A Clinical Evaluation of the Cognitive Approach to Psychosis
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82
In an era of quantification of the mind and of physicalization of psychological events, the cognitive sciences aim to develop a new scientific theory that invalidates “pre-cognitive” psychiatric knowledge and the teachings of Freudian psychoanalysis. By studying works that are representative of this cognitive approach applied to psychosis, we will show that this program refers only to one psychosis—schizophrenia—and ignores the others. In this approach, schizophrenia would arise from the alteration of the specific cognitive function that manages verbal or motor activity (action monitoring). We question this explanation. Firstly, it is not a new paradigm, and this “mental causality” brings together mechanicist and organicist psychiatric theories. Secondly, compared with clinical analysis, the cognitive approach reveals some paradoxes, debated within the cognitive sciences themselves. They concern brain-mind and computer-brain identity. There are gaps in the cognitive explanation. We insist those gaps are leftovers of the Freudian Unconscious, which creates a “field of symptoms” (Lacan) and a new, libidinal causality. Therefore, psychosis is a peculiar subjective position, in which the subject tries to connect their jouissance-focused being with language and speech. In light of this, the delusion of the psychotic is not an epiphenomenon but an invention (machina), an attempt at self-therapy. The analytic setting can help the psychotic subject to understand this reality.
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