the time – that the unconscious is structured by a language. The unconscious is structured like the assemblages in question in set theory, which are like letters. (p. 48, emphasis in the original)
The materiality Lacan is concerned with has to do with differential elements that follow their own formal laws—separate from semantic concerns. Especially for the later Lacan, increasingly abstract differential conceptions (e.g., the formulas of sexuation) become the privileged means for articulating the real not as an external substance that resists symbolization but as an impasse immanent to the symbolic. A Meeting of the Reals I propose that a focus on an ontology of the real as antagonism immanent to the symbolic can open a new approach to the epistemological issues highlighted in the NPSA debate. In TM terms, the real as ontological antagonism can be seen in the contradictions of “weak laws.” Nature is itself comprised of differential, conflicting elements that produce more-than-natural phenomena from “weak nature” alone. Žižek (2006) provides a remarkable formula for this Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic solution. He describes two common psychoanalytic reactions to neuroscientific advances: (1) jubilant celebration at the confirmation of psychoanalysis by neuroscience, or (2) rejection of the relevance of neuroscience on hermeneutic or transcendental grounds. One can see the teams of the NPSA debate here: defendants highlighting that neuroscience has validated and enriched the essential hypotheses of psychoanalysis; critics claiming hermeneutic (and epistemological) irrelevance. Žižek carves out a third position:The only proper reply to this challenge is to meet the brain sciences’ neuronal Real with another Real, not simply to ground the Freudian semblant within the neuronal Real. In other words, if psychoanalysis is to survive and retain its key status, we have to find a place for it within the brain sciences themselves, starting from their inherent silences and impossibilities. (p. 177, emphases in the original)
Žižek’s proposition focuses not on what can be explained within the respective (psychoanalytic and neuroscientific) epistemological systems, but on the limits within those systems—their “inherent silences and impossibilities.” The key bridge will not (only) be found via epistemological correlation but by identifying how the neuronal real opens onto another real, the psychoanalytic real. In other words, a viable bridge between neuroscience and psychoanalysis can be sought at points of ontological antagonism (the neuronal real, the psychoanalytic real) that are articulated through formal limits, impasses, or contradictions within each discipline’s epistemological framework. In TM terms, antagonism is a point of emergence for a novel, irreducible register. The real as immanent antagonism has an ontological status—not as a hard, inaccessible Thing (a Kantian Ding) but as the contradictions and antagonisms in “weak nature” alone. Solms’s Hidden Spring of the Real Now I will develop how Mark Solms’s (2020a, 2020b, 2021) work on the hard problem of consciousness illustrates this opening of the neuronal real onto the psychoanalytic real. In my Lacanian reading, the neuropsychoanalytic ontology of formal laws governing the mental apparatus (the Free Energy Principle; see below) self-sunders insofar as it contains immanent antagonisms and contradictions. It thereby exemplifies TM in NPSA and provides a non-reductive materialist theory of subjectivity. Solms’s Informatic Ontology[2] While Solms maintains his dual-aspect monist perspective, his incorporation of Karl Friston’s (2010) Free Energy Principle marks a significant advance. While DAM proposes that the mental apparatus must, like all other things in nature, be inferred (here, one can hear Kantian undertones of an indirectly grasped Ding), Solms’s discerns the informatic laws that govern the phenomenological appearances of both objective processes (neural activity) and subjective experience (affective consciousness). Solms (2020b) describes this more fundamental informatic level through the framework of statistical mechanics:In physics, matter is no longer a fundamental concept; it is an energy state (hence E=MC2). …“Information” is a physical [not physiological] concept…Consider, for example, quantum entanglement between two particles: the one particle “carries information” about the other. (p. 99).
This shift is important because it allows one to read Solms’s model as bearing upon ontological questions (i.e., the laws in nature that govern the mental apparatus). Solms steps beyond debates over divergent epistemologies through constructing a unifying informatic framework. Following Friston (2010), Solms argues that the demand to reduce entropy or surprise is a common imperative to all self-organizing systems. Solms terms this principle Friston’s Law: “All the quantities that can change; i.e. that are part of the system, will change to minimise free energy” (Friston & Stephan, 2007, p. 427). Because self-organizing systems like the brain are not in direct contact with external states (such as the internal body or the external world), they must form inferences or beliefs about the unknown causes of its sensory input. These inferences are “predictions” (probability distributions represented by neuronal patterns of activity). Predictions are compared to sensory input—enabling the self-organizing system to determine how well it is minimizing surprise (i.e., how well it is remaining within its desired states and homeostatic bounds). This difference (“prediction error”) can be minimized in three ways: perception (updating prior predictions to new predictions that better match the sensory data), action (selecting input that confirms prior predictions), and by adjusting the precision or salience of error signals (imprecise, non-salient prediction errors can be disregarded by the system). Mammalian Homeostasis and Affective Consciousness Importantly, mammalian homeostasis involves a variety of innate homeostatic set-points or viable bounds. These are evolutionary inherited predictions of states that the organism must remain within (over varying spatiotemporal timescales). Deviations from these set-points generate salient prediction errors that drive the organism to return to those states. Solms highlights that deviations from multiple innate homeostatic predictions generate precise prediction errors that are felt as affect. For example, when blood oxygenation drops below a certain threshold, a particular feeling (suffocation alarm) drives the organism to move to a new location and return blood oxygenation within viable bounds. Building on Jaak Panksepp’s (1998) cross-mammalian research on basic emotional systems, Solms argues that various categories of socio-emotional homeostasis operate similarly. Each involves a certain set-point: stay safe from bodily harm (FEAR), nurture and care for others (CARE), remove obstacles to goals (RAGE), engage sexually (LUST), engage proactively with uncertainty (SEEKING), remain close to caregivers (PANIC), and engage in reciprocal social games (PLAY).[3] Importantly, the organism is not driven by these evolutionary ideals; it is driven by feelings. Deviations from the set-points for each system generate unique qualities of unpleasure; moving towards those set-points generates distinct pleasures. Prioritizing a particular category of pleasure–unpleasure adjusts precision-weights throughout the brain’s hierarchy of predictions (via command neuromodulators adjusting post-synaptic gain) based on which predictions and prediction errors best reduce that particular category of felt uncertainty. For example, prioritizing PANIC (feeling separation-distress) will render certain perceptions and actions associated with attachment more salient. In contrast, prioritizing RAGE (feeling frustration) will bring a different cascade of perceptions and actions to the fore. For Solms, this mechanism is the fundamental function of consciousness. Following Panksepp and synthesizing a range of neurological literature, Solms (2013) argues that non-declarative affective consciousness—the phenomenal “what-it-is-likeness” of being—is the fundamental form of consciousness. Lesions to key upper brainstem structures involved in affect can obliterate consciousness, yet lesions to various neocortical (cognitive) centers do not eliminate sentient feeling. Cases of hydranencephaly—children born with no neocortex yet an intact upper brainstem who display clear signs of affective being—provide exemplary evidence for the primacy of affective consciousness (Merker, 2007). Antagonism at the Level of Innate Emotional Systems[4] Keeping Clarke’s (2018) epistemological criticisms in mind, one can ask whether Solms’s unifying project eliminates the difference and uniqueness of the psychoanalytic subject. Does invocation of the Free Energy Principle not do violence to psychoanalytic epistemology? Are the more-than-natural features of the psychoanalytic subject (here, the subjective feeling of affective consciousness) seamlessly reduced to deterministic informatic laws (here, Friston’s Law)? Within a TM perspective, such reductionism would only hold if the ontological level of informatic laws were fully determining in the sense of capital-N Nature. If, on the other hand, this ontology were a “weak nature,” then the uniqueness of the psychoanalytic subject (the difference afforded to psychoanalytic epistemology) can be preserved while nevertheless drawing links to neurobiology. Let us consider Solms’s (2020b) critical mechanistic features of consciousness:(1) The presence in the system of multiple categories of demand for homeostatic work, which (2) need to be prioritized in a context-dependent manner, including (3) in unpredicted contexts where (4) choices must be made, and therefore (5) voluntary actions must be executed. (p. 104, emphases in the original)
Here, Solms comes to a remarkably Lacanian point. These innate set-points conflict with each other, generating uncertainty regarding which need to act upon. A basic example would be the conflict between SEEKING and PANIC. SEEKING demands engagement with uncertainty; PANIC dictates proximity to known attachment figures. One system must be prioritized—this prioritization of a specific category of uncertainty is, for Solms, affective consciousness. Prioritization is necessary because there is no “meta-prediction” that would dictate which need to act upon in all possible situations. Were such a meta-prediction to exist, there would be no uncertain circumstances, and there would be no need for context-dependent feeling one’s way through (a particular category of) uncertainty. Affective consciousness arises precisely at this structural conflict. Thus, consciousness depends on antagonism. For our concerns, it is essential to note that—within Solms’s informatic characterization of affectively conscious self-organizing systems—there is antagonism at the level of natural ontology. Innate socio-emotional homeostatic predictions conflict. While the imperative to minimize free energy (Friston’s Law) is the informatic law that explains both neuronal and subjective dynamics, Friston’s Law is a “weak law” in the sense of “weak nature.” Friston’s Law self-sunders in the structural conflict between different categories of uncertainty. This is the “increasing complexity of the interior of the organism” that results in a surplus of felt uncertainty (affective consciousness) that cannot be fully eliminated (Solms, 2020a, p. 7). In TM, increasing complexity breeds negativity, points of short-circuiting, and emergence of novel dynamics. In a Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic view, this ineliminable surplus corresponds, in Freudian terms, to the drive’s constant pressure or, in Lacanian terms, to jouissance as the excess arising at the point of the real (as antagonism) immanent to the symbolic (Dall’Aglio, 2021b, forthcoming). The lack of a meta-prediction that eliminates all uncertainty and resolves between competing categories of uncertainty points to the “weak nature” of Solms’s informatic ontology of affective consciousness. Solms’s model thereby discerns a point of emergence and a meeting of psychoanalytic and neuroscientific reals (Žižek, 2006). At the level of evolutionary substance, there is innate contradiction (competing categories of socio-emotional homeostasis). This neuronal real opens onto the psychoanalytic real of jouissance in the form of irremovable felt uncertainty. Affective consciousness, with its own ensuing dynamics, emerges at a point of deadlock. In other words, the neuronal real of conflicting hyperpriors opens onto a psychoanalytic real of non-declarative (but still felt) subjectivity. Importantly, this should not be read in a hierarchical fashion, where the neuroscientific level is “below,” and the psychoanalytic-subjective level emerges “above.” From a Free Energy Principle and DAM perspective, these are phenomenal appearances of the same mechanism. This antagonism names a point where these two dimensions split off and run parallel. One might criticize my position for advocating a type of neural causality, that brain causes mind. Emergence is more precise than cause. The causality here is not determinate; it is the causality of the gap (Lacan, 1973/1978, 1975/2000). Causality lays in impossibility (real as immanent antagonism) that opens onto the emergence of a new, irreducible dimension. In this way, my reading of Solms overcomes Ferraro’s (2022) Lacanian criticism:Thus, it is inadequate for Dall’Aglio to suggest that neuroscience accounts for the real by way of allowing for ‘gaps’ within its formalisations. To be sure, the Žižekian definition of the real as a ‘gap’ immanent to discourse is valid, but only from the standpoint of imaginary-symbolic representation (Vorstellung). From the standpoint of real qua real – the determinate negation of this representation – the real is not a pure ‘gap’ or negativity but a positivity, unassimilated (as of yet) to representation. Its paradigmatic form is that of trauma, as a sub-species of jouissance.
There is not only innate conflict among socio-emotional homeostats. The “weakness” of Friston’s Law running up against antagonism in natural substance has the corollary of unexplained affect that is excessive to the brain’s predictive model. In TM, the “real qua real” (as jouissance) emerges at this point of deadlock. A Transcendental Materialist Defense of Neuropsychoanalytic Dual-aspect Monism Even with the notion of emergence, it is common to place ontology closer to neuroscience. However, recall that DAM supposes that both neuroscience and psychoanalysis are phenomenological insofar as they are both incomplete perspectives on an underlying reality. With Solms’s recent work, this Ding-as-sich has been given a system of its own. Simply put, Solms’s ontological level, relying on concepts from statistical mechanics and physics, has an informatic status. I emphasize the immanent contradictions and failures in these informatic laws. Subjectivity is not explained by the success of these informatic laws but by their failure to function flawlessly, without conflict. From this framework, one might criticize the participants of the NPSA debate as taking a smooth, non-antagonistic ontology for granted. This conception of natural ontology—capital-N Nature—leads to the risks of reductionism so objectionable to critics of NPSA. In my view, such risks are substantively minimized with a philosophy of ontology that self-sunders (weak nature) and allows for the emergence of more-than-natural phenomena. Talvitie and Ihanus (2011) or Clarke (2018) might claim that I (in following Solms) am at risk of epistemological violence. I would go a step further to add ontological violence as well. Insofar as our substantial bodies are plagued by the dynamics of signifiers, social customs, fantasies, and so on, spoken signifiers do violence to an already denaturalized, self-sundering living substance (Johnston, 2019). Regarding my epistemological violence, I suggest that TM provides a philosophical framework that can account for the “internal violence” between conflicting epistemologies like psychoanalysis and neuroscience. There is indeed epistemological violence between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, but this is not restricted to the intellectual endeavors of NPSA. Such a violence is an existential dilemma of this part of nature that refracts into two irreducible perspectives. TM proposes that this violence arises from ontological antagonism, the weakness of nature out of which this interdisciplinary clash explodes in its blatant incongruity.[5] TM defends neuropsychoanalytic DAM by side-stepping the critique that NPSA privileges neuroscientific epistemology. TM provides a system for conceptualizing the contradiction between neuroscientific and psychoanalytic epistemologies by developing a meta-(neuro)psychology (e.g., Solms’s statistical-physics integration of Friston, Panksepp, and Freud) that can account for the gap between subjectivity and objectivity (Dall’Aglio, 2022). In a sense, the charge of “neuroscience or psychoanalysis” is a forced choice. The best philosophical defense is not a perverse “both-and,” a disavowal of the difference between brain and mind, but a system that centralizes the causality and emergence of this difference. Conclusion: The Case for More Debate! As I conceded earlier, I do not seek to exonerate NPSA from critics who charge NPSA with improper epistemological translation. By their criteria, I have failed to show how neuroscience necessarily contributes to psychoanalytic epistemology beyond inspiration. However, it is evident that I do not think that one epistemology (psychoanalysis or neuroscience) should be privileged over the other. The issues of reductionism due to imprecise epistemological toggling only arise from a problematic assumption of a fully deterministic natural ontology. I have discussed how, using TM and emphasizing antagonism at the level of differential elements (materiality), neuropsychoanalytic bridges might be better built at points of the real immanent to nature.