The Wisdom of Lived Experience: Views from Psychoanalysis, Neuroscience, Philosophy and Metaphysics

In our quest toward truth we often rely on the guidance and clarity of conscious thought, but in doing so we may bypass awareness of a more deeply informing resource, which is embodied in lived experience. This book highlights aspects of this deeper dialogue where neuroscience (McGilchrist’s work on right- and left-brain dynamics) and psychoanalysis (Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, and others) verify the Hegelian dialectics that seem to underlie all living processes and perhaps all of Nature. Hegel’s concept of Aufhebung embraces the creative negating transformations that carry forward what has gone before in new and evolving forms and structures.

Becoming, as on-going lived experience, exemplifies this dialectic as it embodies the cycle in which the emergence of unconscious (implicit) intuition is externalized and clarified (made explicit) via conscious notation and thought to then be enfolded back (made implicit once again) into the newly enriched unconscious matrix that becomes the root for the next intuition. While it is often difficult to surrender the clarified products of conscious thought, the deepest sources of wisdom in Becoming are those that involve the implicit and the bodily because the deepest reaches of Reality are those that resonate with somato-sensory experience.