PLEASE JOIN NYPSI FOR A YEAR LONG CELEBRATION OF OUR CENTENARY: CELEBRATING A CENTURY OF ADVANCEMENT THROUGH SELF-KNOWLEDGE
THE NEW YORK PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY & INSTITUTE:
Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuropsychoanalysis
247 East 82nd St., between 2nd & 3rd, NY, NY, 10028
Saturday, October 2, 2010
10 a.m.
Vittorio Gallese, M.D.
Professor of Physiology, Dept. of Neuroscience,
University of Parma, Italy
(www.unipr.it/arpa/mirror/english/staff/gallese.htm)
will receive The Arnold Pfeffer Prize for 2009
and speak on:
From mirror neurons to embodied simulation: A new perspective on intersubjectivity
Discussant: Mark Solms, Ph.D.
Our seemingly effortless capacity to perceive the bodies inhabiting our social world as goal-oriented individuals like us depends on activity within a shared “we-centric” space. I have proposed that this shared manifold space can be characterized at the functional level as embodied simulation, a basic functional mechanism by which our brain/body system models its interactions with the world.
The mirroring mechanism for action and other mirroring mechanisms in our brain represent sub-personal instantiations of embodied simulation. Embodied simulation provides a new empirically based notion of intersubjectivity, viewed first and foremost as intercorporeity. Embodied simulation challenges the notion that Folk-psychology is the sole account of interpersonal understanding. Underlying our capacity for “mind reading” is intercorporeity as the main source of knowledge we directly gather about others. Parallel to the detached third-person sensory perception of social stimuli, internal non-linguistic “representations” of the body-states associated with actions, emotions, and sensations are evoked in the observer, as if he or she were performing a similar action or experiencing a similar emotion or sensation.
By means of an isomorphic format we can map others’ actions onto our own motor representations, as well as others’ emotions and sensations onto our own viscero-motor and somatosensory representations. Social cognition is not only explicitly reasoning about the contents of someone else’s mind. Our brains, and those of other primates, appear to have developed embodied simulation as a basic functional mechanism that gives us a direct insight of other minds, thus enabling our capacity to empathize with others.
This proposal opens new perspectives on our understanding of psychopathological states and therapeutic relations.
For information about NYPSI training programs please visit us at www.psychoanalysis.org