Biology of Freedom-Fast Shipping

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This groundbreaking book delivers a much needed bridge between the neurosciencesand psychoanalysis.

Freud hoped that the neurosciences would offer support for hispsychoanalysis theories at some point in the future: both disciplines, after all,agree that experience leaves traces in the mind. But even today, as we enter thetwenty-first century, all too many scientists and analysts maintain that each sidehas wholly different models of the origin and nature of those traces. What constituteshuman experience, how does this experience shape us, and how, if at all, do we changeour lives? Psychoanalysis and the neurosciences have failed to communicate aboutthese questions, when they have not been frankly antagonistic. But in Biology ofFreedom Francois Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti are at last breaking new ground.

This fully illustrated account, rigorous yet lucid and entirely accessible, showshow the plasticity of the brain’s neural network allows for successive inscriptions,transcriptions, and retranscriptions of experience, leading to the constitution ofan inner reality, an unconscious psychic life unique to each individual. In whatamounts to a paradigm shift based on the concept of plasticity, this elegant, seamlesscollaboration of a psychoanalyst and a neuroscientist bridges the gap between disciplinesformerly believed to be incompatible. Ansermet and Magistretti have opened up newareas of exploration of the mind/body connection and profoundly new ways in whichto understand the bodily underpinnings of personal freedom, identity, and change.