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In 2008, George Makari published Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. Bruce Rudisch praised the book in American Imago as “an eye-opening paradigm shift in the telling of psychoanalytic history” (2009, p. 293). In that book Makari de-centered and de-mystified Freud as he mapped out the history of psychoanalysis from about 1870 through the end of the Second World War. When Revolution in Mind was first published, the eminent novelist Paul Auster declared on the cover, “George Makari [had] written nothing less than a history of the modern mind.” Now with Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, Makari, a renowned psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and historian, turns more exactly to that, continuing his endeavor in a history of the philosophy of mind in European thought. His topic is “the invention of the modern mind” in European history. Ending where Revolution in Mind began, Makari now takes his research from Plato and Aristotle through the medieval “Age of Faith” and the Counter Reformation into the “Age of Reason” and further into modernity to investigate the history of the mind-body problem. To give an idea of the historical time-period covered, I ought to note that the first mention of Sigmund Freud occurs on page 509 of this volume, and even then, in passing.
Nothing seems more compelling these days than the mind-body problem. What is consciousness and where does it reside? Where is the ghost in the proverbial machine? Can contemporary brain science account biologically for every aspect of sentience in a purely reductive manner? Do spirit and organic matter combine to make humans think, or is the concept of spirit merely one of the many fictions that emanate from the biological mechanics of the brain? If we are trapped in the network of our own subjectivity then how are we to study subjectivity itself? Or perhaps words like consciousness and subjectivity are already outmoded in the second decade of the twenty-first century.
To date (see George Joh