The study of the brain-mind complex has been hampered by the dichotomy between objective biological neuroscience and subjective psychological science. The two antithetical avenues of research are partly responsible for the failure to unravel the transformation of neural events into mental images: how matter becomes imagination, and vice versa; is the brains consciousness equivalent to Ego consciousness? Is the ego the self? In its new and updated edition, The Rosetta Stone of the Human Mind: Three Languages to Integrate Neurobiology and Psychology illustrates how the simultaneous use of the languages of neurobiology, of mathematics, and of the humanities, enriches the understanding of the neural and mental realms and adds new dimensions to our perception of neuropsychological events. Dr. Sanguineti shows how the two seemingly dichotomous approaches are similar in what they describe, and he explores how the awareness and application of these perspectivesare helpful in getting a deeper theoretical grasp on major mental events, giving us a better understanding of individual minds, and fostering a more integrated therapeutic intervention. The intended readers include neuroscientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and anyone interested in the human mind.
Learning the Languages.- Humanitys Search for Mind and the Subject: A
Brief Review of the Evolution of Neuropsychobiology.- An Ideographic,
Suprapersonal Language of Rules and Universal Symbols: Alwyn Scott and
Nonlinear Dynamics.- A Demotic, First-Person Language of the Individual and
the Social System: Apuleius and the Myth of Psyche.- The Language of the
Objective Observer: Gerald Edelman and Neurodarwinism: Antonio Damasio and
the Feeling of Knowing.- Seeking the Understanding.- Consciousness.- The
Unconscious.- The Database.- Affectivity.- The Neural/Mental Gap: Intuition,
Self and Ego, a Trilingual Map.- Applying the Knowledge.- The Three Languages
and Science: A New Scientific Paradigm?.- The Three Languages and Treatment.-
The Psychotherapeutic Dialogue: Intersubjectivity.- The Role of a New Science
for Psyche Upon Society and Culture.
Vincenzo Sanguineti was born in Eritrea and lived there until completion of Medical School at the Universita Degli Studi in Milan, Italy. He then spent five years in Nigeria, where he conducted published field research in Tropical Medicine and directed a missionary hospital. Consequently, he profited from the prolonged exposure to uncontaminated natural habitats and to the degrees of difference and similarity among different species, and different human cultures, which enhanced his fascination for the interaction between the unique subjectivity of the self and the interactive processes stemming from the profound complexity of the individual and collective variables participating to the phase-space of the mind. Such interests evolved into more programmatic research that generated various studies and formed the basis of his books: Landscapes in my Mind, The Rosetta Stone of the Human Mind, and his fictional historical biography of Sarpedon, the mythical king of Lykia. Currently, Dr. Sanguineti is in private practice in Philadelphia, where he is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Jefferson Medical Center, within the Sidney Kimmel Medical College.
