January 2018
“Psychoanalysis versus psychiatry” and “unconscious versus brain” are classic oppositions between different perspectives on the human being and mental suffering.
This paper was published in the dossier “Psy cultures: psychoanalysis, subjectivity and politics”.
The paper Psychoanalysis and neurosciences: fuzzy outlines? Notes on the notion of cerebral plasticity (HCSM vol. 24, 2017), by Maria Jimena Mantilla (Conicet/Universidad de Buenos Baires) reflects on how new ideas about the brain and biology favor closer interaction between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences.
These questions are redefined through the notion of cerebral plasticity, by which the brain is open to interaction with the social environment and the influence of psychoanalytical therapy.
Conceiving of the brain as a plastic organ – open to influence from life experiences – allows for the possibility of interchange between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences.
