Psychanalyse et cognition

Using the exemple of the psychoanalytical approach of brain-injured patients, this article goes on to show that there are fundamental differences in the models of psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Confronting the two disciplines, in particular in the care of patients with brain damage, does nevertheless enable their complexity to be apprehended more fully, so that each discipline can define its particular area, its objects and its limits, without lapsing into reductive shifts and analogies. Using the clinical example of the failure to have awareness of a cognitive and behavioural disability (anosognosia) among brain-damaged patients, the author hypothesises that the issue is, for psychoanalysis, that of the place of cognition in our psychic economy.