PubMed1991
The synthesis of psychodynamic and neuroscientific data may be advanced by the study of similarly configured specific patterns of defense along continua from the normal and neurotic mental mechanisms of defenses, through what might be termed neuropsychiatric defenses influenced by the neurological state, to the more clearly neurological cortical reactions. These similar patterns and continua are the particularly human way brain adds its flavor of organism to mind, and the way in which all the psychodynamic mechanisms are specifically imbedded in brain. A purely psychological psychodynamics lacking this medical perspective fails to model human mental processes and reflects problems with artificial intelligence models that do not model brain. The pathological reactions that we address in psychiatry and neuropsychiatry interfere with and thereby reveal parallel processing features in (1) analogical and metaphorical thinking; (2) reduplication, redundancy, and repetitiveness; (3) self, person, and environmental recognition, including transference processes; (4) approximation and statistical inference; (5) spatiality and motor control; (6) affectivity, perception of sensations and sexuality; (7) projective mechanisms; and (8) problem solving by optimization, vectorial summation, and the mutual interaction of interconnected agencies. The new concepts in artificial intelligence built upon brainlike structures called neural nets portend great economies, emergent natural features that are more like human processes, and hierarchical and cyclic organizational demands. Medical psychoanalysts who comprehend dynamic and brain mechanisms and can describe them in terms that refer to both domains and their interaction should find increasing theoretical and practical convergence of their work with the emerging study and modeling of these processes by new forms of computers.