John Hook on “In Search of Identity: A Clinician Muses on Neuroscience and Other Matters”

Abstract: These are exciting times. Increasing technological sophistication across the whole range of scientific enquiry is providing us with a mass of new information, new perspectives from which to examine our psychological theories. What sense can we make of new understandings from neuroscience about how the brain functions, alongside e.g. genetics and epigenetics in psychological theorising about the nature of identity? I hope to explore, utilising my psychoanalytic and group analytic experience, some of what we are learning in these fields about what it means when we say ‘myself’, ‘yourself’, ‘ourselves’.

Bio: Dr John Hook, Consultant Medical Psychotherapist in Private Practice. Following medical and psychiatric training I specialised in psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the NHS at St George’s Hospital, Tooting and in Group Analysis at the Institute of Group Analysis. I was head of psychological services in Southampton and then Guildford before retiring from the NHS in 2011. I have become increasingly interested in neuropsychoanalysis, engaging in the dialogue between neuroscience and psychoanalysis.