The Mammalian Kidney. Biological Structure and Function

421 following the linguists, has made so much in his studies on social organization and which is essential also to the explanation of the psychoanalytically interesting dichotomy of self and other, seems to require the integrity of the area comprising the inferior parietal lobe. Evidence is also at hand to support the proposal that there is a localizable neurognostic structure governing the experience of causality. The foregoing paragraphs summarize in barest outline Professors Laughlin and D'Aquili's first five chapters, in which the evolutionary and neurophysiological background of their thinking is developed. The remaining four chapters apply this background to a variety of subjects, of which the most relevant to the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst is the eighth, on "Psychopathology and Evolutionary Structuralism." From the rather familiar ground of the genetics of schizophrenia, they proceed to other aspects of psychosis and neurosis. The formulation of depression, for example, in terms of the activation of the neurognostic structure that aligns self to the world in a negative fashion is appealing, if not fully convincing. Conversely, in another chapter, the authors invoke the concept of inherited structure governing positive alignment of self to objects to explain homosexuality. It is at this point, when the authors extend their lines to psychopathology, the reviewer's own field, that the arguments seem to run thin. Just as no one can intelligently deny the dependence of mental function on cerebral structure and organization , so it should be welcome to know more precisely the ways in which mental function is mediated by the brain. But, as Jacques Lacan (a psychoanalyst with strong structuralist leanings, who however is not cited in this work) remarked a long time ago, the problem we have to contend with is the "structure of determination" itself. Even if we knew that all the structures which categorize symbolic processes were definable in terms of neurophysiology, we should still have to look at the symbolic processes themselves in their uniqueness to assign their relations with other processes. The significance of an element in a phobia can only be known, for example, through its historical affiliations with other symbols, as revealed through psychotherapeutic discourse. So, too, I should expect that with the most complete mapping of cerebral systems and processes, we should still have to look within the symbolic, ultimately mental data of structural anthropology to account for transformations of social organization. This is to say that the …