John Dall'Aglio

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• PhD Candidate (Clinical Psychology)
• PhD Candidate at Duquesne University

It is a great pleasure to comment on Mark Solms’s “symphonic” target article (to borrow a term from Maggie Zellner). Solms composes a functional model of functional neurological symptoms (FNSs) by updating and integrating psychoanalysis with contemporary neuroscience. Accompanied by Lacan and Freud, here I cross our dual-aspect monist bridge in the...

Research in affective neuroscience highlights the role of primal, basic emotional command systems which are shared across all mammals. These include SEEKING, CARING, LUST, SADNESS, ANGER, FEAR, and PLAYFULNESS. These potentially innate systems shape and are shaped by environmental experiences and developing cognitive capacities. Several researchers...

Contemporary times have witnessed a rise of terror, violence, and catastrophe: Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and Georgia, the abhorrent escalation of the Israel-Palestine conflict, terrorist attacks related to proclaimed religious ideologies, the deadly flooding in Spain and fires in California, and the assassination of a healthcare CEO....

A Neuro-Psychoanalytic Approach to Memory and Perception: Implications for Long-Term Psychotherapy Henriette Löffler-Stastka* Department of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, Medical University of Vienna, 1090 Vienna, Austria. *Correspondence: Henriette Löffler-Stastka, MD, Univ. Professor henriette.löffler-stastka@meduniwien.ac.at Keywords: memor...

This book brings together Lacanian psychoanalysis, neuropsychoanalytic work by Mark Solms and Ariane Bazan, Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience, Karl Friston’s free energy principle, Adrian Johnston’s transcendental materialist philosophy, and Darian Leader’s critique of jouissance in Lacanian theory. In doing so, it articulates a philosophical...

Here I summarize the trajectory of the book. Not only can one bridge Lacanian psychoanalysis with neuropsychoanalysis, affective neuroscience, and computational neuroscience. By putting these concepts into dialogue, new possibilities and ideas emerge in a non-reductive meta-neuropsychology. It is my hope that this book spurs and provokes uncertaint...

This chapter applies a Lacanian lens to Solms’s clinical neuropsychoanalytic model. It also formulates Lacanian technique (especially punctuation and scansion) in neuropsychoanalytic terms as provoking surprise. I describe how psychoanalytic (including Lacanian) intervention utilizes PLAY to modulate deeply automatized predictions. Additionally, I...

This chapter develops the Lacanian concept of jouissance—a traumatic excess of enjoyment which may not be felt as such—in relation to the real, imaginary, and symbolic registers. I demonstrate how Lacan extracts these concepts (and others, such as das Ding, objet a, $, S1, S2) from some of Freud’s major texts. I also discuss how the Lacanian real i...

While jouissance is often invoked as a foundational Lacanian idea, it has been criticized on both clinical and theoretical grounds as overly simplistic. Darian Leader has charged the Lacanian use of jouissance as theoretically imprecise, obscuring the relation to the Other, and smuggling in problematic substantial and energetic presuppositions. To...

Neuropsychoanalysis places subjective and objective perspectives on equal epistemological footing. This philosophical position of “dual-aspect monism” sees mind and brain as two appearances of the same part of nature. Here, I propose a method for shifting between these perspectives, to build a non-bio-reductive meta-neuropsychology. Additionally, b...

Psychoanalysis often speaks of the power of putting feelings into words. However, this notion retains a differentiation between language and emotion. I propose that affects not only push to be connected to signifiers; affects themselves are organized like signifiers. Panksepp’s basic emotional systems are structured like a language. Here, I demonst...

If jouissance arises from the point of antagonism within the symbolic, and I claim that jouissance corresponds to (prioritized) surplus affective consciousness, then is it possible to formulate antagonism within the brain? Here, I demonstrate how antagonism is not only immanent to the brain’s inherited structure; it is also necessary for affective...

Here I demonstrate how my Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic formulation of jouissance overcomes Darian Leader’s criticisms of the concept. Specifically, the brain’s predictive logic is unthinkable without the social domain of shared generative models (the Other). Additionally, the Free Energy Principle allows neuropsychoanalysis to furnish an informatic...

This chapter introduces the Lacanian concepts of the Other and the fundamental fantasy, alongside the notion of shared generative models in the Free Energy Principle. This allows me to sketch how the real, imaginary, and symbolic registers are knotted in dynamic predictive processes across the brain’s different memory systems. I also develop how th...

This chapter outlines Mark Solms’s meta-neuropsychology. I synthesize his arguments for dynamically localizing the ego to the neocortex and the id to subcortical, upper brainstem regions. By integrating Jaak Panksepp’s affective neuroscience, Solms makes the profound argument that the id is affectively consciousness. One can then dynamically locali...

Lacanian psychoanalysis is largely, and notoriously, anti-naturalist. There are special challenges in attempting to formulate a specifically Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis. Many Lacanians have criticized neuropsychoanalysis for bio-reductionism, ethical normalization, and an inability to capture the formal contradictions of subjectivity articulated i...

The Free Energy Principle, as developed by Karl Friston, has been a cornerstone of Mark Solms’s recent work in neuropsychoanalysis. All self-organizing systems aim to minimize free energy, but how do they do this? In this chapter, I outline the basic conceptual arguments of the Free Energy Principle as applied to biological self-organizing systems...

Here, I develop my central argument: jouissance corresponds to surplus affective consciousness, to surplus (prioritized) free energy. I detail how Solms’s neuropsychoanalytic integration of affective neuroscience and the free energy principle can be interpreted through Lacan’s extimate topology of jouissance. I then discuss several implications fro...

By linking the Lacanian symbolic to the brain, one finds that the logic of symbolic organization applies to more than just language per se. Lacan himself is clear to articulate a particular linguistic organization to the unconscious which is not equated with specific language. Hence, the unconscious is structured like a language. This chapter sketc...

While the neuropsychoanalytic field marches ahead, its critics continue to problematize the essential question of the discipline: how does neuroscience, a system of objective knowledge, contribute to psychoanalysis, a system of subjectivity? Critics charge neuropsychoanalysis with not providing a clear formula for toggling between neuroscience and...

As the philosophical basis for neuropsychoanalysis, dual-aspect monism is fundamental to the entire neuropsychoanalytic project. However, dual-aspect monism has been criticized not only from without but also from within neuropsychoanalysis. This paper considers criticisms of dual-aspect monism from within neuropsychoanalysis. These might be summed...

Neuroscience and psychoanalysis study the human condition from two perspectives. One can examine the mental apparatus as an object called the “brain,” the objective view. On the other hand, one can consider what it is like to be this part of nature called the “mind,” the subjective view. Extreme reductionist approaches in the biological sciences su...

Human science (e.g., phenomenology, psychoanalysis) and natural science (e.g., quantitative psychology, neuroscience) approaches to the mind and brain take radically different epistemological stances. Human science prioritizes subjective experience – the mind as a subject with lived experience. Natural science approaches the mind as an object that...

Jouissance is a multifaceted Lacanian concept that refers to a paradoxical blend of pleasure and unpleasure, an excess of pleasure that becomes traumatic. While jouissance appears as a pinnacle of Lacanian theoretical complexity, it has been critiqued as a nebulous descriptor that shuts down questions rather than deepening rigor. Specifically, Dari...

For Freud, the condition of sleep is an important pre-requisite for the formation of dreams. Because of the restriction of psychical capacities, paralysis of the body, and the limited window of time, considerable material must be fit into a handful of dream-images. Hence, the processes of condensation and displacement so central to the dream-work a...

For Freud, the restriction of psychical capacities and the limited time-window during sleep requires that considerable material be fit into a handful of dream-images. Hence, the dream-work (condensation of multiple ideas into a single image, displacement of affect or intention from one image to another, etc.) is not only indexed to unconscious proc...

The neuropsychoanalytic theory of repression as premature automatization is a major clinical contribution of neuropsychoanalysis. One of its clinical implications is that psychoanalysis works with (declarative) derivatives of the repressed to gradually automatize new non-declarative action plans that better meet one’s needs. This supposes a certain...

Neuropsychoanalysis in an interdisciplinary field that combines findings from the neurosciences with those of psychoanalysis. These are two disciplines that have traditionally not spoken to each other, with neuroscience prioritizing objective study of the brain and psychoanalysis privileging a subjective approach to the mind. However, there cannot...

Critics of Lacanian neuropsychoanalysis are quick to invoke Lacan’s prioritization of the symbolic over any sort of naturalism or reliance on biology. Such a move serves to discredit any attempt at integrating Lacanian psychoanalysis with neuroscience. Nevertheless, this view is untenable in light of Lacan’s several (non-reductive) references to an...

Psychoanalysis is increasingly absent from undergraduate education, especially in an age dominated by neuroscientific and cognitive approaches. Students often encounter psychoanalysis through other fields (typically in the humanities) or learn about psychoanalysis as an outdated theory. This educational barrier contributes to the increased difficul...

Lacanian Discourse Analysis (LDA) refers to a broad category of qualitative research methods that study structural aspects of speech from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective. LDA has previously been applied to a wide range of cultural materials such as books, newspapers, clinical interviews, political speeches, film scripts, and court documents....

This chapter considers the foundational nature of the discipline of neuropsychoanalysis as a dialogic field. Various contributions and possibilities opened by neuropsychoanalysis - in theoretical work, clinical practice, research, and the social setting of psychoanalysis - can be indexed to its dialogic structure. At its most fundamental, neuropsyc...

I read Mark Solms’s commentary with deep appreciation and thanks. Such dialogue is precisely what I hope will arise out of these papers. As the commentary makes clear, linking neuroscience and psychoanalysis opens new frameworks for discussing different analytic views. This is one way neuropsychoanalysis can advance psychoanalytic discourse. I emp...

Jouissance refers to an excess enjoyment beyond (yet tied to) speech and representation. From the perspective of some Lacanian analysts, jouissance is precisely what testifies against any relationship to the brain—jouissance “slips” out of cognition. On the contrary, it is argued here that jouissance has a central place in contemporary neuropsychoa...

Jouissance is one of Jacques Lacan’s most impenetrable concepts. Yet it is essential to Lacan’s view of sex. The term is sometimes translated as “enjoyment,” but this misses key features of the concept, notably its “traumatic,” excessive character. This excess points to a structural negativity within the subject (i.e., the real), an original split...

In parts 1 and 2 of this Lacanian neuropsychoanalytic series, surplus prediction error was presented as a neural correlate of the Lacanian concept of jouissance. Affective consciousness (a key source of prediction error in the brain) impels the work of cognition, the predictive work of explaining what is foreign and surprising. Yet this arousal is...

Psychoanalysis prioritizes the subjective experience of the mind. Neuroscience studies the objective aspects of the brain. These different focuses are the advantage—and the difficulty—of a dialogue between the two fields. Some argue that the emergence of “neuropsychoanalysis” reduces the mind to meaningless biological correlates. However, dialogue...

Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the unconscious as the insubstantial gap in experience, largely remains opposed to the neuropsychoanalytic project. This is particularly evident in the title of the PIPOL9 congress: ”The Unconscious and the Brain: Nothing in Common.” Any interface with neuroscience is feared as an abandonment of the unc...

Meta-psychological bridges between neuroscience and psychoanalysis have focused on Freud’s structural model [Kaplan-Solms & Solms, 2002. Clinical studies in neuro-psychoanalysis: Introduction to a depth neuropsychology (2nd ed.). London: Karnac Books; Solms, 2013. The conscious id. Neuropsychoanalysis, 15(1), 5–19]. While other psychoanalytic schoo...