We-ness, Embodied Simulation, and Psychoanalysis: Reply to Commentaries

First of all I would like to thank Robert Emde and Bruce Reis for their insightful reading of my paper and the kind appreciation they both showed for some of the ideas I put forward in it. More generally, I particularly appreciated their open-minded critical evaluation of the potential relevance of developmental psychology and neuroscience for the progress of psychoanalytic thought. For sake of concision I confine my reply on selected topics the two commentaries raised in relation to my article. Both Emde and Reis emphasize the potentialities for psychoanalytic thought of the discovery of mirror neurons and of the new model of basic aspects of social cognition—embodied simulation—inspired by such discovery. The paper of Emde mainly addresses the potential implications of embodied simulation for therapeutic action in psychoanalysis, while that of Reis mostly deals with the philosophical consequences of the “revolution” produced by the current trend of “embodied cognition” in neuroscience, philosophy, linguistics and developmental psychology, stressing its importance in many aspects of interpersonal relations. Robert Emde raises important questions about the potential impact of the recent discoveries of developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience on therapeutic action in psychoanalysis. I focus here on his first question, concerning to what extent and under what circumstances does therapeutic change depend upon implicit and nonconscious interactive empathic exchanges between patient and psychoanalyst. In our paper appeared in the JAPA (Gallese, Eagle, & Migone, 2007) we proposed that beside the traditional role assigned to “insight,” models of therapeutic action in psychoanalysis should incorporate the role of corrective emotional experience enabled by the intentional and affective attunement established within the analytic setting. In particular, we focused on the analyst’s attunement to the patient’s intentions and posited that embodied simulation could play an important role in it. In a recent special issue of The Psychoanalytic Review titled “The Psychonalyst’s Intentions,” the editor Alan Barnett (2008a) in the introductory paper emphasized the role of the analyst’s senPsychoanalytic Dialogues, 19:580–584, 2009 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1048-1885 print / 1940-9222 online DOI: 10.1080/10481880903231928