Knowing the brain, unknowing the body

Abstract

Increasingly knowledge of right brain function is thought to legitimise therapeutic practices which emphasise that the therapist be experienced as being in a state of affective attunement to the client. In thinking about how neuroscience makes its way into the consulting room the paper considers the idea that while in general neuroscientific and hermeneutical knowledge might combine to form a more complete account of client distress, the specific locus for this epistemological combining will always also be the therapist and his or her relationship to this knowledge. In thinking about the ontological specificity of the therapist, the paper considers the idea that therapeutic knowledge is itself a kind of object relation which the therapist holds in mind within the setting. And in considering the specificity of neuroscience as an object relation, the paper posits that the therapist’s relation to neuroscience is felt right on the body through the introduction of affect attunement based praetioes. Elaborating on this hypothesis the paper considers that a counselling psychological holding in mind of neuroscience might lie in thinking the therapist’s body as a specifically relational presence.