In the Mind Fields - Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis

Zusatztext 77504007 Informationen zum Autor CASEY SCHWARTZ has worked as a staff writer at Newsweek/The Daily Beast, where she covered neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times and The New York Sun. She lives in New York City. Klappentext "Everywhere I looked it seemed that we were being defined by what our brains were doing . . . Everywhere! there were hucksters and geniuses! all trying to colonize the new world of the brain." "I'd never been a science person!" Casey Schwartz declares at the beginning of her far-reaching quest to understand how we define ourselves. Nevertheless! in her early twenties! she was drawn to the possibilities and insights emerging on the frontiers of brain research. Over the next decade she set out to meet the neuroscientists and psychoanalysts engaged with such questions as! How do we perceive the world! make decisions! or remember our childhoods? Are we using the brain? Or the mind? To what extent is it both? Schwartz discovered that neuroscience and psychoanalysis are engaged in a conflict almost as old as the disciplines themselves. Many neuroscientists! if they think about psychoanalysis at all! view it as outdated! arbitrary! and subjective! while many psychoanalysts decry neuroscience as lacking the true texture of human experience. With passion and humor! Schwartz explores the surprising efforts to find common ground. Beginning among the tweedy Freudians of North London and proceeding to laboratories! consulting rooms! and hospital bedsides around the world! Schwartz introduces a cast of pioneering characters! from Mark Solms! a South African neuropsychoanalyst with an expertise in dreams! to David Silvers! a psychoanalyst practicing in New York! to Harry! a man who has lost his use of language in the wake of a stroke but who nevertheless benefits from Silvers's analytic technique. In the Mind Fields is a riveting view of the convictions! obsessions! and struggles of those who dedicate themselves to the effort to understand the mysteries of inner life. The last thing we were assigned to read before Christmas was Freud’s evocative watershed paper “Mourning and Melancholia.” In this dense work, Freud puzzles over the question of depression, though he doesn’t call it that, and what makes melancholia different from mourning. I fell into the text, taking in Freud’s formulations. Both mourning and melancholia, Freud says, are, to begin with, states of withdrawal from the world, and both are prompted by some real, external loss.   The paper is short but it brims with ideas that changed the course of psychoanalytic theory in the years to follow. It is considered the work that led to the concept of the superego, the third and final layer of Freud’s so-called metapsychology. But in truth, it was not this breakthrough in the mapping of the mental structure that most grasped my interest. I was thinking of my father.   As I was reading Freud’s essay, my father, a novelist and radio personality, was mired in depression, debilitated almost beyond recognition, for what had then been nearly three years. I had last seen him on my twenty-fourth birthday, two weeks before I left for London, for graduate school. My mother and father had both flown from New York to California, where I lived at the time, to celebrate this birthday with me. It was a disaster. I saw that my father, off the plane, was unreachable, a person in another dimension.   That night, we went to a boxing match in downtown Los Angeles. David, the boyfriend I lived with, was an obsessive boxing fan and it seemed the natural way to spend the evening. David and my brother Adam and my chic mother in her black cashmere uniform and my walking corpse of a father and I all sat in a row and watched two heavyweight champions, Sam “The Nigerian Nightmare” Peter and James “Lights Out” Tone...

Product details

• Authors: Casey Schwartz
• Publisher: Pantheon Schocken Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 25.08.2015
• EAN: 9780307911520
• ISBN: 978-0-307-91152-0
• No. of pages: 240
• Dimensions: 153 mm x 218 mm x 23 mm
• Subjects: Guides > Health; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Medicine > Non-clinical medicine