A theory of mind for personal identity

In this book, Juan Balbi questions and deepens the theoretical and epistemological principles that lie at the basis of the main psychological schools of the 20^th century. This critical examination is indispensable as soon as it is a matter of setting out a theory of mind capable of accounting for the development of personal identity and its possible interferences and disorders, and capable of generating more effective psychotherapeutic methods.

The author formulates a weighty epistemological objection: fundamental human motivation is not constituted by the discharge of drives, as Freud postulated; it aims at the search for protection through the bond, as John Bowlby maintains in his theory of attachment. The structure of early affective relations shapes the subject’s emotional universe and constitutes the material base on which he will construct a unified and continuous sense of himself.

Language, which presupposes access to self-consciousness, makes subjectivity more complex: on the one hand affectivity acquires new nuances; on the other, temporality emerges as the principal regulator of lived experience. It is thus that, through the subjective organisation of time, life becomes personal existence.

This approach, which conceives the mind in terms of narrative and thematic self-consciousness, has enormous consequences in the clinic: the narrative structure of each person is decisive in the emergence, the development and the remission of psychopathological processes.

The author, who follows the principles of his master Vittorio Guidano, creator of post-rationalist cognitive therapy, holds that the great obstacle of psychological currents that are nonetheless very diverse — behaviourism, psychoanalysis, cybernetic psychology, so-called postmodern psychology and computational cognitivism — lies in their associationist vision of the mind.