Thought, Consciousness, and Reality. Joseph H. Smith (Ed.) New Haven:  Yale University Press, Psychiatry and the Humanities, vol.  2, 1977.  xix + 316 pp.: Psychoanalysis and Language. Joseph H. Smith (Ed.) New Haven:  Yale University Press, Psychiatry and the Humanities, vol.  3, 1978.  xxx + 402 pp.

The focus of these two books, published under the auspices of the Forum on Psychiatry and the Humanities and the Washington School of Psychiatry, is on the ontological themes common to both philosophy and psychoanalysis. The titles of these volumes summarize their contents: Thought, Consciousness and Reality deals with mind and body, thought, consciousness, reason, memory and reality; Psychoanalysis and Language examines Freudian theory in the light of current philosophical, psychological, linguistic, and psychoanalytic investigation into the nature of language and mind.

Thought, Consciousness and Reality opens with an essay by Stuart Hampshire, “The Explanation of Thought.” Hampshire reiterates Spinoza's idea that mind and body are bound so that each modifies the other. Thought is always embodied in body and brain. Zeno Vendler's “Words in Thoughts” wittily refutes the platonist notion that thinking means talking to one's self: “Language is the means of expressing thoughts, not of having them.” (p. 48). To Stanley R. Palombo, the author of “Dreams, Memory, and the Origin of Thought,” information processing suggests an analogy with mechanisms of dreaming and with processes of cognition. Palombo postulates an adaptive information processing mechanism integrating experiences accumulated by recent memory with data stored in permanent memory structures. Alfred Hofstadter believes that thinking is a response that consciousness makes to counteract its appropriation by an alien and foreign other. In “Consciousness, Thought, and Endowment,” Hofstadter makes the point that this response is not peculiar to philosophers but is incorporated by every form of human endeavor. Harold A. Durfee's article, “Analytic Philosophy, Phenomenology, and the Concept of Consciousness,” examines interpretations that phenomenology and analytic philosophy offer concerning the nature of consciousness.

So much for thought and consciousness, the general title for the preceding essays by philosophers.