43rd Bulletin of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society

The Human Body is the Collective Unconscious: Archetypal Images as Innate Embodied Metaphors

“…Philosophy itself began to see a rising interest in panpsychism and other non-dualistic ontologies, (Chalmers, 1997; see also Goodwyn, 2021). Somatic therapies (e.g., Goergen & Hernández, 2023;van der Kolk, 2015;Levine, 2010) recognized that the body had its own kind of intentionality, perception and mental capacity-just as we saw with the old feeling-toned complex experiments of the early psychoanalysts. Neuropsychoanalysis and psycho-systems analysis, both based on Freudian and/or Jungian models integrated with neuroscience (Richards & Richards, 2023;Rossi, 2002;Solms, 2020), specifically reject dualism in their approach to mind and body.…”

Understanding Spontaneous Symbolism in Psychotherapy Using Embodied Thought

“…Early psychoanalysts such as Carl Jung, for example, puzzled over this in many of his works, proposing "archetypes" as explanatory elements of the mind, though he struggled to define archetypes clearly. The above proposal might be considered a reimagining of archetype theory, only with much greater clarity of definition and supported by falsifiable empirical findings from spontaneous thought, embodied cognition, affective and cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary theory, and many other fields unavailable to the early psychoanalysts [46][47][48][49][50][51].…”