Sufferings of the mind, how do we know them, understand them and classify these most personal and private states of human beingness? Our first question will be about the nature of psychological knowl- edge, and the polarities of understanding versus explaining, personal relationships and systematizing structures. This of course brings up the question of perspective, since both forms of apprehending are subject to bias, personal as well as cultural.
Knowledge is discrimination, and Karl Jaspers, who was both a major phenomenologist as well as existentialist, wrote a most comprehensive description of mental states experiences and behaviors, with an eye towards that which fell outside of the bell curve we call normality. Most diagnoses are broad and unrelated to self-experience, so we must deepen our abilities to see the many facets of human living.
With newer theoretical advances in attachment theory, traumatology and dissociative processes the work of Lacan and his followers becomes crucial to understanding the ever changing nature of the symp- toms we see. The role of language, and its absence, is that of framing what can be known of our emo- tional experiences and what can’t, and in what context the symptom finds its form. When things remain unprocessed by speech they come back in the body, and so we are seeing many more patients who have an actual, rather than conflict based, disorder. Simplifying diagnoses to the psychoses neuroses and per- versions deepens our understanding of the root cause of these disorders and is essential for treatment.
We will wrap up this course with an attempt to integrate the different viewpoints studied under the umbrella of affective neuroscience. Using Panksepp’s seven drive theory we try to show that underlying all mental suffering are: very specific over and under activation of the drives, unconscious associative processes and cortical level miswiring. Diagnosing will be shown at its best as a descriptive practice that uses well established psychoanalytic and neuroscientific concepts to understand a patient’s individual experience.