“Language, Mind and Body: A Conceptual History” by Prof. John E. Joseph

“Language, Mind and Body: A Conceptual History” By Prof. John E. Joseph

Cambridge University Press

Book description

Where is language? Answers to this have attempted to ‘incorporate’ language in an ‘extended mind’, through cognition that is ’embodied’, ‘distributed’, ‘situated’ or ‘ecological’. Behind these concepts is a long history that this book is the first to trace. Extending across linguistics, philosophy, psychology and medicine, as well as literary and religious dimensions of the question of what language is, and where it is located, this book challenges mainstream, mind-based accounts of language. Looking at research from the Middle Ages to the present day, and exploring the work of a range of scholars from Aristotle and Galen to Merleau-Ponty and Chomsky, it assesses raging debates about whether mind and language are centred in heart or brain, brain or nervous-muscular system, and whether they are innate or learned, individual or social. This book will appeal to scholars and advanced students in historical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, language evolution and the philosophy of language.

Reviews

‘Joseph vividly defamiliarizes linguistic categories we are accustomed to – abstract and concrete, langue and parole, embodied cognition, even language and mind. Rereading our histories, he rethinks what’s at stake when we affirm a ‘discipline’ of linguistics.’

Mark Amsler – University of Auckland

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/language-mind-and-body/241FA66A2B3BE70004282E9B7F2EF95C#fndtn-information

New book chapter by Prof. Robert Stolorow

Stolorow, R. D. (2018). Emotional disturbance, trauma, and authenticity: A phenomenological-contextualist psychoanalytic perspective. In Existential Medicine: Essays on Health and Illness, ed. K. Aho. London, UK: Rowman and Littlefield International, pp. 17-25.

The chapter offers a radicalization of phenomenological psychopathology and a critique of psychiatric diagnoses as manifestations of what Robert Stolorow calls “the illusion of metaphysical essences.” He claims that there are no psychiatric entities, only traumatizing contexts.
Here is also a Psychology Today blog post that expands on Robert Stolorow’s view. “Deconstructing Psychiatry’s Every-Expanding Bible”: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/feeling-relating-existing/201204/deconstructing-psychiatrys-ever-expanding-bible

“Language and Psychotherapy – Knowledge Transfer Group”

We will be hosting a series of seminars relevant to the topic of language in psychotherapy and patient-centred communication. The aims of the seminars are to transfer knowledge that complements the development of professionals (e.g., academics, practitioners and post-graduate students) working in the field of counselling, psychotherapy, clinical psychology, nursing, psychology, education and other disciplines with an interest in the use of language in therapy and patient-centred communication. The seminars will be also reaching out to NHS staff and therapists working across all three sectors: voluntary, statutory and private.

The seminars will encourage collaborative work and the development of skills for language-based psychotherapy research, and also to develop greater awareness of person-centred communicative processes within the psychotherapeutic context.

ALL ARE WELCOME but spaces are limited. Please contact laura.cariola@ed.ac.uk to reserve your place for the KE seminars. All seminars will take place at the University of Edinburgh, School of Health in Social Science, Teviot Place, Old Medical School, Doorway 6, Edinburgh EH8 9AG.

10th November 3-5pm, Room 4.01 “Second-language use in psychotherapy” by Dr. Lorena Georgiadou

19th December 3-5pm, Room 4.01 “Subjectivity in psychotherapy from a perspective of enlightenment and critical rationalism” by Prof. Matthias Schwannauer

 24th January 2-4pm, Room 4.01 “Power and narratives in psychotherapy” by Mr. Seamus Prior

16th February 4.30-5.45pm, Room 4.01 “Autoethnography: a ‘close up’ research approach” Dr. Jonathan Wyatt

 9th March 3-5pm, Room 4.01 “Phenomenology and minority experiences” by Dr. Billy Lee

 6th April, 3-5pm Room 4.01 “Metaphors in psychotherapy” by Dr. Laura A. Cariola

See you at the seminars!

Funded by the Researcher-Led Initiative Fund

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“Working at the Wonder: Collaborative Writing as Method of Inquiry” by Ken Gale and Jonathan Wyatt

home_coverAbstract

This article offers a discussion concerning the future of collaborative writing as a method of inquiry. Taking the form of a dialogic exchange, we take up Isabelle Stengers’ notion of “wonder” as a creative and political lens through which to consider the disruptive, radical, and productive methodological capacity that collaborative writing as a research method potentially offers. Working particularly with Deleuze and Guattari, we argue that language in collaborative writing practices is deeply entangled with complex materialist practice, and through engagements with these “matterings” we make sense of collaborative writing as immanent event. We discuss—and experience—the challenges that collaborative writing has for research and this article pushes at established categories, works against the fixities of conventional theory construction, contests the humanist and phenomenological proclivities that arguably limit the process and effectiveness of collaborative writing as method of inquiry, and wonders at the immensities that are possible.

Original article: Qualitative Inquiry, 2016, pp. 1-10. Link

Prof Robert Stolorow

Affiliation: Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis

Robert D. Stolorow is a Founding Faculty Member at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Los Angeles, and at the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity, New York. Absorbed for more than four decades in the project of rethinking psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry, he is the author of World, Affectivity, Trauma: Heidegger and Post-Cartesian Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2011) and Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections (Routledge, 2007) and coauthor of eight other books. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Harvard in 1970 and his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California at Riverside in 2007.

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