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This paper traces the concept of desire and its meaning in normal discourse through its use in psychoanalysis to some of the findings of affective neuroscience. Recent neuroscientific discoveries about how the brain works are compared with a psychoanalytic view of mental functioning to determine if they are compatible and to understand how they may inform the work of the analyst.
Since the 1980s, when new discoveries in neuroscience began to appear in Time magazine and the New York Times, I have been fascinated by what seemed to me to be obvious corroboration of fundamental Freudian theory. I became increasingly impressed with the biological grounding of modern psychoanalysis and more and more convinced that psychoanalysis was a natural science in search of empirical verification. In chapter four of Modern Psychoanalysis of the Schizophrenic Patient, "A Neurobiogical Approach to Communication" (first formulated in the first edition of this work in 1969), Spotnitz (1985) writes: "[T]he curative process entails, in neuroscientific terms, the reversible deactivation of certain neuronal pathways and the activation of new pathways . . . these . . . can be accomplished through either psychological or chemical measures, or through a combination of both" (p. 81). And, "One unit of communication . . . would be the equivalent . . . of a mouthful of milk" (p. 107). My work with psychotic patients only deepened my conviction that psychoanalysis was grounded in biology. I became more and more convinced. The bizarre behaviors and terrifying quantities of energy in the room left me little doubt that levels of stimulation and states of comfort and discomfort were the most important phenomena I had to work with. How to help transform this bundle of toxic energy into a mind I could understand was a formidable challenge, but the new methods I was learning addressed these problems and left me little doubt that I was working at the mind/body boundary. Because of the pioneering work with schizophrenia of Spotnitz (1985, 1988), Clevans (1957), Feldman (1978), Meadow (1996), Liegner (1979, 1980), and many others, modern analysts today are privileged to work on the cutting edge of the quest to reverse the schizophrenic process (Spotnitz, 1985) and other disorders considered to be biological. But the reversibility of schizophrenia...