Neuro-Psychoanalysis and Pain. Neurosciences between Natural Science and Cultural Studies

The project is actively engaged in shaping neuro-psychoanalysis – in both theory and practice – as it attempts to observe and bridge, if not close, existing methodological and epistemological gaps through dialogue, exchange, and the integration of different bodies of knowledge. In conjunction with these efforts, the research project further asks what contributions philological, cultural-scientific, and psychological approaches can make to help bridge these gaps – each with its own specific area of expertise, for example, in the analysis of texts, language, gestures, imagery, and other forms of expression. To this end, the research and collaborations that began as part of the ZfL Project Freud and the Sciences (2008–2010), will continue to inform our current work, including, among others, our collaborations with the Sigmund-Freud-Institute in Frankfurt and the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society. An international network has grown out of these efforts enabling a productive dialogue between the humanities/cultural sciences and neuroscience over the last few years.

The dialogue has several focal points. It aims at reconstructing the interdisciplinary conceptual history behind central terms and concepts (for example, Einfühlung/empathy, imagination/simulation, plasticity) and the respective epistemological conditions that have shaped their use in specific disciplines. It also explores the implicit knowledge that informs research practices and therapy. Another special focus looks at the relationship between data collection practices in the humanities versus the natural sciences. The tension between the epistemes of interpretation versus measurement is understood as constitutive of neuro-psychoanalytical undertakings.

At the symposium on empathy, Empathy. A Neurobiological Capacity and Its Cultural and Conceptual History (January 2013, Berlin), researchers discussed the variegated conceptual and cultural history of empathy and its predecessor, Einfühlung (F. Th. Vischer, R. Vischer, Th. Lipps, and others), on the basis of the discovery of mirror neurons and neuroscientific research on empathy. The mirror neuron mechanism is characterized by our neurons’ general ability to internally simulate the actions and intentions that we observe in others. This neuronal aspect has been met with diverse interdisciplinary processes of transfer and translation between aesthetic theory, moral philosophy, political theory, psychology, psychoanalysis, and the neurosciences. These processes in turn influence the moral dimension of our current understanding of empathy and the concept’s association with related terms such as sympathy (Mitgefühl), compassion (Mitleid), and prosocial behavior.

The ability to internally simulate the actions and intentions of others is apparently based on unmediated “as-if” constructs, which in turn are related to one’s own personal experiences. At a subsequent symposium on figures of the imagination and simulation, »As-if« – Figures of Imagination, Simulation, and Transposition in the Relation to the Self, Others, and the Arts (part of the Villa Vigoni-Conversations series, June 2014, Loveno die Menaggio, Italy), scholars explored the rich body of knowledge on these as-if constructions that the humanities and cultural science research have acquired. The symposium also looked at other operations, including that of the imagination, simulation, fiction, thought experiments, imitation, mimicry/facial expression, etc. and what significance they might have for current psychological, psychoanalytical, and neuroscientific research on intersubjectivity and embodied knowledge.

Pain as a corporeal and mental experience represents, more than any other phenomenon, the gap between the various explanatory models used both in science and in society at large. In the 1960s the emergence of the so-called gate control theory revolutionized pain research with its claims about the influence of emotions and consciousness on the peripheral perception of pain. This shift signaled the integration of psychological (affective, emotive, and cognitive) and cultural aspects of pain into neurophysiological research, while the fields of psychology and psychiatry also began to rely on biological frames of reference in which pain could be studied and manipulated using neuroscientific methods. Thus, researchers interpret the fact that individuals experience pain in unique and personal ways according to very different premises, with some focusing on brain anatomy, neural activity, and epigenetic make-up, while others emphasize culturally predispositioned forms of expressing pain and psychological conflicts.

Pain research, in this respect, does not constitute a unified field of scientific inquiry. The various disciplines that take up pain as an object of study have their own ways of conceptualizing it – from neuronal correlates to complex mental functions – and equally diverse methods of analyzing expressions of pain. Inherent to nearly all of these approaches are implicit, that is pre-scientific, assumptions, such as the idea that the phenomenon of pain can reveal the mechanisms of conscious and subconscious processes. This assumption has long held sway over the field of psychoanalysis, yet its premise is still an experimental object of research in neurophysiology. The debates surrounding the paradoxical phenomenon of ›unconscious pain‹, which calls into question the general definition of pain as something that is ›experienced‹, have in turn led to new conceptualizations of the body and mind within the neurosciences.

This project investigates the extent to which different epistemological practices and semiotic systems involved in studying pain can be brought together and what impact this might have on the treatment of pain in a clinical context. The focus will be on historical and current trends that establish connections between various approaches to the phenomenon of pain and on the potential for a productive synthesis of these approaches exemplified perhaps by the birth of »neuro-psychoanalysis« as a discipline in its own right.