The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage

Description

This book employs a philosophical approach to the new wounded (brain lesion patients) to stage a confrontation between psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology, focused on the issue of trauma and psychic wounds. It thereby reevaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather at its center. The new wounded suffer from psychic wounds that traditional psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the psyches need to integrate events into its own history, cannot understand or cure. They are victims of various cerebral lesions or attacks, including degenerative brain diseases such as Parkinsons and Alzheimers. Changes caused by cerebral lesions frequently manifest themselves as an unprecedented metamorphosis in the patients identity. A person with Alzheimers disease, for example, is not–or not only–someone who has changed or been modified but rather a subject who has become someone else. The behavior of subjects who are victims of sociopolitical traumas, such as abuse, war, terrorist