A cat is not a battleship: thoughts on the meaning of "neuropsychoanalysis"

As a conspicuously hybrid entity, neuropsychoanalysis enjoins one to look critically at its assumptions about knowledge and subjectivity as one tries to understand how its un-hyphenated halves relate to one another. The author looks at the differences between mind (which is grounded in subjective experience) and brain (which is an objectively described neurobiological entity), and suggests that neuropsychoanalytic writers are inclined to acknowledge but then disregard the unique, irreducible nature of lived experience, and the fundamental differences between the psychoanalytic mind (which requires an experiencing subject) and the brain (which is a neuronal aggregate). The author offers a philosophical basis for contending that there are potential dangers for psychoanalysis when neuroscience is misrecognized in its fundamental differences and injudiciously employed as a psychoanalytic partner in order to answer questions that properly belong to the language and conceptual architecture of psychoanalysis.