The Relationship between Neurophysiology and Psychoanalysis in the Light of Dream Research

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NEUROPHYSIOLOGY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS IN THE LIGHT OF DREAM RESEARCH JOHANNES LEHTONEN* Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, expressed a wish many times that points of contact between his theories and biology could be established. He surmised that there were chemical substances which would one day be shown to make up the somatic factor of the libido, the name he used for the psychic representative of the sexual instinct [1, p. 78; 2]. Although by assuming this he foresaw in a way the discovery of the sexual hormones, the latter have not provided the required link. Modern neurophysiology, with the functional and highly flexible phenomena it deals with, is obviously much better suited for the purpose ofbridging the gap between the "psychic" and the "biological." Attempts to study the findings of neurophysiology in the light of psychoanalytic observations have been negligible however. This is perhaps partly explained by the fact that during the lifetime of Freud neurophysiology was still in its infancy and prospects for integrative research were not good. Freud himself, however, made a major effort in this direction, but he discarded the result and never published it [3]. Since that time, our understanding ofthe physiology and chemistry of the brain has grown immensely, and the possibility of revealing such connections has considerably increased. There has been little convergence , however, in the development of the two fields. This is no doubt partly because of general trends in the culture of the twentieth Translated by Antony Landon. Presented in a seminar on dream research held at the Psychiatric Clinic, University Central Hospital of Helsinki, October 2-3, 1975. The seminar lectures have been published in Finnish by K. A. Achte and J. Lehtonen, eds., Unija nukkuminen (Helsinki: Foundation for Psychiatric Research, 1977). Research supported by the National Research Council ofMedical Sciences, Finland, and YyöJahnsson Foundation, Helsinki, Finland.»Department of Psychiatry, University Central Hospital of Helsinki, Lapinlahdentie, SF-001 80 Helsinki 18, Finland.© 1980 by The University of Chicago. 0031-5982/80/2303-0141$01.00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine ¦ Spring 1980 \ 415 century. The emphasis in scientific development has been on the "hard facts" of the natural sciences and on the exponential growth of their technical applications. But other causes can also be discerned, for example , in the respective working methods of neurobiology and psychoanalysis. The former is experimental; its findings are repeatable and can be described in quantitative terms. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is verbal; its subject matter does not consist of experimentally verifiable and repeatable phenomena but of successive "historical" events as they have been uniquely and personally experienced. Neither do the clinical applications of neurobiology and psychoanalysis have much in common, and the same is true for their theoretical frames of reference. The concepts shared by them are very few. It seems to be impossible to devise a theoretical framework applicable to both biology and psychoanalysis, and, as a consequence of this, causal explanations from biology to psychoanalysis or vice versa cannot be given [4-7]. It is not only as a science that psychoanalysis has stood apart from neurobiology. The actual relations between the two disciplines have either been nonexistent or negatively coloured. There has been a feeling that both sides have trespassed on one another's territory. This has hardly created favourable conditions for a comparative investigation of how the two disciplines look at the subject matter—the various functions of the human mind—and what might be similar in their findings. There have been signs recently, however, of an increasing interest in integrative studies of the relationship between neurophysiology and psychoanalysis [8, p. 5; 9, p. 124; 10, p. 128; H]. It is nevertheless quite easy to point to a subject common to both psychoanalysis and neurobiology, namely, dream research, which has traditionally held a prominent place in psychoanalytic theory [12]. In the thirties, neurophysiological observations of the effects of brain-stem lesions on wakefulness [13] and the discovery of the reticular formation [14], and soon thereafter of the paradoxical sleep associated with dream experiences [15], have made sleep and dreams an important topic for neurobiology also. A glance at what has been written makes it clear, however, that the...