Dear All,

At the workshop ‘Cultivating Common Ground’ the break-away group on critical theory (close textual analysis) led by Professor Karin Lesnik-Oberstein discussed how a grounding paper for the study of ‘mirror neurons’ in neuroscience could be critiqued through both scientific approaches but also through textual analysis of underpinning assumptions in the language of the theories and experiments. Interestingly, the group found, there turned out to be overlap between the science and the textual analyses in both what they critiqued in the paper and how.

Karin has continued to write critiques of neuroscience based on this close textual analysis (several are awaiting publication) and is now going to give an invited paper on how ideas of childhood and ideas of neuroscience are linked at the following symposium:

Depsychologizing/deneurologizing modern subjectivity?

One-day symposium and book launch Psychologization and the Subject of Late-Modernity (Jan De Vos, Palgrave 2014)

Ghent, Belgium, 8 January 2014

What does it mean to become the (neuro)psychologist of one’s own life? If something is not working in our education, in our marriage, in our work and in society in general we turn to the (neuro)psy-sciences. But is the latter’s paradigm precisely not relying on feeding neuro-psychological theories into the field of research and action? Isn’t therefore, psychology not always already psychologization, and is, concomitantly, neuroscience not always already neurologisation?

This one-day symposium brings together psychologists, psychoanalysts, philosophers and educationalists to reflect on the centrality of the (neuro)psy slope of modern subjectivity and its consequences for critique. The closing event of the day is the book launch of Jan De Vos’s book Psychologization and the Subject of Late Modernity (Palgrave, 2014).