Cathexis Revisited Corticolimbic Resonance and the Adaptive Control of Memorya

Several issues that Freud (1895) addressed in his Project, a “psychology for neurol-ogists, ” remain fundamental problems for a neural model of mental processes. By theorizing how neurons could represent experience and organize behavior adaptively, Freud confronted the problem of establishing memories in the same neural mechanism that must be immutable in response to perceptual events. That is, according to Freud there is an inherent inconsistency between the changes that must occur in the functions of neurons in order for memory traces to be formed and the stability that must also be present in order for perceptual processing to be unprejudiced. By proposing a neural architecture for motivating cognition and behavior adaptively, he attempted to under-stand how needs and values come to shape the structure of memory and behavior. Per-haps most importantly, by framing his neurophysiological model to address broad psy-chological questions, Freud proposed a specific theoretical approach for bringing the evolutionary insights of nineteenth-century biology to bear on practical questions of human behavior. In this paper we revisit Freud’s neurophysiological speculations in light of current thinking in cognitive neuroscience. For important aspects of Freud’s approach, such a