Recovering the embodied subject: Interdisciplinary issues in cognitive science and psychoanalysis

In recent decades, cognitive science broadened the scope of its inquiry to include consciousness and subjectivity in models of "embodied" and "embedded" cognition. The consequences of this sweeping change for the interdisciplinary boundary between cognitive science and psychoanalysis are examined. In spite of disclaimers by critics of rapprochement that the two paradigms are not commensurate in their core, it is argued that subjectivity, conceived as particularity of situated embodied mental states, has been a long-standing conceptual problem for both fields, and does not therefore provide a rigid boundary of mutual exclusion between psychoanalysis and cognitive science. Signs of intra-disciplinary splits and fault-lines are revealed in the problem of semantic reference in cognitive science and the problem of drive-object linkage in psychoanalysis. The following critiques of rigidly polarized conceptualizations in the two disciplines are examined: (a) mechanical action vs. intentional representation (Varela, Thompson and Rosch); (b) localized presence vs. absence of conscious content (Dennett and Kinsbourne); (c) data vs. inference (Gigerenzer and Murray); (d) instinctual/biological vs. interpersonal/representational states (Winnicott and Ogden). It is shown the questions raised by Winnicott and Ogden are closely related to some of the central concerns of Varela, Dennett, and Damasio, namely: (a) the status of objective reality in the experience of embodied subjects; (b) temporality as a factor in integration of mental states; and (c) the role of affect in the development of intentionality. Analysis of implicit objectivist assumptions operating in the normative models of judgment, decision making and randomness perception shows how the objectivist "brand of ownership" shapes descriptive data and leads researchers to neglect the subjective contribution in information search and the role of task. The general conclusion is that the traditional approach which identifies subjectivity with the inter-disciplinary boundary between objectively oriented science and hermeneutically oriented psychoanalysis is subverted by new models of situated embodied cognition; thus, subjectivity needs to be re-conceptualized as an intra-disciplinary problem which is shared by both fields and which emerges in conflicts between mechanical (design) and intentional (content) descriptions of cognitive processes.