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FREUDIAN LOCALIZATION: A NEUROPSYCHOANALYTIC DIALOGUE BETWEEN ON APHASIA AND ‘THE UNCONSCIOUS’

by | Vol 43 (4) 2025

Summary: The question – and challenge – of localization is central to contemporary neuropsychoanalysis. While meta-psychological mappings of brain areas have been made, critics emphasize the incompatibility of psychodynamics with brain location. Freud himself dealt with the tension between location and function of different systems, not only in his psychoanalytic meta-psychology, but also in his neurological career. Both the 1915 essay ‘The Unconscious’ and the 1891 monograph On Aphasia tarry between localization and function. Close reading of these texts reveals that Freud does not categorically reject localization. He carves a dynamic model that still admits of localization. This paper employs a neuropsychoanalytic dialogue internal to Freud – between 1891 and 1915 – to articulate the key features of Freud’s meta-psychological theory built, in part, upon neuropsychological dynamic localization. Implications for contemporary neuropsychoanalysis will be briefly discussed.

The loss of thinking-defence in a case-study of prefrontal brain injury

by | Vol 24 (3/4) 2006

The author asserts that psychoanalysis can serve as both a meta-psychology and as psychotherapy for people who have sustained brain-injury. Changes of personality after traumatic brain-injury are well documented but a strictly neurological explanation is unsatisfactory (Damasio, 2003). We argue that psychoanalytic meta-psychology can explain how brain-damage translates itself into a changed personality and psychodynamics. The author starts with Freud’s “Project”, where he describes the essential function of the I as the inhibition of thoughts (images) that lead to pain, resulting in the so-called “thinking-defence” (Freud, 1992: 68). According to the author, this protecting influence of the I often fails in the case of patients with prefrontal lobe-damage. This will be illustrated comprehensively by a case-study.