Biology of Freedom

by Ansermet, Francois; Magistretti, Pierre

• ISBN13: 9781590512227
• ISBN10: 1590512227
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-12-17
• Publisher: Other Press Professional

Summary

This groundbreaking book delivers a much needed bridge between the neurosciences and psychoanalysis. Freud hoped that the neurosciences would offer support for his psychoanalysis theories at some point in the future: both disciplines, after all, agree that experience leaves traces in the mind. But even today, as we enter the twenty-first century, all too many scientists and analysts maintain that each side has wholly different models of the origin and nature of those traces. What constitutes human experience, how does this experience shape us, and how, if at all, do we change our lives? Psychoanalysis and the neurosciences have failed to communicate about these questions, when they have not been frankly antagonistic. But in Biology of Freedom Francois Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti are at last breaking new ground. This fully illustrated account, rigorous yet lucid and entirely accessible, shows how the plasticity of the brain's neural network allows for successive inscriptions, transcriptions, and retranscriptions of experience, leading to the constitution of an inner reality, an unconscious psychic life unique to each individual. In what amounts to a paradigm shift based on the concept of plasticity, this elegant, seamless collaboration of a psychoanalyst and a neuroscientist bridges the gap between disciplines formerly believed to be incompatible. Ansermet and Magistretti have opened up new areas of exploration of the mind/body connection and profoundly new ways in which to understand the bodily underpinnings of personal freedom, identity, and change.

Author Biography

Francois Ansermet

Francois Ansermet is a psychoanalyst, professor, and head of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the School of Medicine at the University of Geneva. He is member of the World Association of Psychoanalysis (AMP).


Pierre Magistretti

Pierre Magistretti is a professor of neuroscience, Co-director of the Brain Mind Institute of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale (EPFL) in Lausanne, and Director of the Center for Psychiatric Neurosciences at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois and University of Lausanne. He holds the International Chair 2007-2008 at the Collège de France, Paris. He has served as the president of the European Federation of Neuroscience Societies (FENS).


Susan Fairfield

Susan Fairfield is an editor, translator, and poet. She is also the author of papers on literary criticism, a psychoanalyst, and co-editor of Bringing the Plague: Toward a Postmodern Psychoanalysis. She lives in the Bay Area of California.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Preface	p. xiii
The Polar Bear and the Whale: What Plasticity Entails	p. 1
Diego and Haydn: Perception and Memories	p. 15
Inhibition on the Shore of Lake Trasimene: What Becomes of Perception	p. 37
Aplysia, Rat, Man: From Experience to the Trace	p. 49
Forgetting the Name Signorelli: Synaptic Trace and Psychic Trace	p. 75
Claire and the Pope: Perceptions and Emotions	p. 95
Milk and the Sound of the Door: Mental Traces and Somatic States	p. 107
Man and Wolf: Fantasy, Object, and Action	p. 119
An Unexpected Phone Call: How Drives Originate and What Becomes of Them	p. 133
Incest and the Refrigerator: Pleasure and Unpleasure	p. 147
Freud and James: Let's Be Synthetic	p. 171
Redibis Non Morieris: The Plasticity of Becoming and the Becoming of Plasticity	p. 179
The Couple at a Red Light: The Influences of Internal Reality	p. 193
The Hour of the Traces: The Unconscious, Memory, and Repression	p. 213
The Ferrari and the Trailer: Beyond the Fantasy Scenario	p. 229
Afterword	p. 241
References	p. 245
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