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Lost in Cognition: Psychoanalysis and the Cognitive Sciences

Author(s) : Eric Laurent, Translator : Adrian Price

Reviews and Endorsements

'What is the relationship between psychoanalysis and cognitive science? Is it not high time that psychoanalysis fell in line with the latter by trying to combine the theory of the unconscious with the findings of neuroscience? This book by Éric Laurent does not take such simplistic shortcuts. Rather, he pinpoints the position of psychoanalysis and shows how it cannot be assimilated to a translation of its clinical practice in narrow scientific terms. He sheds light on the “real” that is specific to psychoanalysis, and which is not to be confused with the “real” of science.’
— Antonio Di Ciaccia, President of the Istituto Freudiano, Rome

‘From the confrontation between psychoanalysis, which is untranslatable, and the Babel of the so-called cognitive sciences in their translation into neuroscience, Éric Laurent extracts the subject, the central theme of this book. This is an excellent way to bring the subject, which is precisely what is lost in this translation, before us.’
— Miquel Bassols, President of the World Association of Psychoanalysis

‘Cognitive behaviourism seeks to reduce the human subject to a system of learning processes, turning it into an anonymous entity within uniform, impersonal categories of classification. Éric Laurent demonstrates that this model fails to grasp the complexity of human existence, positing the Freudian unconscious as an alternative that bears the singular truth of the subject, a truth that lies beyond any learning process.’
— Avi Rybnicki, psychoanalyst, department of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv District

‘This is the opportunity to remind ourselves just how far psychoanalysis is from both science and religion. The traditional opposition between mind and brain that is endorsed by the likes of Jean-Pierre Changeux obscures what is really at stake, above all in political terms, and it is not by chance that Éric Laurent opens the first section of his book with a dialogue with Chomsky on the question of the inscription of the subject.’
— Nathalie Charraud, author of The Real in Mathematics

‘Lost in Cognition offers a complete and utter reversal: rather than it being science that gives an account of spoken languages, it is spoken language that allows for the emergence of science. This book shows that the unease generated by the discovery of the unconscious is such that, since the start of the twentieth century, memory has continued to obsess researchers. Likewise, the perspective of “localisation” has been driving the brain scientists. Éric Laurent clearly affirms that the unconscious cannot be localised, and that there is nothing to be expected from these attempts to confirm psychoanalysis through neuroscience.’
— Dr Guy Briole, professor of psychiatry at Val-de-Grâce Hospital, Paris