Foreign Bodies: Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience

To what extent, this article asks, does the drive to reconcile psychoanalysis with neuroscience risk participating in a movement of appropriation, an attempt to reduce the event of psychoanalysis? This article shows how the neuro-psychoanalytic attempt to locate a psychoanalytic understanding of the mind in the brain does not end up correlating psychoanalysis with neuroscience; rather, it points to another, less conciliatory model for their relationship. In psychoanalysis, neurology encounters a Fremdkorper (foreign body), something unassimilable to its inside, something forever inside-outside any neurological theory of trauma. This Fremdkorper prevents neurology from reducing neurological traumas to mere cerebral laws; it is what makes every neurological trauma traumatic in its own way.