Neuropsychoanalysis: An Evolutionary Perspective

 

Please note – this event is not hosted
by the Neuropsychoanalysis Association – for any questions
regarding registration please contact Irith Barzel-Raveh at: irbarzel@gmail.com.

Neuropsychoanalysis – Open school

7 PM (Israel time; GMT +2)

The parallel development of psychoanalysis and neuroscience has eventually brought an integration which keeps deepening and fruiting. Similar parallels have occurred with the disciplines of ethology and sociobiology, where animal and human behavior are studied from the evolutionary viewpoint. In this course we review these disciplines and seek their integration to neuropsychoanalysis. We begin with an introduction to evolutionary theory, with emphasis on the evolution of instincts. We then study pre-human manifestations of sex, aggression and bonding. Lorenz’s studies of imprinting and Bowlby’s model of attachment are discussed next. We next proceed to human sexuality, of which several aspects are unique among all animals. Freudian and post-Freudian formulations of sexuality are revisited in this context. We then proceed to current research on sleep and dreaming, again from the evolutionary perspective of animals’ sleep and dreams, before returning to the psychoanalytic approaches to dream interpretation. We conclude some open questions in the overlapping zones of psychology, science and philosophy: The nature of consciousness, free will and morality.

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Avshalom C. Elitzur is an Israeli physicist and philosopher with a somewhat unusual biography (see Wikipedia). He has obtained his PhD under the guidance of Prof. Yakir Aharonov, one of the leading quantum physicist of our time and discoverer of the Aharonov-Bohm effect. Together with Lev Vaidman, he has discovered the IFM effect, which has since become (in)famous as the “Elitzur-Vaidman bomb-testing experiment.” In later papers he has presented advances in quantum mechanics, relativity theory and the thermodynamics. Other works of his deal with the thermodynamics of living systems. Together with Aharonov, Currently he is at the Institute for Quantum Studies in Chapman University, Chapman, CA, USA.