Welcome back to the ongoing journey through the area of intersection between mind, brain, and psychoanalysis. If you’re just joining me, I have been using these Substack posts to adapt the content of my postgraduate seminars for a broader, non-specialist audience. The goal here is to organise the complexities and insights from these seminars into an accessible format that ultimately will become a book. I feel it’s important to emphasise that these posts are not intended as peer-reviewed academic articles, but rather as an approachable and accessible series of explorations meant for those who are curious—wherever they might be on the spectrum of knowledge and interest.
Up to now I have covered the first two of twelve seminars worth of material. Each of these seminars has been spread across approximately six Substack posts. (You might have seen additional posts on the subject of dreaming, but I will leave those aside for the moment, though they too connect to the project as a larger whole - and will most likely form the basis for a different book). My plan for the future is somewhat ambitious. There are ten more seminars worth of content to be transformed into Substack posts, each of which will offer a deeper exploration of the ideas I have already started to discuss, and some new ones too. To give you a sense of how this will happen, I anticipate approximately another sixty posts—roughly six per seminar, and one per week—to complete the project. I will ask for your patience as I am writing the posts while trying to balance a busy clinical practice and the demands of university teaching and research commitments.
In this post, I will summarise the progress to date and set the scene for what’s to come. A kind of a roadmap, if you will, for the extended journey into the intersection of mind and brain, filtered through a psychoanalytic lens.
The Journey So Far
1. Positioning the Mind-Body Problem
One of the focal points of our conversation so far has been the mind-body problem. This classical philosophical dilemma—how consciousness (the intangible world of thoughts, feelings, and subjective experience) emerges from physical processes (the organic tissue, neurons, and chemical signals in our brains)— which also sits at the core of psychoanalysis. In the psychoanalytic tradition, the unconscious mind is central to how we assign meaning to our experiences. Meanwhile, neuroscientists investigate physical correlates of consciousness by researching the complexities of neural pathways and neurotransmitters.
Notwithstanding the obvious gaps, psychoanalysis and neuroscience share something fundamental a focus on what it is that shapes our lived experiences. As I mentioned in these earlier posts, part of the current aim is to demonstrate how these two fields, historically distanced by academic and ideological factors, can find points of convergence. Now, more than ever, there is the potential for scientific methods and psychoanalytic thought to be in synergy with each other. These first two seminars, and their Substack posts, have begun to bridge that gap, with a particular interest in how memory, affect, and psychoanalytic processes relate to the structure and function of the brain.
2. The Role of Subjectivity
Another principal theme has been the importance of subjective experience in psychoanalysis—what we might call ‘the view from the inside’. Psychoanalysis, at its core, is about understanding the emotional and mental life of the individual. One of the strengths of psychoanalysis is its rigorous and detailed attention to subtle ( and sometimes not so subtle) nuances, such as: intangible affects; internal conflicts; transference and counter-transference phenomena; and the all too familiar complex narratives we create about ourselves.
Where early neuroscientific accounts (and even some current ones – cognitive neuroscience for example) can sometimes bypass the richness of subjective experience, psychoanalysis reminds us of the importance of considering the critical role of taking a detailed personal history and based upon this trying to formulate unconscious motivations that contribute to our patients’ suffering. It’s really fascinating to see how recent developments in neuroscience—brain imaging, for instance—have opened up new ways of researching processes that were once largely the domain of speculative philosophy of mind and psychology. These developments encourage increased collaboration across and between fields of scientific enquiry, further highlighting why a conversation between mind and brain sciences is so necessary at this time.
3. Introductory Debates on Theory and Practice
In the first two seminars (and corresponding Substack posts), I also introduced various theoretical debates within psychoanalysis itself. From Sigmund Freud’s foundational ideas to more contemporary psychoanalytic schools. The field has long been characterised by debates over interpretation and technique. Some focus more on relational approaches, others on the dynamics of drives and instincts, and others again on how culture, society, and politics shape unconscious processes. As the project continues, we will see how these theoretical positions might integrate—or at times conflict with corresponding scientific models of the mind.
Why an Accessible Format?
Before going further, let’s clarify the purpose behind these Substack posts. The material presented in my postgraduate seminars in the School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin, and now most recently with the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in New York, can be challenging, filled with theoretical nuance, historical context, and clinical complexity. It’s easy for the non-expert to feel overwhelmed. My aim here is to deconstruct and rework these ideas into a format that is both accurate and reader friendly. I want to open a door into what can sometimes seem like an enclosed and inaccessible domain of knowledge for many.
These posts are not meant to be authoritative or conclusive statements on neuroscience or psychoanalysis. Rather, they are an invitation to come and explore the area with me. The plan is to eventually compile these posts into a book. That final version will still be intended for a broad audience, but it will contain more references, deeper analyses, and revised sections based on feedback from colleagues and readers of the posts. The feedback from the community of Substack readers is already proving helpful in this regard. If you’ve been following these posts from the start, thank you for your continued support and curiosity. If you’re just jumping in now, consider subscribing and revisiting the earlier posts. You’ll see how the discussions on mind, brain, and psychoanalysis intertwine, and you will get a sense of the overall trajectory of the project. The next ten seminars—and, consequently, the next series of posts—will immerse us more deeply into the content I have already introduced. Why revisit the same content? Because some of the topics I have covered in broad brush strokes deserve much more detailed examination. My approach reflects how postgraduate study typically unfolds – it is iterative - each new layer builds upon what came before, adding nuance and complexity, a little like Jerome Bruner’s idea of the ‘spiral curriculum’. I hope you will join me for the upcoming content and posts.
© 2025 Paul Moore
This series of posts on brain and mind is based upon postgraduate modules, and seminars, I teach for the M.Sc. in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, and the M.Phil. in Psychoanalytic Studies at the School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin. The module, "The Mind-Body Question in Psychoanalysis" (MBQiPA), is part of the M.Phil. in Psychoanalytic Studies in the School of Psychology. I have developed and delivered the MBQiPA module in various forms, and for several educational institutions, for over 16 years.