Psychoanalysis and the Mind-Body Problem

Psychoanalysis and the Mind-Body Problem
Author: Jon Mills
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2022-04-28
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000578909

Winner of the 2022 NAAP Gradiva Award for Best Edited Book In this volume, internationally acclaimed psychoanalysts, philosophers, and scholars of humanities examine the mind-body problem and provide differing analyses on the nature of mind, unconscious structure, mental properties, qualia, and the contours of consciousness. Given that disciplines from the humanities and the social sciences to neuroscience cannot agree upon the nature of consciousness—from what constitutes psychic reality to mental properties, psychoanalysis has a unique perspective that is largely ignored by mainstream paradigms. This book provides a comprehensive exploration of the mind-body problem in various psychoanalytic schools of thought, including philosophical and metapsychological points of view. Psychoanalysis and the Mind-Body Problem will be of interest to psychoanalysts, philosophers, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, academics, and those generally interested in the humanities, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind.

Minding the Body

Minding the Body
Author: Alessandra Lemma
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2014-08-13
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 131763733X

Minding the Body: The Body in Psychoanalysis and Beyond outlines the value of a psychoanalytic approach to understanding the body and its vicissitudes and for addressing these in the context of psychoanalytic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. The chapters cover a broad but esoteric range of subjects that are not often discussed within psychoanalysis such as the function of breast augmentation surgery, the psychic origins of hair, the use made of the analyst’s toilet, transsexuality and the connection between dermatological conditions and necrophilic fantasies. The book also reaches ‘beyond the couch’ to consider the nature of reality television makeover show. The book is based on the Alessandra Lemma’s extensive clinical experience as a psychoanalyst and psychologist working in a range of public and private health care settings with patients for whom the body is the primary presenting problem or who have made unconscious use of the body to communicate their psychic pain. Minding the Body draws on detailed clinical examples that vividly illustrate how the author approaches these clinical presentations in the consulting room and, as such, provides insights to the practicing clinician that will support their attempts at formulating patients’ difficulties psychoanalytically and for how to helps such patients. It will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health workers, academics and literary readers interested in the body, sexuality and gender.

Mind-Body Problems

Mind-Body Problems
Author: John Horgan
Publisher: Independently Published
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2019-01-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781731440488

Science journalist John Horgan presents a radical new perspective on the mind-body problem and related issues such as consciousness, free will, morality and the meaning of life. Horgan argues that science will never discover an objectively true solution to the mind-body problem because such a solution does not exist. Horgan explores his thesis by delving into the professional and personal lives of nine mind-body experts, including neuroscientist Christof Koch, cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, child psychologist Alison Gopnik, complexologist Stuart Kauffman, legal scholar and psychoanalyst Elyn Saks, philosopher Owen Flanagan, novelist Rebecca Goldstein, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, and economist Deirdre McCloskey.

Finding the Body in the Mind

Finding the Body in the Mind
Author: Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2018-03-26
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429913788

Since the 1990s many different scientific disciplines have intensified their interest in the so called 'mind-body-problem': psychoanalysis, philosophy, academic psychology, cognitive science and modern neuroscience. The conceptualization of how the mind works has changed completely, and this has profound implications for clinical psychoanalytical practice as well as for theorizing in contemporary psychoanalysis. The question of how unconscious fantasies and conflicts, as well as traumatic experiences, can be understood and worked through is, and has been, one of the central topics of psychoanalysis. Interdisciplinary studies from the fields of embodied cognitive science, epigenetics, and cognitive neuroscience offer challenging explanations of the functions in the analysts mind which might allow him to create spontaneous associations through which he unconsciously 'understands' the traumatic, embodied experiences of the patient.

The Conscious Body

The Conscious Body
Author: Perrin Elisha
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2011
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN:

The author takes readers through Western history to a comprehensive review of Freud's formative theories, the adaptations of psychotherapeutic theory by thinkers such as Kohut and Klein, and beyond, to modern attachment theory and the fascinating findings of neuropsychological studies. Elisha provides ample illustration of how the mostly unexamined beliefs about the body that we all share may impede efforts to work with body-based presenting problems such as psychosomatic disorders and eating disorders, and even with disorders less associated with the body, such as depression. Ultimately, this 'psychoanalysis of psychoanalysis' will lead mental health practitioners to see psychotherapy's view of the mind and body as not incorrect, but rather, incomplete.

Self and Emotional Life

Self and Emotional Life
Author: Adrian Johnston
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2013-06-11
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 023153518X

Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou defy theoretical humanities' deeply-entrenched resistance to engagements with the life sciences. Rather than treat biology and its branches as hopelessly reductive and politically suspect, they view recent advances in neurobiology and its adjacent scientific fields as providing crucial catalysts to a radical rethinking of subjectivity. Merging three distinct disciplines—European philosophy from Descartes to the present, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and affective neuroscience—Johnston and Malabou triangulate the emotional life of affective subjects as conceptualized in philosophy and psychoanalysis with neuroscience. Their experiments yield different outcomes. Johnston finds psychoanalysis and neurobiology have the potential to enrich each other, though affective neuroscience demands a reconsideration of whether affects can be unconscious. Investigating this vexed issue has profound implications for theoretical and practical analysis, as well as philosophical understandings of the emotions. Malabou believes scientific explorations of the brain seriously problematize established notions of affective subjectivity in Continental philosophy and Freudian-Lacanian analysis. She confronts philosophy and psychoanalysis with something neither field has seriously considered: the concept of wonder and the cold, disturbing visage of those who have been affected by disease or injury, such that they are no longer affected emotionally. At stake in this exchange are some of philosophy's most important claims concerning the relationship between the subjective mind and the objective body, the structures and dynamics of the unconscious dimensions of mental life, the role emotion plays in making us human, and the functional differences between philosophy and science.

Body-Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis

Body-Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis
Author: Riccardo Lombardi
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2016-11-25
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317329260

The conflict and dissociation between the Body and the Mind have determinant implications in the context of our current clinical practice, and are an important source of internal and relational disturbances. Body-Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis proposes the concept as a new hypothesis, different from traumatic dissociation or states of splitting. This approach opens the door to a clinical confrontation with extreme forms of mental disturbance, such as psychosis or borderline disorders, and strengthens the relational power of the analytic encounter, through a focus on the internal sensory/emotional axis in both analyst and analysand. The book details this importance of the analyst’s intrasubjective relationship with the analysand in constructing new developmental horizons, starting from the body-mind exchange of the two participants. Body-Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis will be of use to students, beginners in psychotherapy, mental health practitioners and seasoned psychoanalysts.

Creative States of Mind

Creative States of Mind
Author: Patricia Townsend
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2019-03-04
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429620942

What is it like to be an artist? Drawing on interviews with professional artists, this book takes the reader inside the creative process. The author, an artist and a psychotherapist, uses psychoanalytic theory to shed light on fundamental questions such as the origin of new ideas and the artist’s state of mind while working. Based on interviews with 33 professional artists, who reflect on their experiences of creating new works of art, as well as her own artistic practice, Patricia Townsend traces the trajectory of the creative process from the artist’s first inkling or ‘pre-sense’, through to the completion of a work, and its release to the public. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, particularly the work of Donald Winnicott, Marion Milner and Christopher Bollas, the book presents the artist’s process as a series of interconnected and overlapping stages, in which there is a movement between the artist’s inner world, the outer world of shared ‘reality’, and the spaces in-between. Creative States of Mind: Psychoanalysis and the Artist’s Process fills an important gap in the psychoanalytic theory of art by offering an account of the full trajectory of the artist’s process based on the evidence of artists themselves. It will be useful to artists who want to understand more about their own processes, to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists in their clinical work, and to anyone who studies the creative process.

Imagination and the Meaningful Brain

Imagination and the Meaningful Brain
Author: Arnold H. Modell
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2003
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 9780262134255

An exploration of the biology of meaning that integrates the role of subjective processes with current knowledge of brain/mind function.