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Practising psychotherapists and analysts are often at a loss to know what to make of the range and complexity of empirical research in neuroscience and developmental psychology. We know that this research offers vital new evidence about the development and functioning of the human mind, but it is very hard for us to know how to evaluate the significance of these findings for our clinical work, since so much of it is outside our field of expertise.
This paper by Corrado Sinigaglia and Laura Sparaci provides us with a helpful summary of some of the key issues arising from the study of mirror neurons, in which these authors themselves play a central part and which is increasingly recognized to be revolutionizing contemporary scientific understanding of human communication and intersubjectivity. The purpose of my response is to draw out some of the issues that are of particular relevance to our clinical practice as analysts and therapists.
The authors get to the heart of the matter in their statement that, in making sense of other people's actions, we do not always rely on inferential processes (p. 4). In other words, we do not necessarily have to deduce consciously what is the intention of their action—we do not need a ‘theory of mind’. We often rely on a more immediate understanding of others' goals and behaviour and the activity of the mirror neuron system plays a fundamental role in such understanding. The crucial characteristic that defines mirror neurons is that the same neurons fire both when carrying out an action and when observing another performing an action.
Mirror neuron activity therefore provides a direct matching of the others' observed behaviour with our own motor and emotional repertoire, a neurological mirroring process that functions automatically and does not require any conscious concept or inference. Mirror neurons have different degrees of specificity, but they work together as a system to encode not just the observed actions per se, but the intenti