New neuroscience can’t prove psychoanalysis correct---can’t prove anything about unconscious or desire

However, with a lack of available concepts or a grammar of how to create and use the bridging tools, a dialogue between disciplines with different premises and concepts cannot be easy. For a successful dialogue to emerge, understanding of the language of both par- ticipants is a necessity. A living grammar is required to connect the languages of both fields and to avoid confusion. Its creation is. to express it diminutively, not a small challenge.¶ Neuroscience cannot prove psychoanalysis to be correct. However, when coherence between the findings of the two fields is shown, neuroscience may strengthen the credibility of psychoanalytical theory. The criterion for this, then, is that meaningfulness can be seen to prevail in the connection of the findings within these two fields, even though the connections arc in a strict sense not causal, as they always require interpretation of their meaning.¶ The history of psychoanalysis is a history of diverging schools of psychoanalytic thought. Psychoanalysis scarcely needs new schools of thought, which is what the development of neuro-psychoanalysis might lead to. In assessing the meaning of neuroscience to psychoanalysis, it is important to stress the mutuality of their cooperation and not surrender to a misleading impression of their merging with one another. Psychoanalysis needs a conception of mental reality based on its own observations and concepts of the unconscious and conscious, presymbolic and symbolic nature of the mind, which cannot be replaced by paradigms of experimental research (see, c.g.. von Wright. 1971: EnckelK H. 2002. 2010).¶ Although recent information-theoretical models of the human mind may have narrowed the gap between these two paradigms {Sun ct al.. 2009). neurocognitive models have not changed either the symbolic or the presymbolic nature of the symbiosis of human relations or the differences prevailing between them and experimental models. A crucial question in the dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis is whether a real benefit is gained from their interactions. New concepts or denotations, such as neuro-psychoanalysis do not create a new reality. They do so only if they truly widen the understanding of the mind.