It is hard to know with whom Ramus ^{Reference Ramus1} is most angry. Is it the esteemed neuroscientists (Damasio, Friston, Kandel, LeDoux), whom he considers to have lent credence to psychoanalysis? Or is it the neuropsychoanalysts (largely engaged via only one position paper by Panksepp and Solms and an article co-authored by Carhart-Harris), who represent to him another attempt to ‘rehabilitate’ Freud? Or is it the French psychoanalysts, who, he argues, harm patients and hold back ‘evidence-based psychiatry’? Or is it Freud himself, whose ideas Ramus regards as both unoriginal - Plato and Pierre Janet said it all before - and malignant?

The historian of psychoanalysis John Forrester would not be surprised by Ramus's mode of critique. Forrester noted in the late 20th century that the ‘classic manoeuvre’ by those opposing Freud is to argue that ‘if what he says is right, he stole it from somewhere else […] On the other hand, if what he says is wrong, it belongs entirely to him and it is we who are the fools if we believe it.’ ^{Reference Forrester2} Ramus's scattergun attack on neuropsychoanalysis should, indeed, be seen as the latest skirmish in the interminable Freud Wars.

But what Ramus's attack on neuropsychoanalysis obscures - by interpreting neuropsychoanalysis as, ultimately, an attempt simply to ‘rehabilitate’ Freud - is what is arguably most interesting about it (at least from my perspective as a historian of science and psychiatry). For although neuropsychoanalysis situates itself in proximity to Freudian psychoanalysis, it is a distinct project. ^{Reference Papoulias, Callard, Kirchhoff and Scharbert3} It differs in several of its scientific methods, terminologies and objects; the canon on which it draws; and some of its modes of clinical treatment. ^{Reference Fotopoulou, Pfaff and Conway4} And consider Solms and Panksepp, whom Ramus, like many, takes to be the central architects of neuropsychoanalysis. There is something both fascinating and unexpected about a neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst (Solms) joining forces with an affective neuroscientist (Panksepp) whose research career has been built on electrical stimulation studies involving non-human animals (which vocalise, but do not talk; cf. psychoanalysis as ‘the talking cure’). Their partnership is built on their separate and conjoined challenge to dominant models of the emotions in cognitive and affective neuroscience ^{Reference Panksepp5,Reference Solms and Nersessian6} - and affect, indeed, forms one of the main lines of neuropsychoanalytic research. Both would virulently disagree with Ramus's claim that the ideas they attribute to neuropsychoanalysis ‘are already mainstream within cognitive, social and affective psychology and neuroscience’.

To understand the specificities of ‘neuropsychoanalysis’ - in relation to as well as in contradistinction from psychoanalysis - requires, at the very least, reading the peer-reviewed journal Neuropsychoanalysis (not referenced by Ramus), which is the central locus for scientific and clinical data, disputation and model-building among neuropsychoanalytic researchers and clinicians, as well as their interlocutors. For Ramus, such efforts would be unnecessary. His consummate lack of doubt as regards what (the heterogeneous practices of) psychoanalysis and neuropsychoanalysis are and do, as well as ‘[w]hat is needed’ for any proper ‘rehabilitation’ of psychoanalysis, ensure that for him any further enquiry would be otiose. His scientific and moral certainty is both remarkable and dismaying.