Biology of Freedom - Softcover

Ansermet, Francois; Magistretti, Pierre

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590512227 ISBN 13: 9781590512227

Publisher: Other Press Professional, 2007

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

François 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 is a professor of neuroscience, Co-director of the Brain Mind Institute of the École Polytechnique Fédérale (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).

About this edition

• Publisher: Other Press Professional
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1590512227
• ISBN 13: 9781590512227
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272