Living within the cellular envelope: subjectivity and self from an evolutionary neuropsychoanalytic perspective

A growing literature has been exploring the implications of reconciling psychoanalytic understandings of human behavior with the research findings of neuroscience. This essay proposes a new linking perspective--neurodarwinian psychoanalysis--as a way to revise the predominantly disembodied nature of existing analytic theory by grounding it in the biological realities of human nature, development, and psychopathogenesis. Beginning with a focus on the evolutionary significance of the cellular envelope within which all living organisms exist, it provides theoretical and clinical examples of how evolved neural assemblies in the brain play a key role in the representational depictions of both typical and atypical human predicaments. Conventional psychoanalytic concepts of such theoretical entities as the self and tripartite concretizations of intrapsychic tropes are reformulated in terms of naturally selected neural innervations. Accordingly, dynamically unconscious functioning and psychoanalytically-informed therapeutic process are considered as crucial adaptations that warrant natural selection.