Modern developmental psychoanalysis

Human knowledge is unavoidably embodied knowledge, and having the sort of body we do has a direct bearing on that. This is why I love modern developmental psychoanalysis, because it is the one science that understands the importance of the fact that we are embodied... You see, people still think about the body in premodern ways, as if there is a sharp division between body and mind, and that we consist of a sort of immaterial soul that is implanted into a body. (There is some truth to that, but I don't want to go there for the moment.)

Science continues to study human intelligence in the wrong way. There seems to be a default position that intelligence is simply a result of a complex enough nervous system--as if, through blind natural selection, our hominid brains just became more and more complex, until voila, human intelligence popped out. That is a very unsophisticated, pre-post-postmodern view. For human intelligence and self-consciousness only came about through a very species specific situation, not simply through genes and brains. Although genes and brains were obviously necessary, they were not sufficient to produce humanness. posted by Gagdad Bob at 6:10 AM 25 comments Friday, March 31, 2006