Harnessing psychoanalytical methods for a phenomenological neuroscience.
Frontiers in psychology January 1, 2014 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00334 via PubMed
Summary
Psychoanalysis offers valuable phenomenological tools that can enhance the study of consciousness, particularly in bridging first-person and third-person perspectives. By employing observational and narrative techniques, psychoanalysts aid patients in articulating their subjective experiences, which may improve understanding of complex brain functions and neuroimaging technologies. Individuals with analytic experience can effectively describe their consciousness, making them suitable for neurophenomenology, and psychoanalytic methods could help untrained participants gain awareness of their mental processes.
Study at a glance
| Key finding | Psychoanalysis provides innovative methods for studying consciousness that can bridge subjective experience with cognitive science. |
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Abstract
Psychoanalysis proffers a wealth of phenomenological tools to advance the study of consciousness. Techniques for elucidating the structures of subjective life are sorely lacking in the cognitive sciences; as such, experiential reporting techniques must rise to meet both complex theories of brain function and increasingly sophisticated neuroimaging technologies. Analysis may offer valuable methods for bridging the gap between first-person and third-person accounts of the mind. Using both systematic observational approaches alongside unstructured narrative interactions, psychoanalysts help patients articulate their experience and bring unconscious mental contents into awareness. Similar to seasoned meditators or phenomenologists, individuals who have undergone analysis are experts in discerning and describing their subjective experience, thus making them ideal candidates for neurophenomenology. Moreover, analytic techniques may provide a means of guiding untrained experimental participants to greater awareness of their mental continuum, as well as gathering subjective reports about fundamental yet elusive aspects of experience including selfhood, temporality, and inter-subjectivity. Mining psychoanalysis for its methodological innovations provides a fresh turn for the neuropsychoanalysis movement and cognitive science as a whole - showcasing the integrity of analysis alongside the irreducibility of human experience.