Clinical neuroscience and imaging studies of core psychoanalytic constructs

Core psychoanalytic constructs may be impossible to study directly using neuroscience and imaging methodologies. Nevertheless, experimental paradigms have been developed and are being applied that are at least relevant to understanding the neural bases of certain core theoretical constructs within psychoanalysis. These paradigms have demonstrated the likely contributions of: (1) the nucleus accumbens and related limbic circuitry in assigning valence within the pleasure/unpleasure continuum of affective experience; (2) the reticular formation, thalamus, amygdala, and cortex within arousal circuits in assigning personal salience to those affective experiences; (3) frontostriatal systems in subserving top-down processing in the CNS, which in turn contributes to numerous important psychological functions, including the control of drives and the construction of experience according to preestablished conceptual schemas—processes that likely underlie cognitive distortions, projection, and transference phenomena; and (4) multiple memory systems, particularly the procedural learning systems based within the dorsal striatum and declarative learning systems in the mesial temporal lobe, that likely contribute to memories within the domain of the descriptive unconscious, and the interactions across affective and cognitive memory systems, that might contribute to memory formations within the dynamic unconscious. q 2005 Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.