Mistaken Identity: The Mind-Brain Problem Reconsidered

Abstract

LESLIE BROTHERS: Mistaken Identity: Mind-Brain Problem Reconsidered. State University of New York Press, Albany, N.Y., 2001, 107 + ixx pp., $16.95 (paperback), ISBN 0-7914-5188-7. If I had my way this clearly written little book would be mandatory reading for all trainees in the mental health field. I would like my practicing colleagues to read it also, but I fear it is too late to change the contemporary surrender of psychiatry and psychotherapy to the language of neurophysiology. purpose of this book is to dissect, in careful, logical, and methodical fashion, this current surrender-to reveal the fallacies involved in mixing the language of psychology with the language of neurophysiology. It unmasks the incompatible and dubious assumptions upon which this mixing is based. It reminded me of David Hume's famous treatise Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, which opened my eyes to the fallacies underlying epistemological positivism when I read it as student 60 years ago. style of the book is journalistic, free of jargon and not burdened by innumerable references that usually serve more to show off the author's erudition than to illuminate his or her arguments. An even shorter version of the book The trouble with neurobiological explanations of mind, has been published in Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 22, 857-860, 2002. In this also lies the weakness of the book, for to make it more convincing to those at the forefront of the field the author would have to give many more examples and expand his review of various theories of mind-brain relationships. He would have to indicate which, if any, of the theoretical approaches has the least confusion in its premises, even granting that he considers all of psychology not to be empirical science and to indulge in speculative hypotheses that cannot be proven by measurable empirical observations. In that sense his approach resembles that of Grunbaum's positivistic attack on psychoanalysis, but he differs from Grunbaum because he does not believe that this vitiates psychology, just that it makes it different. One final problem with the book is that the author's qualifications to write it are not spelled out. We are told on the back cover by the publisher that he is neuroscientist and a private consultant in Los Angeles, and that is all I could find. At any rate, he says he intends to confront an apparently successful and growing literature that purports to show how the mind arises from the brain. He invents the term neuroism for this, and spends the book showing how it does not make sense. …