Neuro-psychoanalysis: a new revolution?

In this brief article we will explain the current connections between psychoanalytic concepts, like Ego or Id, and Neurology and the computational study of the episodic memory for artificial agents. We will refer to the book by Solms and Turnbull, "The Brain and the Inner World" and to the recent work by Andreas Gruber at the Vienna University.

In 1923, Freud recognized that the rational part of the mind is not necessarily conscious: consciousness was not a fundamental organizing principle of the architecture of the mind. Freud attributed the functional properties previously assigned to the system Conscious-Preconscious to the "Ego", being conscious only a small portion of the Ego´s activities. Its main property was the capacity for inhibition. Freud thought of the capacity to inhibit drive energies, the basis of all the Ego´s rational. Consciousness over time allows the development of what Damasio (1999) calls an "autobiographical self". In psychoanalytic terms, the core "self" might be described as a perception of the current state of the "Id", whereas the autobiographical self is synonymous with the "Ego". Episodic memory is the fundamental element of the "autobiographical self". Following to Schacter (1996), the episodic memory system allows explicitly to recall the personal incidents that define the lives of human beings. Very recently, Andreas Gruber (2007) at the Vienna University, has built a computational model of episodic memory that is based on Freud´s Ego-Superego-Id personality model. A pre-decision module, representing the Freudian "Id", consists of the drives and the basic emotions modules. In this model, low-level decision making is done. If a drive is very high, the system will try to bring the drive back into its balanced range. By the other side, perceived situations are handed over to the the high-level decision making module: it represents the "Ego". Decision module interacts with the episodic memory by searching for similar situations to the current one including their emotional rating. A behavior may be triggered directly by a complex emotion while reactive responses arise from the pre-decision module, whereas routines are longer sequences of actions stored in the procedural memory.

It is very curious to verify that the Freudian paradigm, always impugned by the absence of scientific methodological rigour, currently is guiding the search in Neurology and Artificial Intelligence. Are we witnessing a new and revolutionary synthesis?