As Ebbinghaus (1908) tells us in the opening words of his popular textbook of psychology, “psychology has a long past but only a short history.” In my opinion, there are three foundational moments in the history of psychology and, paradoxically, all three are moments of great advancement in biology. First, in the long past of psychology, psychology did not exist as such but was part of philosophy. It is extremely interesting to understand why it has been necessary, at one point (...) of time in the sixteenth century, to invent this field and to create a signifier – namely “psychology” – separate from philosophy, which enabled the field to distinguish itself from philosophy (Mengal, 2000/2001). In this century of religious violence, bare corpses lay everywhere and progresses in anatomy are major. In 1540, the German religious reformer Philippe Melanchthon publishes a book which comments the De anima of Aristotle and he completes the Aristotelian text with a long treaty of anatomy (Mengal, 2000/2001). On the basis of this new knowledge, Melanchthon attributes functions to the body which were previously reserved for the soul. The brain becomes the principal organ of sensory functions and displaces the heart as the seat of emotional life and of thought. To the Aristotelian position that all living beings, whether plant, animal, or human, to varying degrees possess a soul which organizes the body, Melanchthon opposes a dualistic anthropology which divides the human in body and soul. The two-dimensional “anthropologia” is articulated in “anatomia,” science of body, and “psychologia,” science of the soul. It is this new anthropology that is diffused into the world of the Reformation (Mengal, 2000/2001). The Dutch reformer Snellius (1594), for example, defines the body and the soul by their respective essential property: “The rational soul of man is the thought that, coupled with the body, completes man. (…) The physical things closer to natural bodies that move naturally, have an extension and for that reason occupy a space. (…) The faculty of the rational soul is the mind or will. Thought is the faculty of the soul to discourse and think about things which are and which are not.”1 (Snellius, 1594, pp. 26–27). It is as a philosopher that René Descartes proposes his dualist vision much in line with the reformist opinions. Descartes dissects animals and human cadavers and is familiar with the research on the flow of blood (Fuchs, 2001). He comes to the conclusion that the body is a complex device that is capable of moving without the soul, thus contradicting the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul. The metaphysical order, which states that the body exists by the soul, is broken. (shrink)

How did psychoanalysis attain its prominent cultural position? How did it eclipse rival psychologies and psychotherapies, such that it became natural to bracket Freud with Copernicus and Darwin? Why did Freud 'triumph' to such a degree that we hardly remember his rivals? This book reconstructs the early controversies around psychoanalysis and shows that rather than demonstrating its superiority, Freud and his followers rescripted history. This legend-making was not an incidental addition to psychoanalytic theory but formed its core. Letting the primary (...) material speak for itself, this history demonstrates the extraordinary apparatus by which this would-be science of psychoanalysis installed itself in contemporary societies. Beyond psychoanalysis, it opens up the history of the constitution of the modern psychological sciences and psychotherapies, how they furnished the ideas which we have of ourselves and how these became solidified into indisputable 'facts'. (shrink)

Eliminative materialism is the thesis that our common-sense conception of psychological phenomena constitutes a radically false theory, a theory so fundamentally defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced, rather than smoothly reduced, by completed neuroscience. Our mutual understanding and even our introspection may then be reconstituted within the conceptual framework of completed neuroscience, a theory we may expect to be more powerful by far than the common-sense psychology it displaces, and more substantially (...) integrated within physical science generally. My purpose in this paper is to explore these projections, especially as they bear on (1) the principal elements of common-sense psychology: the propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, etc.), and (2) the conception of rationality in which these elements figure. (shrink)

The phenomenological approach to schizophrenia has undergone something of a renaissance in Anglophone psychiatry in recent years. There has been a proliferation of works that focus on the nature of subjectivity in schizophrenia and related disorders, and that take inspiration from the work of such German and French philosophers as Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, and such classical psychiatrists as Minkowski, Blankenburg, and Binswanger (Rulf 2003; Sass 2001a, 2001b). This trend includes predominantly theoretical articles, which typically incorporate clinical material as well (...) as reviews of empirical and experimental findings in psychopathology. Some very recent examples (since 2000) are studies of .. (shrink)

This article provides a historical overview of the Existential-Phenomenological tradition in psychiatry and psychotherapy, tracing its development from its origin in nineteenth and twentieth century philosophical thought, through its major European psychiatric proponents and schools, to its emergence as an influential approach in North America after World War II. The emphasis is on the implicit themes that provide continuity within this movement as well as on the distinctive contributions of individual thinkers. We conclude with a discussion of the present status (...) and future prospects of this tradition. (shrink)

The mysteries of consciousness have gripped the human imagination for over 2,500 years. At the dawn of the new millennium, Understanding Consciousness provides new solutions to some of the deepest puzzles surrounding its nature and function. Drawing on recent scientific discoveries, Max Velmans challenges conventional reductionist thought, providing an understanding of how consciousness relates to the brain and physical world that is neither dualist, nor reductionist. Understanding Consciousness will be of great interest to psychologists, philosophers, neuroscientists and other professionals concerned (...) with mind/body relationships, and all who care deeply about this subject. (shrink)

Most ?theories of consciousness? are based on vague speculations about the properties of conscious experience. We aim to provide a more solid basis for a science of consciousness. We argue that a theory of consciousness should provide an account of the very processes that allow us to acquire and use information about our own mental states ? the processes underlying introspection. This can be achieved through the construction of information processing models that can account for ?Type-C? processes. Type-C processes can (...) be specified experimentally by identifying paradigms in which awareness of the stimulus is necessary for an intentional action. The Shallice (1988b) framework is put forward as providing an initial account of Type-C processes, which can relate perceptual consciousness to consciously performed actions. Further, we suggest that this framework may be refined through the investigation of the functions of prefrontal cortex. The formulation of our approach requires us to consider fundamental conceptual and methodological issues associated with consciousness. The most significant of these issues concerns the scientific use of introspective evidence. We outline and justify a conservative methodological approach to the use of introspective evidence, with attention to the difficulties historically associated with its use in psychology. (shrink)

I review three answers to the question: How can phenomenology contribute to the experimental cognitive neurosciences? The first approach, neurophenomenology, employs phenomenological method and training, and uses first-person reports not just as more data for analysis, but to generate descriptive categories that are intersubjectively and scientifically validated, and are then used to interpret results that correlate with objective measurements of behaviour and brain activity. A second approach, indirect phenomenology, is shown to be problematic in a number of ways. Indirect phenomenology (...) is generally put to work after the experiment, in critical or creative interpretations of the scientific evidence. Ultimately, however, proposals for the indirect use of phenomenology lead back to methodological questions about the direct use of phenomenology in experimental design. The third approach, 'front-loaded' phenomenology, suggests that the results of phenomenological investigations can be used in the design of empirical ones. Concepts or clarifications that have been worked out phenomenologically may operate as a partial framework for experimentation. (shrink)

Reviews evidence which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. Ss are sometimes unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, unaware of the existence of the response, and unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do (...) so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response. This suggests that though people may not be able to observe directly their cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to report accurately about them. Accurate reports will occur when influential stimuli are salient and are plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not plausible causes. (shrink)

This article presents an interview method which enables us to bring a person, who may not even have been trained, to become aware of his or her subjective experience, and describe it with great precision. It is focused on the difficulties of becoming aware of one’s subjective experience and describing it, and on the processes used by this interview technique to overcome each of these difficulties. The article ends with a discussion of the criteria governing the validity of the descriptions (...) obtained, and then with a brief review of the functions of these descriptions. (shrink)

Many special problems crop up when evolutionary theory turns, quite naturally, to the question of the adaptive value and causal role of consciousness in human and nonhuman organisms. One problem is that -- unless we are to be dualists, treating it as an independent nonphysical force -- consciousness could not have had an independent adaptive function of its own, over and above whatever behavioral and physiological functions it "supervenes" on, because evolution is completely blind to the difference between a conscious (...) organism and a functionally equivalent (Turing Indistinguishable) nonconscious "Zombie" organism: In other words, the Blind Watchmaker, a functionalist if ever there was one, is no more a mind reader than we are. Hence Turing-Indistinguishability = Darwin-Indistinguishability. It by no means follows from this, however, that human behavior is therefore to be explained only by the push-pull dynamics of Zombie determinism, as dictated by calculations of "inclusive fitness" and "evolutionarily stable strategies." We are conscious, and, more important, that consciousness is piggy-backing somehow on the vast complex of unobservable internal activity -- call it "cognition" -- that is really responsible for generating all of our behavioral capacities. Hence, except in the palpable presence of the irrational (e.g., our sexual urges) where distal Darwinian factors still have some proximal sway, it is as sensible to seek a Darwinian rather than a cognitive explanation for most of our current behavior as it is to seek a cosmological rather than an engineering explanation of an automobile's behavior. Let evolutionary theory explain what shaped our cognitive capacity (Steklis & Harnad 1976; Harnad 1996, but let cognitive theory explain our resulting behavior. (shrink)

The last ten years have seen an increasing interest, within cognitive science, in issues concerning the physical body, the local environment, and the complex interplay between neural systems and the wider world in which they function. --œPhysically embodied, environmentally embedded--� approaches thus loom large on the contemporary cognitive scientific scene. Yet many unanswered questions remain, and the shape of a genuinely embodied, embedded science of the mind is still unclear. I begin by sketching a few examples of the approach, and (...) then raise a variety of critical questions concerning its nature and scope. A distinction is drawn between two kinds of appeal to embodiment: 'simple' cases, in which bodily and environmental properties merely constrain accounts that retain the focus on inner organization and processing, and more radical appeals, in which attention to bodily and environmental features is meant to transform both the subject matter and the theoretical framework of cognitive science. (shrink)

The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we have to confront it directly. In this paper, I first isolate the truly hard part of the problem, separating it from more tractable parts and giving an account of why it is so difficult to explain. I critique some recent work that uses reductive methods to address consciousness, and argue that such methods inevitably fail to come to grips with the hardest part of the problem. Once this failure is recognized, the (...) door to further progress is opened. In the second half of the paper, I argue that if we move to a new kind of nonreductive explanation, a naturalistic account of consciousness can be given. I put forward my own candidate for such an account: a nonreductive theory based on principles of structural coherence and organizational invariance, and a double-aspect theory of information. (shrink)

This paper responds to the issues raised by D. Chalmers by offering a research direction which is quite radical because of the way in which methodological principles are linked to scientific studies of consciousness. Neuro-phenomenology is the name I use here to designate a quest to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience, thereby placing myself in the lineage of the continental tradition of Phenomenology. My claim is that the so-called hard problem that animates these Special (...) Issues can only be addressed productively by gathering a research community armed with new pragmatic tools for the development of a science of consciousness. I will claim that no piecemeal empirical correlates, nor purely theoretical principles, will really help us at this stage. We need to turn to a systematic exploration of the only link between mind and consciousness that seems both obvious and natural: the structure of human experience itself. In what follows I motivate my choice by briefly examining the current debate about consciousness at the light of Chalmer’s hard problem. Next, I outline the phenomenological strategy. Finally I conclude by discussing some of the main difficulties and consequences of this strategy. (shrink)

Consciousness fits uneasily into our conception of the natural world. On the most common conception of nature, the natural world is the physical world. But on the most common conception of consciousness, it is not easy to see how it could be part of the physical world. So it seems that to find a place for consciousness within the natural order, we must either revise our conception of consciousness, or revise our conception of nature. In twentieth-century philosophy, this dilemma is (...) posed most acutely in C. D. Broad’s The Mind and its Place in Nature . The phenomena of mind, for Broad, are the phenomena of consciousness. The central problem is that of locating mind with respect to the physical world. Broad’s exhaustive discussion of the problem culminates in a taxonomy of seventeen different views of the mental-physical relation.1 On Broad’s taxonomy, a view might see the mental as nonexistent , as reducible, as emergent, or as a basic property of a substance . The physical might be seen in one of the same four ways. So a four-by-four matrix of views results. At the end, three views are left standing: those on which mentality is an emergent characteristic of either a physical substance or a neutral substance, where in the latter case, the physical might be either emergent or delusive. (shrink)

The paper presents a research programme for the neuroscience of consciousness called 'neurophenomenology' and illustrates it with a recent pilot study . At a theoretical level, neurophenomenology pursues an embodied and large-scale dynamical approach to the neurophysiology of consciousness . At a methodological level, the neurophenomenological strategy is to make rigorous and extensive use of first-person data about subjective experience as a heuristic to describe and quantify the large-scale neurodynamics of consciousness . The paper focuses on neurophenomenology in relation to (...) three challenging methodological issues about incorporating first-person data into cognitive neuroscience: first-person reports can be biased or inaccurate; the process of generating first-person reports about an experience can modify that experience; and there is an 'explanatory gap' in our understanding of how to relate first-person, phenomenological data to third-person, biobehavioural data. (shrink)

This paper analyzes an explicit instantiation of the program of neurophenomenology in a neuroscientific protocol. Neurophenomenology takes seriously the importance of linking the scientific study of consciousness to the careful examination of experience with a specific first-person methodology. My first claim is that such strategy is a fruitful heuristic because it produces new data and illuminates their relation to subjective experience. My second claim is that the approach could open the door to a natural account of the structure of human (...) experience as it is mobilized in itself in such methodology. In this view, generative passages define the type of circulation which explicitly roots the active and disciplined insight the subject has about his/her experience in a biological emergent process. (shrink)

This talk, delivered at De l''autopoièse à la neurophénoménologie: un hommage à Francisco Varela; from autopoiesis to neurophenomenology: a tribute to Francisco Varela, June 18–20, at the Sorbonne in Paris, explicates several links between Varela''s neurophenomenology and his biological concept of autopoiesis.

This article summarily presents the explicitation interview with some examples of interviews. In the first part, referring to three excerpts from protocols, we consider some of the techniques used to guide a subject into an introspective posture. We show how these techniques create conditions conducive to access to pre-reflective knowledge, knowledge stemming from a moment of action experienced by the subject, of which the subject has no knowledge in the mode of reflective consciousness. Some of this knowledge is in fact (...) surprising both for the interviewer and for the interviewee. The experience or the expertise of the subject interviewed is invariably increased as a result. In the second part, we provide a brief insight into the fields of application of the explicitation interview, with reference to three case studies, which are presented in a vivid and detailed way . We conclude with a very brief panorama of the various known fields of application of the explicitation interview. (shrink)

In his Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume asked how people succeed in constructing edifices of belief from their limited store of sensory impressions and derived ideas. Hume could adduce no evidence to support the existence of an inner self that intelligently manipulates impressions and ideas. At the same time, he recognized in himself the conviction that there is inner self. Today, there is a growing conviction among cognitive neuro-scientists, behavioral scientists, science journalists, and their publics that neuroscience is on (...) the verge of providing us with the ultimate solution to ‘‘Hume’s problem.’’ This article describes two approaches to this solution. (shrink)

Can the psychodynamics of the mind be correlated with neurodynamic processes in the brain? The book revisits a question that scientists and psychoanalysts have been asking for more than a century. It brings together experts from Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Psychiatry and Neurology to consider this question.

The main objective of this article is to capitalise on many years of research, and of practice, relating to the use of introspection in a research context, and thus to provide an initial outline description of introspection, while developing an introspection of introspection. After a description of the context of this research, I define the institutional conditions which would enable the renewal of introspection as a research methodology. Then I describe three aspects of introspective practice: 1) introspection as a process (...) of becoming aware, theorized through Husserl's model of consciousness modes; 2) introspection as recollection, through the model of retention and awakening in Husserl's theory of memory; 3) the use of universal descriptive categories for the description of all lived experiences, as a guide for skilled practice of introspection in research. Finally I examine the question of the validation of introspective data, suggesting a strong distinction between the ethical criterion and the epistemic criterion of truth. (shrink)

A week ago, I heard James Conant give a talk at Tufts, entitled “Two Varieties of Skepticism” in which he distinguished two oft-confounded questions: " Descartes: How is it possible for me to tell whether a thought of mine is true or false, perception or dream? " Kant: How is it possible for something even to _be_ a thought? What are the conditions for the possibility of experience at all?

Searches for the sources and means for a disciplined practical approach to exploring human experience.

Accession Number: ATLA0001712130; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 226-235.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 234-235.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

What kind of a science is psychoanalysis? What constitutes its domain? What truth claims does it maintain? In this unique and scholarly work concerning the nature of psychoanalysis, Gunnar Karlsson guides his arguments through phenomenological thinking which, he claims, can be seen as an alternative to the recent attempts to cite neuropsychoanalysis as the answer to the crisis of psychoanalysis. Karlsson criticizes this effort to ground psychoanalysis in biology and neurology and emphasizes instead the importance of defining the psychoanalytic domain (...) from the vantage point of the character of consciousness. His understanding of the unconscious, the libido and the death drive offer new insights into the nature of psychoanalysis, and he also illuminates and develops neglected dimensions such as consciousness and self-consciousness. Karlsson's approach to psychoanalysis is rigorous yet original, and this book fills an intellectual gap with implications for both the theoretical understanding and clinical issues of psychoanalysis. (shrink)

The article by Froese, Gould and Seth is a survey rather than a commentary, dealing with the intertwined issues of the validity of first- person reports and of their interest for a science of consciousness. While acknowledging that experiential research has already produced promising results, the authors find that it has not yet produced 'killer experiments' providing a definitively positive answer to these two questions, and wonder what kind of experiment would allow it. Our response will address these two questions (...) successively. (shrink)

The ‘self’ is increasingly used as a variable in cognitive experiments and correlated with activity in particular areas in the brain. At first glance, this seems to transform the self from an ephemeral theoretical entity to something concrete and measurable. However, the transformation is by no means unproblematic. We trace the development of two important experimental paradigms in the study of the self, self-face recognition and the adjective self ascription task. We show how the experimental instrumentalization has gone hand in (...) hand with a simplification of the self-concept, and how more conceptual and theoretical reflections on the structure, function and nature of self have either disappeared altogether or receded into the background. We argue that this development impedes and complicates the interdisciplinary study of self. (shrink)