{"id":2072,"date":"2025-04-04T13:53:12","date_gmt":"2025-04-04T20:53:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/?p=2072"},"modified":"2025-04-04T13:53:12","modified_gmt":"2025-04-04T20:53:12","slug":"notes-on-kandel-age-of-insight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/alteritas\/2025\/04\/04\/notes-on-kandel-age-of-insight\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes on Kandel, Age of Insight"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present<\/div>\n
Kandel, Eric R.<\/div>\n
Citation (APA): Kandel, E. R. (2012). The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present<\/i> [Kindle iOS version]. Retrieved from Amazon.com<\/div>\n
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Part One: A Psychoanalytic Psychology and Art of Unconscious Emotion<\/div>\n
Bookmark – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 40 \u00b7 Location 434<\/div>\n
Bookmark – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 41 \u00b7 Location 446<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 44 \u00b7 Location 498<\/div>\n
Van Swieten formed what is now known as the First Vienna School of Medicine, a school that began to transform Viennese medicine from the practice of therapeutic quackery based on humanist philosophy and the teachings of Hippocrates and Galen into a practice based on natural science.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 47 \u00b7 Location 519<\/div>\n
This development had two roots. First, as noted, every patient who died in the Vienna General Hospital was autopsied under the supervision of a single, highly trained person, the head pathologist.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 47 \u00b7 Location 521<\/div>\n
During a career spanning over thirty years, he and his associates carried out some sixty thousand autopsies,<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 47 \u00b7 Location 528<\/div>\n
The process gave rise to a new understanding of the clinical-pathological correlation that has characterized modern medicine ever since.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 47 \u00b7 Location 530<\/div>\n
contrary to the teachings of Galen, clinical symptoms arise from disorders of individual organs: symptoms are the cries of suffering organs. To understand disease, one must first find where in the body the disease originates.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 48 \u00b7 Location 545<\/div>\n
Skoda became not only a skilled listener to the heart\u2019s sounds, but also a remarkable interpreter of their anatomical and pathological significance, setting the standard for current medical practice.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 50 \u00b7 Location 565<\/div>\n
In fact several of the founders of academic medicine in the United States\u2014William Osler, William Halsted, and Harvey Cushing\u2014studied medicine in Vienna before assuming their leadership roles.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 50 \u00b7 Location 572<\/div>\n
disease, Rokitansky and Skoda also provided the scientific basis for the concept of the disease process, the idea that each disease has a natural history and progresses through a series of steps from its onset to its termination.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 2. Exploring the Truths Hidden Beneath the Surface: Origins of a Scientific Medicine > Page 51 \u00b7 Location 577<\/div>\n
\u201cThe phenomena are a visible expression of that which is hidden.\u201d<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 3. Viennese Artists, Writers, and Scientists Meet in the Zuckerkandl Salon > Page 58 \u00b7 Location 663<\/div>\n
both fields appear repeatedly in the background ornamentation of Klimt\u2019s paintings. In fact, his radical portrayals of the nude female figure are seen by the art historian Emily Braun as reflecting a naturalistic, post-Darwinian perspective: \u201cAfter Darwin, the body in painting stands nakedly for itself: a biological species subject to the same procreative laws as every other organism.\u201d<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 64 \u00b7 Location 706<\/div>\n
His linking of psychology and brain biology led him to a second idea that is central to the biology of mind: the brain\u2014and particularly its outer covering, the cerebral cortex\u2014does not function as a single organ; therefore, different mental functions can be localized to different regions.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 67 \u00b7 Location 733<\/div>\n
Broca and Wernicke each conducted postmortem examinations of the brains of people with speech defects and found that specific disorders of language are associated with damage to specific regions of the brain. Thus, language can indeed be localized. The understanding of language is located<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 68 \u00b7 Location 735<\/div>\n
in the back of the cortex (in the left posterior superior temporal gyrus), the expression of language is located in the front of the cortex (in the left posterior frontal lobe), and the two sites are connected by a bundle of nerve fibers.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 70 \u00b7 Location 750<\/div>\n
damage to the hypothalamus produces stress that can cause what we now call \u201cstress ulcers\u201d in the stomach. Subsequent work by other scientists showed that the hypothalamus controls the pituitary gland and the autonomic nervous system and therefore plays a central role in mediating sexual, aggressive, and defensive behavior and in controlling hunger, thirst, and other homeostatic functions.<\/div>\n
Bookmark – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 73 \u00b7 Location 796<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 77 \u00b7 Location 851<\/div>\n
Encouraged by Br\u00fccke to study the nervous system, Freud completed one study of the lamprey, a simple vertebrate animal, and another study of the crayfish, a simple invertebrate animal. He found that the cells of the invertebrate nervous system<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 77 \u00b7 Location 853<\/div>\n
are not fundamentally different from those of the vertebrate nervous system.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 4. Exploring the Brain Beneath the Skull: Origins of a Scientific Psychiatry > Page 78 \u00b7 Location 864<\/div>\n
During this period, Freud made several contributions to research on the neuroanatomy of the medulla oblongata (the part of the nervous system that contains the centers for breathing and heart rhythms), and carried out several important clinical neurological studies on cerebral palsy and aphasias.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 81 \u00b7 Location 900<\/div>\n
We cannot do without men with the courage to think new things before they can prove them.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 94 \u00b7 Location 1052<\/div>\n
He therefore concluded that his patients\u2019 reports were based not on real events but were \u201conly phantasies which my patients had made up or which I myself had perhaps forced on them.\u201d 11 This led him to alter his seduction theory. He now saw the traumatic seduction experienced by the patient not as an actual physical act, but as an imagined physical experience with the patient\u2019s parent, a fantasy that he concluded was universal.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 95 \u00b7 Location 1073<\/div>\n
Rather, he saw the decision as a necessary and, he hoped, temporary separation that would allow time for both the psychology of mind and the biology of the brain to mature before any ultimate unification of the two was attempted\u2014a radical idea at that time.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 97 \u00b7 Location 1094<\/div>\n
\u201cWe must recollect that all of our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably one day be based on an organic substructure,\u201d 14 he wrote. In his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle, written in 1920, he continued:<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 97 \u00b7 Location 1097<\/div>\n
The deficiencies in our description would probably vanish if we were already in a position to replace the psychological terms with physiological or chemical ones.\u2026<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 97 \u00b7 Location 1098<\/div>\n
We may expect [physiology and chemistry] to give the most surprising information and we cannot guess what answers it will return in a few dozen<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 97 \u00b7 Location 1099<\/div>\n
years of questions we have to put to it. They may be of a kind that will blow away the whole of our artificial structure of hypotheses.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 98 \u00b7 Location 1114<\/div>\n
His determination was based on the remarkable insight that unlike many neurological disorders, psychiatric disorders\u2014and psychopathology in general\u2014are extensions and distortions of normal mental processes.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 99 \u00b7 Location 1116<\/div>\n
cognitive psychology,<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 5. Exploring Mind Together with the Brain: The Development of a Brain-Based Psychology > Page 99 \u00b7 Location 1118<\/div>\n
The term \u201ccognition\u201d refers to all processes by which a sensory stimulus is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered and used. It is concerned with these processes even when they operate in the absence of relevant stimulation, as in images and hallucinations.\u2026 Given such sweeping definition it is apparent that cognition is involved in everything a human being might possibly do, that every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. 16<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 106 \u00b7 Location 1219<\/div>\n
The subjective experience which appears in consciousness during sleep and which, after waking, is referred to by the sleeper as a dream is only the end result of unconscious mental activity during sleep which, by its nature or its intensity, threatens to interfere with sleep itself. Instead of waking, the sleeper dreams. We call the conscious experience during sleep, which the sleeper may or may not recall after waking, the manifest dream. Its various elements are referred to as the manifest dream content. The unconscious thoughts and wishes which threaten to waken the sleeper we call the latent dream content. The unconscious mental operations by which the latent dream content is transformed into the manifest dream we call the dream work. 8<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 107 \u00b7 Location 1236<\/div>\n
Freud also continues an earlier line of thought\u2014namely, that to understand a person\u2019s present, one must turn inward and understand that person\u2019s earliest experiences in childhood, both real and imagined.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 108 \u00b7 Location 1247<\/div>\n
First, mental processes operate primarily unconsciously; conscious thought and emotion are the exception rather than the rule.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 108 \u00b7 Location 1249<\/div>\n
Second, no aspect of mental activity is simply noise in the machinery of the brain. Mental events do not occur by chance, but adhere to scientific laws.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 108 \u00b7 Location 1253<\/div>\n
Third, and critical to unlocking the secrets of the human unconscious, Freud<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 108 \u00b7 Location 1254<\/div>\n
argued that irrationality per se is not abnormal: it is the universal language of the<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 108 \u00b7 Location 1255<\/div>\n
Fourth, normal and abnormal mental function lie on a continuum. Every neurotic symptom, no matter how strange it may seem to the patient, is not strange to the unconscious mind, because it is related to earlier mental processes.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 109 \u00b7 Location 1266<\/div>\n
What proved to be Freud\u2019s most original and influential idea is that mental activity adheres to scientific laws.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 113 \u00b7 Location 1299<\/div>\n
The superego is the unconscious moral agency, the embodiment of our aspirations.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 113 \u00b7 Location 1305<\/div>\n
the implicit unconscious. The implicit unconscious, which we now realize is a much larger part of our unconscious mental life than Freud thought, is not concerned with instinctual drives or conflicts. Instead, it is concerned with habits and perceptual and motor skills, which involve procedural (implicit) memory. Even though it is not repressed, the implicit unconscious is never accessible to consciousness.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 114 \u00b7 Location 1310<\/div>\n
Freud used the term unconscious in a broader sense\u2014the preconscious unconscious\u2014<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 114 \u00b7 Location 1312<\/div>\n
access to it by an effort of attention.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 114 \u00b7 Location 1312<\/div>\n
unconscious much of the time; it becomes conscious only as sensory percepts\u2014words, images, and emotions.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 114 \u00b7 Location 1315<\/div>\n
consciousness is Darwinian: it allows us to experience thought, emotion, and the states of pleasure and pain that are essential for the propagation of the species.<\/div>\n
Bookmark – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 115 \u00b7 Location 1329<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 116 \u00b7 Location 1342<\/div>\n
book Darwin points out that emotions are part of a primitive, virtually universal approach-avoidance system designed to seek out pleasure and decrease exposure to pain.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 6. Exploring Mind Apart from the Brain: Origins of a Dynamic Psychology > Page 119 \u00b7 Location 1382<\/div>\n
The patients in his five major case studies\u2014Dora, Little Hans, the Rat Man, Schreber, the Wolf Man\u2014have become characters as indelible in the canon of modern literature as those of Dostoevsky.<\/div>\n
Bookmark – Chapter 8. The Depiction of Modern Women\u2019s Sexuality in Art > Page 143 \u00b7 Location 1661<\/div>\n
Bookmark – Chapter 9. The Depiction of the Psyche in Art > Page 193 \u00b7 Location 2070<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 9. The Depiction of the Psyche in Art > Page 196 \u00b7 Location 2116<\/div>\n
Die Tr\u00e4umenden Knaben<\/div>\n
Bookmark – Chapter 10. The Fusion of Eroticism, Aggression, and Anxiety in Art > Page 245 \u00b7 Location 2562<\/div>\n
Bookmark – Chapter 10. The Fusion of Eroticism, Aggression, and Anxiety in Art > Page 274 \u00b7 Location 2774<\/div>\n
Part Three: Biology of the Beholder\u2019s Visual Response to Art<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 14. The Brain\u2019s Processing of Visual Images > Page 348 \u00b7 Location 3404<\/div>\n
The ventral tegmental area of the midbrain also contains neurons that release dopamine, a chemical that serves to command attention and anticipate reward.<\/div>\n
Highlight(blue<\/span>) – Chapter 14. The Brain\u2019s Processing of Visual Images > Page 350 \u00b7 Location 3431<\/div>\n
Computers are better than the human brain at processing and manipulating large amounts of data, but they lack the hypothesis-testing, creative, and inferential capabilities of our visual system.<\/div>\n
Part Five: An Evolving Dialogue Between Visual Art and Science<\/div>\n
Bookmark – Chapter 30. Brain Circuits for Creativity > Page 688 \u00b7<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present Kandel, Eric R. Citation (APA): Kandel, E. R. (2012). The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present [Kindle iOS version]. Retrieved … <\/p>\n

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