How Culture Runs the Brain

Reviews / Votes

In this timely analysis of how collective or social conditions affect the ways human beings respond to their inner and outer worlds, Harris (New York Medical College) offers an important intervention into multiple fields, including neuroscience, psychology, politics, and biography. His readings are built around Freud's struggles to articulate how cultural forces shape and unshape the mind. This book will be identified with its critical readings of traumatic experience and its effort to build an understanding of trauma in relation to contemporary examples of conflict, aggression, and regressions. Examples include readings of the Boston Marathon bombing; the Orlando, FL, shooting; the Bowe Bergdahl military desertion trial; and political regressions in the American political sphere. With an acute grasp of how trauma is induced and its ramifications for individual and collective identities, Harris has made psychoanalysis relevant as a mode of cultural analysis. Few authors in the analytic tradition have done this with as much success. This book will be immensely rewarding for those who wish to think through the relation of psyche and society, and this will include practitioners as well as students.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals. * CHOICE * This important work follows Harris' previous highly regarded book Minding the Social Brain. It is in the spirit of Ludwick Fleck who contends that scientific contributions are influenced by social, historical, cultural, psychological and personal determinants. He makes a very convincing case that Freud's work was impacted by all those factors. It is a brilliant exposition - a psychoanalytic tour de force. -- Arnold Richards, MD, editor of internationalpsychoanalysis.net