{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.0234009360374415, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005850234009360375, 'mean_word_length': 5.195652173913044, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 1, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A curious intimacy

This is an ambitious work, short but dense, which examines the function of the arts in the light of neuropsychoanalysis. Neuropsychoanalysis involves bringing together psychoanalysis, with its interpersonal methodology, and the experimental findings of neuroscience. Discoveries in neuroscience are providing ‘hard science’ confirmation, at least in broad terms, of the central tenets of Freud’s thought, for instance the drives, libido, repression, sublimation and the rooting of the ego in the body. The work of Solms, Sheverin, Damasio and others is doing what Freud would have done had he had the means, i.e. replacing the speculations of his abandoned Project for a Scientific Psychology with empirical evidence that neurologists of his day lacked the technology to provide. In addition to furnishing welcome external validation of key aspects of the psychoanalytic approach, Oppenheim contends that work in this area, far from supporting physiological reductionism, has undone the Cartesian split of mind and body, subject and object, demonstrating how the perceiver and perceived can never ultimately be disentangled. Likewise, while mind cannot be separated from neural activity, it cannot be reduced to it either. The basic characteristics of the neuropsychoanalytic approach to the arts are expounded in Part 1, Art and the brain. In Chapter 1, Creativity and biology, Oppenheim sets out how the subjective ‘I’ begins its development through the transformation of information from the body’s viscera to the brain. Emotions and the inner world are therefore inseparable from the body; they are shaped by it and in turn feed back to it, helping it to regulate itself. Oppenheim sees artistic creativity as having a specific role in this system as a means of processing and transforming neural and emotional stimuli. Crucially, artistic processes enable this transformation to occur unconsciously as well as consciously. Indeed, the material that is processed will not always be amenable to conscious representation. In carrying out this function, the arts, according to Oppenheim, fulfil a homeostatic function, helping the body to regulate its relationship with its internal and external environments so as to maintain the dynamic equilibrium necessary for life. Oppenheim is mainly concerned here not with the work of art as a product but with how the creative processes are experienced by those who engage in them. A major point is that the arts enhance the awareness of self, Psychodynamic Practice Vol. 14, No. 2, May 2008, 219–238