Category: Editorials

OP ED: a response to Dr. Alan Stone’s piece from the Harvard Magazine
By Categories: Editorials

Click here to read Dr. Stone’s piece.
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JaneSHall_300x-186x300Dear Dr. Stone,

I would like to share my thoughts about your interesting article in the Harvard Magazine. I am responding to the following questions you raise.

“Whether critical of Freud, as some people were, or reverential, as we were here in Boston, we all hoped to be able to see farther than the giant and to build on the foundation Freud had begun.”
“Psychoanalysts can no longer assert that what they learn about their patient’s childhood will help them to explain the etiology of the patient’s psychopathology, or even of the patient’s sexual orientation.”

“The task of constructing self-descriptions in psychoanalytic therapy also encounters the problem of memory. Everything we have learned in recent years about memory has emphasized its plasticity, the ease with which it can be distorted, and the difficulties of reaching a hypothetical veridical memory. Much of what psychoanalysis considered infantile amnesia may be a function of the reorganizing brain rather than of the repressing mind. All of this makes the task of constructing meaningful histories of desire in the individual more daunting.” Continue reading OP ED: a response to Dr. Alan Stone’s piece from the Harvard Magazine

David Brooks on “Neurocentrism”
By Categories: Editorials, Science News

BrooksDavid

Click here to Read:  Beyond the Brain By David Brooks in The New York Times on June 17, 2013.

David Brooks on “Neurocentrism”

Brooks in today’s NYT’s column cites several recent books that reframe the popularity of brain picturing in today’s science and popular press.

He summarizes four conceptual complications about using brain imaging alone to explain our functioning. First, that a brain region may serve a variety of different tasks. Second, (and complementary), that one task may use different brain reactions or states. Third, that one activity, such as ‘working memory’, may distribute over multiple regions (at least 30 in the case of working Continue reading David Brooks on “Neurocentrism”