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The difference between neuroscience and psychoanalysis: Irreducibility of absence to brain states

ABSTRACT There is a difference between neuroscience and psychoanalysis in terms of their primary correlate for subjectivity. Neuroscience defines its discourse in relationship to the materiality of the brain – something that is present – whereas one of the defining features of psychoanalysis is its relationship to problematic forms of absence, namely, unconscious mental processes. One central concern in this regard is the proposition of unconscious mental processes as a wish-fulfillment. In this paper, the logic of the unconscious as a wish-fulfillment is mobilized as a type of knowledge having significant value for understanding neuroscience as a social and historical community. From this perspective, one of the central problems of neuroscience, the “hard problem of consciousness,” is framed not as a problem of neurological correlation but of problematic experience itself. This reframing of the hard problem of consciousness suggests that in order to bring neuroscience and psychoanalysis together, theorists need to think principles of absence. This can be explored with the metaphysics of absence, where indeterminacy and incompleteness become central, and also in the psychoanalytic formulation of the death drive, where we reach the limit of conscious mastery and control. From this foundation, neuroscience and psychoanalysis may find productive dialogue in constructing an “absential science” which would allow a space for new theory of the human relationship to sex (libido) and death (mortality). This paper argues that such new theory is necessary because the future development of neuroscientific technologies could transform fundamental experiences of absence which structure subjective discourse.