ABSTRACT
There is a body of neuroscience and cognitive science that is of great interest to psychoanalysts wishing to find some sort of explicative bridge between daily clinical experience and theoretical inheritance. While there are a number of competing explanatory models in neuropsychoanalysis, they share many commonalities that are useful for thinking about possible communicative processes. The nature of the human mind is determined by the form of the human body, and properties of cognition, emotion, and consciousness are shaped by properties of the body. Vittorio Gallese, a professor of neurophysiology and social neuroscience at the University of Parma, borrows the word “intercorporeity” from Merleau-Ponty to describe his theory of embodied simulation, which is automatic, non-conscious, and prelinguistic. Gallese and colleagues use A. Meltzoff and M. Moore’s studies of newborns merely hours old who were capable of imitating adult mouth and tongue movements, not in a reflexive way, but in a responsive way that matches the observed behaviour of an other.
