Psychobiology

This paper provides an initial, multidimensional map of the complex relationships among consciousness, mind, brain and the external world in a way that follows both the contours of everyday experience and the findings of science. It then demonstrates how this reflexive monist map can be used to evaluate the utility and resolve some of the oppositions of the many other “isms” that currently populate consciousness studies. While no conventional, one-dimensional “ism” such as physicalism can do justice to this web of relationships, physicalism, functionalism, dualism, neutral monism, and dual-aspect monism can all be seen to provide useful ways of understanding different aspects of the relationships among consciousness, mind, brain and the external world when these are viewed in either a first- or a third-person way from within this web of relationships by sentient creatures such as ourselves. For example, physicalism and functionalism provide a useful understanding of consciousness, mind, brain and external world when viewed from a third-person perspective, while neutral monism provides a useful way of understanding first- versus third-person views of external phenomena. On the other hand, dual-aspect monism provides a useful way of understanding first- versus third-person views of mind, including Eastern versus Western views of mind.  Dual-aspect monism also provides a useful understanding of the “unconscious ground of being” that gives rise to, supports and embeds all these observable phenomena. For an integrated understanding one needs to understand how these phenomena and relationships combine into an integrated whole.

Despite its long and auspicious place in the history of psychiatry, dissociative identity disorder (DID) has been associated with controversy. This paper aims to examine the empirical data related to DID and outline the contextual challenges to its scientific investigation. The overview is limited to DID-specific research in which one or more of the following conditions are met: (i) a sample of participants with DID was systematically investigated, (ii) psychometrically-sound measures were utilised, (iii) comparisons were made with other samples, (iv) DID was differentiated from other disorders, including other dissociative disorders, (v) extraneous variables were controlled or (vi) DID diagnosis was confirmed. Following an examination of challenges to research, data are organised around the validity and phenomenology of DID, its aetiology and epidemiology, the neurobiological and cognitive correlates of the disorder, and finally its treatment. DID was found to be a complex yet vali...

The effect of sensory input on hormones is essential to any explanation of mammalian behavior, including aspects of physical attraction. The chemical signals we send have direct and developmental effects on hormone levels in other people. Since we don t know either if, or how, visual cues might have direct and developmental effects on hormone levels in other people, the biological basis for the development of visually perceived human physical attraction is currently somewhat questionable. In contrast, the biological basis for the development of physical attraction based on chemical signals is well detailed.

Questo lavoro è teso ad approfondire i correlati psicobiologici del Disturbo da Deficit di Attenzione / Iperattività (DDAI, in italiano, e ADHD, in inglese, da Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) e, partendo dalle caratteristiche del disturbo, arriva a formulare alcune ipotesi suggerite dal confronto fra gli studi sullo stato di hyperfocus in soggetti con DDAI
e gli studi sullo stato di flow in campioni non diversificati in base a eventuali disturbi psicologici, che potrebbero essere verificate empiricamente in successivi studi.
I numerosi studi sui soggetti con DDAI hanno evidenziato diverse anomalie anatomiche e funzionali che, seppur con qualche incongruenza, hanno prodotto diverse teorie psicobiologiche.
Le teorie che, oltre a evidenziare il più generico deficit dell'attenzione, cercano di spiegare il disturbo come prodotto in via primaria da disfunzioni in un unico dominio clinico (funzioni esecutive, motivazione, impulsività) non sono risultate soddisfacenti.
Risultano, invece, più credibili le ipotesi che spiegano il disturbo dal punto di vista psicobiologico attraverso deficit in domini cognitivi multipli e relativamente indipendenti.
La ricerca fino ad oggi realizzata per una comprensione psicobiologica del disturbo converge nell'attribuire un ruolo centrale ai neurotrasmettitori (glutammato, GABA, dopamina e noradrenalina) e, più nello specifico, alla disfunzione di alcuni importanti circuiti dopaminergici, causata da anomalie nella densità di recettori dopaminergici DI e D2 e relativi sottotipi (DI, D5, D:, D3 e Da).
Particolare approfondimento da parte della ricerca è stato dedicato al sistema dopaminergico della ricompensa che presenta significative alterazioni nel DDAI e costituisce il correlato psicobiologico
della motivazione.
In base al DSM 5, nel DDAI la disattenzione interferisce con il funzionamento o lo sviluppo dell'individuo e i suoi sintomi hanno un'intensità tale da produrre un impatto negativo sulle abilità sociali, scolastiche o lavorative.
Tuttavia, nella letteratura viene descritto, sia dai soggetti con DDAI che dai loro familiari e dai clinici, un particolare stato di attenzione altamente focalizzata su attività interessanti per il paziente, denominato hyperfocus. Questo paradosso è stato oggetto di approfondimento da parte della presente dissertazione con lo scopo di capire se il fatto che le attività in cui si verifica questo stato siano interessanti per il soggetto possa essere in qualche modo collegato alla motivazione.
Dalla lettura di tali studi è emerso che lo stato di hyperfocus potrebbe riferirsi allo stesso stato che viene, invece, definito flow in studi empirici condotti su soggetti non diversificati in base a eventuali disturbi e che viene concettualizzato come uno stato di motivazione ottimale, associato a performance di livello elevato. Infatti, le caratteristiche descrittive dei due stati sono molto simili e potrebbero riferirsi ad un unico costrutto a base psicobiologica.
La presente dissertazione ha lo scopo di approfondire i correlati psicobiologici del disturbo e presentare i risultati del confronto tra la letteratura esistente sui correlati psicobiologici dello stato
di flow in campioni non diversificati e quella reperita sullo stato di hyperfocus in soggetti con DDAI. Tali risultati portano a ipotizzare che una stretta interazione tra particolari caratteristiche
dell'attività e predisposizione dei soggetti con DDAI allo stato di flow possa spiegare il paradosso costituito dalla capacità di sostenere un'attenzione focalizzata e di alta produttività in soggetti con
deficit di attenzione, come in un incastro perfetto mediato dalla motivazione intrinseca suscitata dal bilanciamento tra abilità del soggetto e difficoltà del compito.
E' possibile ipotizzare che una replica di alcuni studi già effettuati sullo stato di flow, ma eseguita su un gruppo di soggetti con DDAI e gruppo di controllo, utilizzando un compito intrinsecamente motivante e capace di fornire un feedback immediato, potrebbe chiarire se il deficit del controllo cognitivo nel DDAI sia specifico al contesto.
In campioni di soggetti non diversificati in base alla presenza o meno del DDAI, compiti intrinsecamente motivanti, caratterizzati da un perfetto bilanciamento tra abilità del soggetto e difficoltà del compito e capaci di fornire un feedback immediato, si sono rivelati capaci di produrre sotto-regolazione del Default Mode Network da parte del nucleo dorsale del rafe. In studi su soggetti con DDAI, purtroppo condotti attraverso la somministrazione di compiti che non rispondono alle caratteristiche favorenti lo stato di flow individuate da Csikszentmihalyi
(1975, 1993, 1996), è stata riscontrata una ridotta capacità di regolazione negativa del DMN.
E' possibile suggerire una replica dello studio che evidenzia la sotto-regolazione del DMN nello stato di flow, questa volta in soggetti con DDAI, mantenendo costante la capacità del compito di fornire un feedback immediato e manipolando la difficoltà del compito in rapporto all'abilità del soggetto, per verificare se la ridotta capacità di regolazione negativa nei soggetti con DDAI, verrebbe compensata dallo stato di flow che, come detto, in campioni di soggetti non diversificati, produce sotto-regolazione del DMN.
Inoltre, in uno studio su un campione di soggetti che non presentano DDAI, è emersa una significativa correlazione positiva tra alta disponibilità di recettori striatali D2 e propensione allo
stato di flow e, nei pazienti con DDAI, è emersa un'alta disponibilità di recettori D2 nel caudato e nel putamen. Un approfondimento di questa corrispondenza potrebbe chiarire se nei soggetti con DDAI esiste una propensione allo stato di flow.
Si può suggerire che un approccio capace di considerare i due stati come un unico costrutto a base psicobiologica, qualora empiricamente sostenuto, potrebbe non solo orientare la clinica, ma anche fornire una prospettiva applicativa per interventi educativi, psicologici e didattici

The chapter uses the methods of psychobiography and object relations theory to conduct a single-case study of the life and loves of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003). Leni's childhood home was dominated by her father, who had to be cajoled, and sometimes outright deceived, into supporting his daughter's desire to enter a career in the performing arts. Unfortunately, Leni's success was often her worst enemy: Just as she evaded her father Albert's censorious glance, so did she avoid the barbs of German film critics by gaining Adolf Hitler as her patron until the fall of the Nazi regime in 1945. At this time, Leni lost not only her marriage and her film career, but even her sanity, if only for a short time. The chapter shows, through a Fairbairnian analysis, how Leni adapted to the disaster that was her early career by reinventing herself as a photographer of African tribes. Also, in her romantic life, she changed tacks. Compared with her late-in-life companion Horst Kettner, Leni's early romances were relatively shallow either because her counterpart was too involved in promoting her career (Harry Sokal) or too far removed from her working life (Peter Jacob).

Behavior analysis relies on the idea of a science dealing with specific interactions between the organism and its environment. Yet it is not always clearly defined what does an “organism” mean. I will contend that disagreements arise from the roles the organism is said to have in behavioral settings. I will also argue for the organismal level as appropriate for explaining behavior in an attempt to reconcile physiology with behavior analysis thus considering organismal variables as either bodily conditions or physiological mechanisms without neglecting the selective pressures of the environment for guiding behavior.

Background: Seventy-seven selected high performing soccer players of South-East Asian contingent, selected on the basis of
their consistent high soccer performance by their respective coaches, volunteered as participants in this study.
Materials and Methods: Out of a pool of one-hundred twenty-nine soccer players (who were evaluated on regular basis with
regard to their psychobiological viz. − cortical, autonomic and peripheral measures of arousal; psychomotor parameters, such
as − temporal anticipation and whole body reaction ability and psychological, for instance - cognitive flexibility and emotional
stability variables) those who were found matched according to their anthropometric, cardiovascular and performance status,
were considered as the representative young-adult soccer participants. For this present experiment all of the participants were
evaluated with tonic and phasic electrodermal activity comprising of autonomic startling response index as marker of sudomotor
nerve activity and orienting reflex indices of phasic components of electrodermal activity decomposed as orienting latency;
amplitude and recovery were assessed simultaneously while the players were engaged in evaluation of inner core emotionality.
Results: Multiple linear and polynomial regression analyses were done to observe shared aetiology in the form of direct,
inverse and supportive relationships between psychobiological and emotional indices related to performance excellence in soccer.
Conclusion: Comprehensive understanding of the confounding relationships between subjective feelings emotional resilience
and corroborative orienting reflex indices as predictor of high performance was established.

Researchers often use the term “sensitivity ” when theorizing that certain persons may be more readily affected by various influences than others. Through a review of the literature, it is argued that some individuals are disposed toward a range of sensitivities that, in novelty as well as intensity, distinguish them from the general population. The author cites evidence indicating that such persons exhibit greater susceptibility to a range of  environmental factors including allergies, migraine headache, chronic pain, and chronic fatigue. Their immediate family members appear to be similarly affected. Additionally, these “sensitive” individuals report a high degree of anomalous perception. While no single factor in a person’s background is likely to distinguish him/her as  sensitive, eight demographic or personality factors are found to be significant.

La psicología es una ciencia biosocial, por lo que los estudiantes de psicología deben recibir una adecuada formación en la orientación psicobiológica, neuropsicológica y psicosocial. Así se ha constituido en diversos centros de estudios de prestigio mundial, por lo que el desarrollo de la ciencia psicológica parte por concebir su objeto de estudio como un dominio de diversos factores que hace necesaria una adecuada comprensión de las bases biológicas y sociales de la conducta. Se presenta la naturaleza de la carrera acorde a la estructura Curricular de Psicología de la UNMSM, para ver en qué medida se cumple con la consigna de una formación científica integral y un entrenamiento profesional óptimo del psicólogo así como la responsabilidad que la escuela debería asumir en su compromiso con la ciencia, la tecnología y el servicio social.

We propose to read Francis Bacon's doctrine of the idols of the mind as an investigation firmly entrenched in his mental-medicinal concerns and we argue that an important role therein is played by the imagination. Looking at the ways in which the imagination serves to pinpoint several crucial aspects of the idolic mind permits us to signal the explicit or implicit cross-references between what in Bacon's tree of knowledge appear as distinct branches: the various faculties and their arts; the mind, the body, and their league; natural philosophy, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of man. The consequence of this rich picture of the diagnosis of the mind is an equally rich conception of the cure, which comprises both epistemic and physiological aspects. We extract the features of this integrated view out of Bacon's epistemological and medical natural historical writings, which we propose to read in tandem. We also propose a number of sources for Bacon's views on the imagination, whose variety accounts for the multivalent, sometimes elusive, but surely pervasive role of the imagination in the Baconian diagnosis and cure of the mind.

Alla luce delle più recenti scoperte sul cervello umano e sulla presenza di "automatismi" (ossia, azioni compiute involontariamente), il diritto deve rivedere le proprie convinzioni sotto i profili dell'imputabilità e della colpevolezza, in ambito penale, e della capacità di agire, in ambito civile, al fine di avvicinare il più possibile la concezione giuridica dell'uomo a quella biologico-scientifica.

Negli ultimi anni si è compreso anche come fattori collegati all'alimentazione e, in generale, allo stile di vita possano essere implicati nell'esacerbazione, nel mantenimento e nella remissione di moltissime malattie; il paradigma della psiconeuroendocrinoimmunologia, a questo proposito, si propone di fornire gli strumenti teorici per indagare il nesso tra le variabili biologiche, psicologiche e comportamentali all'interno di numerose condizioni cliniche (Bottaccioli, 2011). Per realizzare interventi che rispettino il paradigma biopsicosociale appare allora necessario partire dallo studio delle realtà cliniche di interesse in una ottica integrata, tenendo in considerazione sin dall'inizio variabili che comprendano: lo stato psicologico, il livello di stress, le abitudini alimentari e di vita del paziente, proprio alla luce dei modelli integrati proposti.  La letteratura a questo proposito descrive il rapporto tra psoriasi e obesità, tra psoriasi e disturbi del comportamento alimentare, tra psoriasi e diversi tipi di addiction, tuttavia sembra non esista ancora una visione unitaria e integrata di tutti questi fattori, i quali potrebbero influire sulla gravità della patologia cutanea ed agire da fattori di mantenimento. Un lavoro orientato verso questa direzione potrebbe rappresentare quindi una opportunità per accrescere la conoscenza rispetto all'interazione di queste variabili nell'andamento della malattia.

Students have a variety of learning styles.  And communicating with them in their preferred style in ways that open their receptivity to new information is one of the keys to increasing their learning.  Doing this one-to-one, during an office consultation for example is relatively easy.  But, in the classroom where there is a mixture of styles presents an interesting challenge for the effective professor, does it not?  Continually sticking to the facts in a monotone drone during a lecture is not often music to students’ ears. And speaking in unstructured ways often muddies the water.  Clearly, in order to get the greatest learning, one must present one’s ideas so students can literally visualize the points being made, hear the nuances, and internally connect with what is being presented.  Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) provides a number of language pattern tools that can be used to meet this challenge.  This paper presents several of these patterns including Charisma; VAKOG Modalities; Meta Model; Milton Model; Pace-Link-Lead; And-But; and Credibility.

Rispetto alla popolazione generale, gli individui per cui venga formulato un giudizio ARMS (At Risk of Mental State) presentano un rischio cento volte maggiore di sviluppare la schizofrenia (Fusar-Poli et al. 2012). Tuttavia, allo stato attuale della ricerca nella diagnosi precoce, le strategie di riconoscimento degli stati prodromici di malattia non consentono ancora di discriminare tra chi necessita di un intervento preventivo di tipo intensivo e chi invece non ne trarrebbe sufficiente beneficio. Per questo motivo, si auspica un'integrazione di marker neurobiologici e neurocognitivi con i dati clinici, al fine di quantificare in modo affidabile il rischio portato da ciascun singolo soggetto. Nella presente rassegna, si cercherà di render conto di tale complessità presentando le caratteristiche dell'esordio precoce, delineando poi le principali tendenze di ricerca e i risultati da esse conseguiti. Al fine di valutare la solidità del costrutto di diagnosi precoce, verranno presentati diversi modelli predittivi proposti in anni recenti ed evidenziate alcune criticità a livello metodologico, cercando di capire se si tratti di carenze strutturali o se invece vi sia adito a miglioramento tramite best practice e accorgimenti nell'impostazione degli studi. Si passerà quindi a considerare diverse aree oggetto di studio relativamente alla schizofrenia e conseguentemente alle sue fasi prodromiche o precoci, con particolare attenzione verso i soggetti già considerati a rischio o aventi sperimentato un primo episodio psicotico. Nello specifico, si analizzeranno i cambiamenti epigenetici riscontrabili all'insorgere del disturbo e la loro relazione con lo sviluppo neurale; il concetto di " endofenotipo " così come teorizzato dalla psichiatria genetica e una sua esemplificazione pratica; le alterazioni strutturali e funzionali, nonché le anomalie a livello elettrofisiologico, quali possibili indicatori da utilizzare nello screening. Successivamente, si esamineranno due ambiti ˗ l'infiammazione e la neuroendocrinologia ˗ interessanti da un punto di vista teorico in quanto strettamente legati alla patofisiologia della schizofrenia e alle condizioni di

Travma, travmatize olmuş mağdurların yoğun bir çaresizlik ve tehdit algısı hissetmelerine ve ilişkilerini, değerlerini ve varsayımlarını temelden sarsacak bir yıkıma neden olmaktadır. Aslında kurtulan konumda olan mağdurun beden bütünlüğünü ve diğer insanlara dair güvenini insan eliyle alaşağı eden bu durum, atlatılması en güç ruhsal ve bedensel olgudur. Birçok kuramcı ve araştırmacı bu yıkımın faillerini; yıkıcılığın mekanizmasını anlayabilmek ve bireylerin gelecekte daha sağlıklı yaşayabilmelerini sağlamak adına birtakım önerme dizgesi oluşturmuşkardır. Ancak gayrı iradi yıkıcılığın mekanizmasına çok yakın bir tarihte nörobiyolojik bulguları ile katkı sağlamış araştırmacıların saptamaları, beyin araştırmaları ve yeni tedavi yöntemleri için merak uyandırmaktadır. Birtakım tedavi evrelerinden geçerek hayata tekrardan katılabilen travma mağdurlarının iyileşme ihtimali, bazen fizyolojik işlevsizlik kaynaklı bazen de yaşam içindeki deneyimler kaynaklı psikolojik travma geçmişlerini bugüne taşıyan travma faillerinin tedavi olabilme ve değişebilme kapasitesinden daha olanaklı görülmektedir.

Kant’s pre-1770 philosophy responded to the mind-body problem by applying a theory of “physical influx”. His encounter with Swedenborg’s mysticism, however, left him disillusioned with any dualist solution to Descartes’ problem. One of the major goals of the Critical philosophy was to provide a completely new solution to the mind-body problem. Kant’s new solution is “perspectival” in the sense that all Critical theories are perspectival: it acknowledges a deep truth in both of the controversy’s extremes (i.e., what we might nowadays call eliminative materialism and an absolutely ideal folk psychology), by viewing both as ways of considering the issue, rather than as the only correct approach. Once we take into account its perspectival character, a new way of understanding Kant’s philosophy of mind emerges. The mind is no longer separate from the body, but is a manifestation of it, viewed from another (specifically human, rational) perspective. Kant’s transcendental conditions of knowledge (spatio-temporal intuition, categorial conception, and principled schematization) do not portray the mind as somehow creating the physical world; rather, they imply the opposite, that knowledge of objects is necessarily structured by a set of unconscious assumptions about the physical world. Our pre-conscious (or pre-mental, in Descartes’ sense of “mental”) encounter with an assumed spatio-temporal, causal nexus is entirely physical. A reincarnated Kant’s solution to today’s mind-body problem would be: eliminative materialism is good science; but only the “explanatory idealist” can consistently be an eliminative materialist. Philosophically, multiple perspectives are necessary in order to understand anything we say or do.

My target article (henceforth referred to as TA) presents evidence for causal interactions between consciousness and brain and some standard ways of accounting for this evidence in clinical practice and neuropsychological theory.  I also point out some of the problems of understanding such causal interactions that are not addressed by standard explanations.  Most of the residual problems have to do with how to cross the “explanatory gap” from consciousness to brain. I then list some of the reasons why the route across this gap suggested by physicalism won't work, in spite of its current popularity in consciousness studies. My own suggested route across the explanatory gap is more subterranean, where consciousness and brain can be seen to be dual aspects of a unifying, psychophysical mind.  Some of the steps on this deeper route still have to be filled in by empirical research. But (as far as I can judge) there are no gaps that cannot be filled—just a different way of understanding consciousness, mind, brain and their causal interaction, with some interesting consequences for our understanding of free will.  The commentaries on TA examined many aspects of my thesis viewed from both Western and Eastern perspectives. This reply focuses on how dual-aspect monism compares with currently popular alternatives such as “nonreductive physicalism”, clarifies my own approach, and reconsiders how well this addresses the “hard” problems of consciousness. We re-examine how conscious experiences relate to their physical/functional correlates and whether useful analogies can be drawn with other, physical relationships that appear to have dual-aspects.  We also examine some fundamental differences between Western and Eastern thought about whether the existence of the physical world or the existence of consciousness can be taken for granted (with consequential differences about which of these is “hard” to understand). I then suggest a form of dual-aspect Reflexive Monism that might provide a path between these ancient intellectual traditions that is consistent with science and with common sense.

Additional Note for 2012 upload on Academia.edu: This reply responds to thoughtful commentaries on the target article by John Kihlstrom, Todd Feinberg, Steve Torrance, Robert van Gulick, Jeffrey Gray and K. Ramakrisna Rao. One commentary by Ron Chrisley and Aaron Sloman seriously misrepresented my views and then proceeded to criticize their own misrepresentation in ways that I make clear in my response. Ten years after its initial publication, as far as I ca tell, the analysis of consciousness-brain causal interactions presented in "How could conscious experience affect brains?" still conforms closely to both the findings of science and to everyday experience.

This contribution is about sense-making in music. In an attempt to bring together such diverging fields as semiotics and neurobiology, it argues for a processual approach to music, which conceives of 'music users' as organisms that 'cope' with their environment. It is a position which calls forth ecological and epistemological assumptions and which stresses the importance of a conception of music as dealt with rather than a static conception of music as structure or artefact. As such, it considers music as a sounding and temporal art which appeals to lower-level mechanisms of reactivity, as well as to the acquired mechanisms of sense-making which are the outcome of a learning history. It is argued, further, that there is a continuum between lower level sensory processing and higher-order cognitive elaboration. The musical code, accordingly, holds a hybrid position between innate and wired-in dispositions and higher-level cognitive processing mechanisms. The very concept of code, further, is given some theoretical grounding as well as empirical evidence from the domains of psychophysics, psychobiology, and neurobiology.

The recognition that most of today’s invalid psychiatric diagnoses could be attributed to a false psychiatric paradigm led the author to write The Four Domains of Mental Illness: An Alternative to the DSM–5 (FDMI). The FDMI is a third-force effort aimed at steering attention away from the medical model of mental illness and toward the all-but-forgotten psychobiology of Adolf Meyer. Meyer saw psychic pathology as originating in a misuse of freedom that leads to maladaptive choices made in the face of difficult life situations, entailing alterations in both mind and brain. Meyer’s ideas, once dominant in American psychiatry, lost sway for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was his failure to systematically spell out his implicit understanding of what it means to be a human being—an endeavor undertaken by philosophers and psychologists, under the rubric of philosophical anthropology. It gradually became evident that a good deal of what was lacking in Meyer’s psychobiology had already been cultivated by thinkers and clinicians from the existential tradition, including Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ronald Laing. The synergy that comes with consolidating these two seemingly disparate approaches to understanding psychic pathology provided the philosophical anthropology and the analytic power that made possible the diagnostic scheme set out in the FDMI. A further elaboration of the nature and significance of this synergy is the raison d’être for the article that follows. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)

© 2021 American Psychological Asso

In everyday life we take it for granted that we have conscious control of some of our actions and that the part of us that exercises control is the conscious mind.  Psychosomatic medicine also assumes that the conscious mind can affect body states, and this is supported by evidence that the use of imagery, hypnosis, biofeedback and other ‘mental interventions’ can be therapeutic in a variety of medical conditions.  However, there is no accepted theory of mind/body interaction and this has had a detrimental effect on the acceptance of mental causation in science, philosophy and in many areas of clinical practice. Biomedical accounts typically translate the effects of mind into the effects of brain functioning, for example, explaining mind/body interactions in terms of the interconnections and reciprocal control of cortical, neuroendocrine, autonomic and immune systems.  While such accounts are instructive, they are implicitly reductionist, and beg the question of how conscious experiences could have bodily effects.  On the other hand, non-reductionist accounts have to cope with three problems: 1) The physical world appears causally closed, which would seem to leave no room for conscious intervention. 2) One is not conscious of one’s own brain/body processing, so how could there be conscious control of such processing? 3) Conscious experiences appear to come too late to causally affect the processes to which they most obviously relate.  This paper suggests a way of understanding mental causation that resolves these problems. It also suggests that “conscious mental control” needs to be partly understood in terms of the voluntary operations of the preconscious mind, and that this allows an account of biological determinism that is compatible with experienced free will.

It is widely recognized that Leibniz’s basic understanding of the mind (as a combination of consciousness and unconsciousness) gave birth to a tradition destined to affect the entire evolution of German psychology until Freud. The proposal of the possible existence of unconscious mental processes was in complete contradiction with the dominant perspective. However, following Kant’s suggestions about the articulated and complex architecture of the soul contained in his Lectures on Psychology, it can be argued that, paradoxically, it is precisely the ‘Eponymous hero’ of the ‘Enlightened Era’ that gives us a first major revision of a ‘treasure’ made by very complex mechanisms, not detected by the spontaneous consciousness, through which our soul develops its knowledge. In fact, for Kant, far from Descartes but closer to Spinoza, the soul ─ which is not only a ‘thinking substance’, as it is continuously in commercium with the body ─ is an integrated and highly complex structure with functions and sub-functions, comparable today to a computer.

The recovery of the emotions and the body in psychotherapy: the contribution of some theories developed in the field of neuroscience and psychobiology.
Recent knowledge, in neuroscience, concerning the functioning of the mind and brain, have highlighted the role that emotions and their physical expressions play in the psychic life of man and in social behaviors. They are therefore at the center of scientific research that show interconnection and convergence between neuroscience, affective neuroscience, attachment theory, psychology, infant research, the multiple code theory, etc. Even in psychotherapy, generally centered on cognition - interpretation, there is renewed interest in the role that the work on emotions and their physical expression has for the effectiveness of psychotherapy. Today, compared to the 60s that marked a paradigm shift in psychotherapy, this renewed interest can rely on evidence acquired, in fact, within the scientific research. This short study focuses mainly on some theories of emotions, developed through multidisciplinary lenses, particularly significant for the practice of psychotherapy. They particularly emphasize the role of the therapeutic relationship and of affective regulation mechanisms (which also regulate physiological states) in determining the therapeutic progress and the patient's recovery process.

Keywords; Polyvagal theory, affective regulation, " basic emotional systems", psychobiology unconscious communication, attachment.