Neuropsychoanalysis of the development of consciousness and the self
March 12, 2022
This self-portrait of Lucian Freud is the result, as he declared, of the “strange process of observing himself.” But who is the living being who observes his own face and lives, with a sense of continuity, within a body that first grows, then blossoms and matures, then ages, constantly changing?
Who is the living being who in certain pathologies cannot accept his body, his hunger, and subjugates it to his will, as in anorexia nervosa, going against all biological impulses for nutrition and survival or who decides, because he is haunted by feelings, thoughts or memories, to take his own life?
Who is the living being who feels like a woman in a man’s body, or vice versa? Or that he has thoughts in his mind that do not belong to him and haunt him? Who is the living being who disappears in deep sleep or in vegetative states, coma, or during seizures?
When does this entity begin to exist in the body and when does it cease to exist? And how much, this internal individual, lives an integrated whole with the body or is it dissociated from somatic events?
This course deals with the emergence of the psychic individual at the phylogenetic level, i.e., within the evolutionary process, and then addresses some ontogenetic considerations, i.e., of the emergence of the psychic being in the process of individual development, maintaining the dual side of the findings of neuroscience and psychoanalysis, as well as also dealing with the settlement in the body of such an entity (Winnicott) and its use of its own mind.
Poster for the March 12, 2022 course
