"Stripped of its depth (libido, motive, conflict, drives, body), the cognitive unconscious is technically much closer to what Freud called the preconscious: a system governed by the secondary processes, bound to word-presentations, and separated from the raging unconscious by a barrier of censorship" (159)
"The unconscious "consists of traces and associations of traces that have grown apart from initial experience, and the person can no longer enter into a direct relation with what took place: the experience has gotten lost and forms an unconscious internal reality. And because it is the destiny of experience to get lost the unconscious is not a memory." To put this another way, the unconscious is another neurological scene: it is part of the general play of neurological events, but is not directly mapable with them. For Answermet and Magistretti, fantasy and the unconscious are what happens when neurology becomes relational and strange" (164, my italics)
"Following Ferenczi, I would like to persist with the argument that the neurophysiological body is always/already a fantastic, sexualized body: it requires no associative event to render it relational and strange. From the first, neurophysiology is naturally athwart. Without question, we spend our lives elaborating the entanglements of fantasy, sexuality, biology; but these events draw on substrata that are already entangled each with the other" (164)
"Many of these difficulties arise from how the brain is commonly imagined to be a disembodied organ, even as it is promoted as embodiment par excellence. That is, the embodiment promised by neurological data is grounded too often in a kind of exceptionalism: the matter of mind, it is supposed, is of a different kind from the matter of the body. Mind is to be found here (centrally, cerebrally), but not there (peripherally, viscerally)" (165)
I really appreciate the way Wilson reframes the question of locating "the mind" (not to mention the unconscious) in neuroscience. Her argument opens up a space for her "gut feminism," her relocation of mindedness within different bodily processes.
Recently, I have been thinking about cognitivist perspectives and claims about neuroreductionism (particularly in Matthew Wolf-Meyer's Unraveling). Is the cognitivist perspective a reductionism in the service of understanding the brain (or perhaps we can extend it to "the nervous system")? As Mike explained in class, reductionism is useful so long as the reductionists-in-question understand the limits which operationalize their reducitonism.
