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.

The hilarious underground bestseller about one woman’s pursuit of carnal pleasure—and the philosophy that gets in the way. When Renee Feuer goes to college, one of the first lessons she tries to learn is how to liberate herself from the restrictions of her Orthodox Jewish background. As she discovers the pleasures of the body, Renee also learns about the excitements of the mind. She enrolls as a philosophy graduate student, then marries Noam Himmel, the world-renowned mathematician. But Renee discovers that being married to a genius is a less elevating experience than expected, and that the allure of sex still beckons. Her quest for a solution to the conflicting demands of sensuality and spirit is a touching and always humorous adventure. “Terrific. . . . The first fifty or so pages are so clever and funny that I had to put the book down and go to the fridge to cool off.”—The New York Times Book Review “A terrific first novel . . . Goldenstein is intelligent and perceptive, bawdy and witty—an articulate writer of great talent.”—The Los Angeles Times Book Review

This book offers a new theoretical framework within which to understand “the mind-body problem”. The crux of this problem is phenomenal experience, which Thomas Nagel famously described as “what it is like” to be a certain living creature. David Chalmers refers to the problem of “what-it-is-like” as “the hard problem” of consciousness and claims that this problem is so “hard” that investigators have either just ignored the issue completely, investigated a similar (but distinct) problem, or claimed that there is literally nothing to investigate – that phenomenal experience is illusory. This book contends that phenomenal experience is both very real and very important. Two specific “biological naturalist” views are considered in depth. One of these two views, in particular, seems to be free from problems; adopting something along the lines of this view might finally allow us to make sense of the mind-body problem. An essential read for anyone who believes that no satisfactory solution to “the mind-body problem” has yet been discovered.

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.

In this volume, Brakel raises questions about conventions in the study of mind in three disciplines—psychoanalysis, philosophy of mind, and experimental philosophy. She illuminates new understandings of the mind through interdisciplinary challenges to views long-accepted. Here she proposes a view of psychoanalysis as a treatment that owes its successes largely to its biological nature—biological in its capacity to best approximate the extinction of problems arising owing to aversive conditioning. She also discusses whether or not "the mental" can have any real ontological standing, arguing that a form of reductive physicalism can be sufficient ontologically, but that epistemological considerations require a branch of non-reductive physicalism. She then notes the positive implications of this view for psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Finally, she investigates the role of "consistency" in method and content, toward which experimental philosophers strive. In essence, Brakel articulates the different sets of challenges pertaining to: a) ancient dilemmas such as the mind/body problem; b) longstanding debates about the nature of therapeutic action in psychoanalysis; and c) new core questions arising in the relatively young discipline of experimental philosophy.

Unconscious Incarnations considers the status of the body in psychoanalytic theory and practice, bringing Freud and Lacan into conversation with continental philosophy to explore the heterogeneity of embodied life. By doing so, the body is no longer merely an object of scientific inquiry but also a lived body, a source of excessive intuition and affectivity, and a raw animality distinct from mere materiality. The contributors to this volume consist of philosophers, psychoanalytic scholars, and practitioners whose interdisciplinary explorations reformulate traditional psychoanalytic concepts such as trauma, healing, desire, subjectivity, and the unconscious. Collectively, they build toward the conclusion that phenomenologies of embodiment move psychoanalytic theory and practice away from representationalist models and toward an incarnational approach to psychic life. Under such a carnal horizon, trauma manifests as wounds and scars, therapy as touch, subjectivity as bodily boundedness, and the unconscious ‘real’ as an excessive remainder of flesh. Unconscious incarnations signal events where the unsignifiable appears among signifiers, the invisible within the visible, and absence within presence. In sum: where the flesh becomes word and the word retains its flesh. Unconscious Incarnations seeks to evoke this incarnational approach in order to break through tacit taboos toward the body in psychology and psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary work will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as philosophy scholars and clinical psychologists.