Embodying psychology through neuroscience: conceptual and political issues

For the most part psychology is disembodied, the processes and mechanisms it proposes as capable of being enabled by silicon and wire as by flesh and blood. This disembodiment means that analyses tend to grant unwarranted primacy to the cognitive realm, the realm of conscious thought and discourse. As a result, much of psychology lends itself to idealism, voluntarism and a notion of the subject as more-or-less transcendent, bounded, insightful, consistent and controlling. By contrast, in sociology, social theory, anthropology and other social sciences there has in recent years been a renewed interest in notions of embodiment, an interest that may currently be mutating into a focus on affect, emotion and feeling. These are topics on which neuroscience has much to say – indeed, the subdiscipline of affective neuroscience is concerned primarily with these aspects of our experience.