Addressing Basic Faults: Re-evaluating the Role of Psychoanalysis in the Mental Health Crisis

John Thor Cornelius, MD, Discussant Bart Magee, PhD

Tuesday, May 4, 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm via Zoom

In this presentation, Dr. Cornelius will discuss clinical material to reflect on what he has come to see as a substantial imbalance between two perspectives of mental distress. His notion of the Broken Brain perspective understands mental distress from a localized, mechanistic perspective and views mental distress as largely caused by discrete mechanical failures of organic brain function. The Broken Brain perspective is in tension with what he calls the Symphonic perspective of mind which views mental distress as a non-local, wholistic and distributed process spread across the entirety of the mental capacity which results from the impacts of tragic life experience on the normally functioning mind. While these two perspectives overlap in some areas, they most often lead to dramatically different ways of understanding and treating mental distress. And, while the Broken Brain perspective has had preeminence in the last several decades, the increasingly obvious problems regarding its fundamental scientific validity, massive profit driven biases and problematic long-term, real-world clinical outcomes are of significant concern. And while the Symphonic perspective has gone through a period of disrepute, emerging scientific evidence is increasingly supporting it both theoretically and clinically as an efficacious, reasonable, and cost-effective body of treatments in mental health.