The rehabilitation of the drive in neuropsychoanalysis: from sexuality to self-preservation

The nascent field of neuropsychoanalysis positions itself as a putative bridge between two »historically divided disciplines«. In this chapter, we address this attempt to bridge these two disciplines, through considering a particular scientific and conceptual debate that is taking place within this new field. Neuropsychoanalysis is a diverse and loosely defined interdisciplinary field that comprises the efforts of researchers and clinicians within several branches of both psychoanalysis and the neurosciences to construct a shared space of inquiry in which clinical concepts and findings can be correlated with neuronal data and models. While researchers differ in how they conceptualize the specific contours of this shared space, they tend to converge in their desire to figure out how Freudian concepts might be anchored through neurobiological and anatomico-functional investigations.