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This is a rich, dense, and poetic book about big problems and big ideas—the self, consciousness, and qualitative elements of experience (qualia). Neuroscience has made vast progress by putting these problems to one side and addressing more tractable questions. Yet these big problems continue to stand out, as they have since people started contemplating the relationship of mind and brain. Inattention to them has particularly disrupted the relationship between the neurosciences and disciplines like psychoanalysis that center on personal experience.
One source of psychoanalysts' reluctance to incorporate neuroscience in their studies is the sense that there is an irreducible essence of a person's being that cannot be imagined to result from physical events. The problem of selves—or should we say, souls—haunts the interface of neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Despite attempts to address the problem and, even, convincing arguments that it is a pseudo-problem, analysts commonly worry that neuroscientists ignore what is most important to people about their psychological lives—the subjective experiences of consciousness and self.
In psychoanalysis, the self is conceptually slippery. Difficulties start with Freud's loose equation of mental content involving one's person with the idea (translated into English as ego) of a coherent set of functions that mediate between drives, superego, and the external world and include consciousness. Despite efforts to disentangle self and ego, the ideas remained entwined, partly because disturbed ego function and problematic self-experience often co-occur. Heinz Kohut, the most influential psychoanalytic thinker on the self, avoided definitions, stating that it is an “experience-near concept”—that is, something everyone knows from personal experience. Satisfactory self experiences, Kohut observed, include coherence over time and space and a sense of vigor.
Among psychological motives, maintaining a satisfactory sense of self is most important,