New Developments in Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis – Vittorio Gallese

New Developments in Neuroscience and Psychoanalysis Series
This exciting online series hosted by the Neuropsychoanalysis Association showcases the cutting-edge knowledge that is currently emanating from neuroscientific disciplines and the field of psychoanalysis. The series includes presentations from leading authorities that will enhance neuropsychoanalytic understanding, while at the same time inspire our multidisciplinary community. The series will demonstrate the amazing variety of topics that are relevant to the fascinating field of neuropsychoanalysis.

Vittorio Gallese, MD

Friday, January 20
11:00 a.m. – 1 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time)

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The webinar will be 2 hours long.

In spite of the historically consolidated psychopathological perspective, neuroscientific research applied to schizophrenia has so far almost entirely neglected the first-person experiential dimension of this syndrome, mainly focusing on higher-order cognitive functions, such as executive function, working memory, theory of mind, and the like. An alternative view posits that schizophrenia is a self-disorder characterized by anomalous self-experience and awareness. This view may not only shed new light on the psychopathological features of psychosis but also inspire empirical research targeting the bodily and neurobiological changes underpinning this disorder. Recent empirical evidence on the neurobiological basis of a minimal notion of the self, the bodily self, will be presented. The relationship between the body, its motor potentialities and the notion of minimal self will be illustrated. Putative neural mechanisms underpinning an incoherent bodily self and the blurring of self-other distinction in schizophrenic patients will be presented. Cognitive neuroscience can today address classic topics of psychopathology by adding a new level of description, finally enabling the correlation between the first-person experiential aspects of psychiatric diseases and their neurobiological roots. I posit that brain function anomalies of multisensory integration, differential processing of self- and other-related bodily information mediating self-experience, might be at the basis of the deficits and imbalance in the pre-reflective relationship of the bodily self to the social world observed in schizophrenia.

Bio
Vittorio Gallese MD is Professor of Psychobiology at the University of Parma, Italy, Fellow at the Italian Academy of Advanced Studies in America of Columbia University, New York, USA, and Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Philosophy of the School of Advanced Study of the University of London, UK. Cognitive neuroscientist, his research focuses on the relation between the sensory-motor system and social cognition by investigating the neurobiological grounding of intersubjectivity, psychopathology, language and aesthetics. He is the author of more than 300 scientific publications and three books.

CPD credits: 2
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