Advances in Consciousness Research (vols. 1–92, 1995–2015)

Body Memory, Metaphor and Movement is an interdisciplinary volume with contributions from philosophers, cognitive scientists, and movement therapists. Part one provides the phenomenologically grounded definition of body memory with its different typologies. Part two follows the aim to integrate phenomenology, conceptual metaphor theory, and embodiment approaches from the cognitive sciences for the development of appropriate empirical methods to address body memory. Part three inquires into the forms and effects of therapeutic work with body memory, based on the integration of theory, empirical findings, and clinical applications. It focuses on trauma treatment and the healing power of movement. The book also contributes to metaphor theory, application and research, and therefore addresses metaphor researchers and linguists interested in the embodied grounds of metaphor. Thus, it is of particular interest for researchers from the cognitive sciences, social sciences, and humanities as well as clinical practitioners.

The body, as the common ground for objectivity and (inter)subjectivity, is a phenomenon with a perplexing plurality of registers. Therefore, this innovative volume offers an interdisciplinary approach from the fields of neuroscience, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. The concepts of body image and body schema have a firm tradition in each of these disciplines and make up the conceptual anchors of this volume.

Challenged by neuropathological phenomena, neuroscience has dealt with body image and body schema since the beginning of the twentieth century. Halfway through the twentieth century, phenomenology was inspired by child development and elaborated a specifically phenomenological account of body image and schema. Starting from the mirror stage, this source of inspiration is shared with psychoanalysis which develops the concept of body image in interaction with the clinic of the singular subject. In this volume, the creative encounter of these three perspectives on the body opens up present-day paths for conceptualisation, research and (clinical) practice. (Series B)

Analysis and dissociation have proved to be useful tools to understand the basic functions of the brain and the mind, which therefore have been decomposed to a multitude of ever smaller subsystems and pieces by most scientific approaches. However, the understanding of complex functions such as consciousness will not succeed without a more global consideration of the ways the mind-brain works. This implies that synthesis rather than analysis should be applied to the brain. The present book offers a collection of contributions ranging from sensory and motor cognitive neuroscience to mood management and thought, which all focus on the dissociation between conscious (explicit) and nonconscious (implicit) processing in different cognitive situations. The contributions in this book clearly demonstrate that conscious and nonconscious processes typically interact in complex ways. The central message of this collection of papers is: In order to understand how the brain operates as one integrated whole that generates cognition and behaviour, we need to reassemble the brain and mind and put all the conscious and nonconscious pieces back together again. (Series B)