Body and mind: two sides of one coin

ABSTRACT

Psychosomatics is concerned with mentalization and the mind’s impact on the body’s functions. Choosing the reverse approach, how the body steers the mind, the author elaborates on a monistic mind-body-theory, suggesting that all physiological processes down to the cellular level have a psychological concomitant. Body and mind are the two sides of one coin, distinguished though by different representational organizations. This perspective is pertinent to Freud’s 1915 definition of the drive as the body’s demand on the mind. It also opens interesting perspectives for the elaboration of a preservative drive and its specific ideation in mental life. Comparing the dynamics between the sexual and the preservative drives with the workings of the autonomous nervous system reveals some specific traits of the preservative drives, as they are considered characteristic for psychosomatic patients. As a case in point, the author looks into the French conception of the drives and the theoretical framework of the Paris School of Psychosomatics, to which her conception would add an important dimension, theoretically, clinically, and technically.     

Gavagai again

Quine (1960, Word and object. Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, ch. 2) claims that there are a variety of equally good schemes for translating or interpreting ordinary talk. ‘Rabbit’ might be taken to divide its reference over rabbits, over temporal slices of rabbits, or undetached parts of rabbits, without significantly affecting which sentences get classified as true and which as false. This is the basis of his famous ‘argument from below’ to the conclusion that there can be no fact of the matter as to how reference is to be divided. Putative counterexamples to Quine’s claim have been put forward in the past (see especially Evans 1975; 1975, Journal of Philosophy, LXXII(13), 343–362. Reprinted in McDowell (Ed.), Gareth Evans: Collected papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press.), and various patches have been suggested (e.g. Wright (1997, The indeterminacy of translation. In C. Wright & B. Hale (Eds.), A companion to the philosophy of language (pp. 397–426). Oxford: Blackwell)). One lacuna in this literature is that one does not find any detailed presentation of what exactly these interpretations are supposed to be. Drawing on contemporary literature on persistence, the present paper sets out detailed semantic treatments for fragments of English, whereby predicates such as ‘rabbit’ divide their reference over four-dimensional continuants (Quine’s rabbits), instantaneous temporal slices of those continuants (Quine’s rabbit-slices) and the simple elements which compose those slices (undetached rabbit parts) respectively. Once we have the systematic interpretations on the table, we can get to work evaluating them.     

Yu and your mind

This note is a brief reply to the main argument of Qiuen Yu: 1992, Consistency, Mechanicalness, and the Logic of the Mind,Synthese 90, 145–79.     

Recounting the same events again and again: children's consistency across multiple interviews

Children (2–13 years at time of injury) were interviewed four times about an injury that required hospital Emergency Room treatment, namely at 1 week, 6 months, 1 year, and 2 years. The consistency of children's reports was assessed and all children gave mostly the same information at each interview, although consistency was higher for older children and for injury rather than hospital details. Furthermore, details recalled at every interview were virtually always accurate while details that were sometimes omitted were a little less likely to be accurate. New information that was introduced after 6 months was more likely to be accurate than inaccurate but new information introduced at 1 or 2 years post‐injury was just as likely to be wrong as right (except for 12–13‐year‐olds). Implications for forensic situations are discussed. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.