From cognitivism to neurosciences, with regard to psychoanalysis

The author compares psychoanalysis and neuroscience, within the historical context of their differentiation from psychiatry. Freud, for example, deviated from biology in his consideration of the brain and hysteria, founding psychoanalytic theory. The author goes on to consider behavioralism and cognitivism, with all due attention to the question of symbolization in these approaches. Works about consciousness from two contemporary neuroscientists, Edelman and Damasio, show some convergence with conceptions of psychoanalysis. The author concludes with a response suggesting challenges to psychoanalysis: interpretation and perception, determinism and fantasy, the emergence of the psychical sexuality.