Editorial on psychoanalytical neuroscience: exploring psychoanalytic concepts with neuroscientific methods

Exploring psychoanalytic concepts with neuroscientific methods” was cross-linked in two Frontiers journals, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience and Frontiers in Psychoanalysis and Neuropsychoanalysis. [...]contributing authors could choose to submit to either of those two journals. [...]from the psychoanalytic side, why should psychoanalysts care about neuroscientific studies, and (how) can current psychoanalytical theory and practice benefit from their results?” As expected, authors responded differently to this question. On a more theoretical level, results from neuroimaging studies on psychotherapeutic treatment may allow one to disentangle the complex processes during psychotherapy, by relating the brain activation patterns to results from previous experimental studies—for example, linking them to previous research on interpersonal attachment (Buchheim et al., 2013), self-related processing (Fischmann et al., 2013), or emotional memory (de Greck et al., 2013). Changes in brain activity of somatoform disorder patients during emotional empathy after multimodal psychodynamic psychotherapy.