Neuroscience and the Embodiment of Psychoanalysis—With an Appreciation of Damasio’s Contribution

ABSTRACT

This article contends that psychoanalysis benefits from a neurobiological perspective. It is suggested that Antonio Damasio’s view on the neurobiology of mind and self is particularly useful in this regard. The article presents a review and discussion of Damasio’s basic assumptions on body, emotion, feeling, unconscious and conscious mind, and embodied self. It explains how Freud’s hypotheses that ego is first and foremost a bodily ego is underpinned by contemporary neurobiological research and theory. A clinical illustration highlights that changes in sense of self encompasses changes throughout the whole body, as felt from the inside and as observed from the outside.     

THE JERUSALEM DECREE,PAUL, AND THE GENTILE ANALOGY TO HOMOSEXUAL PERSONS

Revisionists and traditionalists appeal to Acts 15, welcoming the Gentiles, for analogies directing the church's response to homosexual persons. John Perry has analyzed the major positions. He faults revisionists for inadequate attention to the Jerusalem Decree and faults one traditionalist for using the Decree literally rather than through analogy. I argue that analogical use of the Decree must supplement rather than displace the plain sense. The Decree has been neglected due to assumptions that Paul opposed it, that it expired, or because Gentiles wanted non‐kosher meat. I argue that Paul continued to observe the Torah and supported the Decree, that it has not expired, and that Gentile desire for non‐kosher meat is not a firm obstacle. Affirming the plain sense of the Decree, I develop the analogy from Acts 15 to homosexual persons.     

Short report: Object-centred inhibition of return of visual attention

Our response to visual events can be delayed at positions we have recently examined attentively. Such inhibition could organize visual search through static scenes by suppressing those loci already searched, but this mechanism would fail in moving scenes as objects' locations then change during search. We cued attention to a moving object and found subsequent inhibition at the locus the object later occupied. This implies that previously examined objects are suppressed. Such object-centred inhibition would be highly adaptive, but would require a sophisticated neural implementation for a mechanism held to be sub-cortical.