|
My exposure to very diverse cultural phenotypes of the same Genus
Homo had an early impact upon the formation of my mental landscapes.
Repeated experiences with African wildlife furthered my curiosity
about what mind is and about the connectedness among separate
species. In the middle seventies I began to systematically analyze
the structure of my brain/mind complex -- as I used to label it to
myself at that time. I did not see the significant advantage of
studying the mind of others -- or the brain of others -- deprived of
their own subjectivity, if indeed I was gifted with a "sentient"
brain. It appeared to me that the concept of "my brain" as an object
of study under some sort of formaldehyde (read also experimental
psychology) was pretty naive. Either I "had" a brain capable of
analyzing brain function that included foremost my own , or I did
not have a brain able to analyze brain function, either mine or of
other subjects. Furthermore I did, at those early times, come to the
strong suspicion the the term "my brain" was moderately oxymoron. If
I had a sentient brain then the proper way of looking at myself was
"I-the "brain". The owner of the "my brain" was too dualistic to be
acceptable by me, in the face of the data at my disposal. Rather, I
then began to suspect that the Self (i.e. Vincenzo) was simply an
interactional structure used by "I-the-brain" to achieve a
phenotypic identity and recognition in the world of others as well
as internally: an identification tag of sort. I then began to
systematically and routinely probe at my inner structure and
workings. Concept as my (metaphorical) VIT (very rapid thinking) and
RT (relational thinking) that I describe in details in "Landscapes
In My Mind" began to emerge and to assume stable consistency. Such
rigorous training enriched my detection of my own subjective world.
The very rich material offered by my psychotherapy practice
presented some sort of intersubjective validation. I am still of the
strong idea that "when a science of the mind is unwilling to accept
the centrality of subjectivity and its major role in delivering
information about mental events, then that science is dead in the
water. Mental states cannot be grasped, and therefore understood,
without being observed and communicated from an internal perspective
and experience." I have also come to respect the knowledge and
wisdom of non human minds and to strongly suspect that the
simplification that we humans use toward other life forms simply
indicates our ignorance and our instinctive tendency to use an
exclusively anthropomorphic yardstick.
|
| More Illustrations:
 The Three Main Libraries of Knowledge
The Psychological Phase-Space
The Pathological Attractor System
The
Disease Illness Spectrum
The Trilingual Perspective of Treatment
|
|
|
