Katja Guenther is assistant professor of the history of science at Princeton University. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
"Localization and its Discontents reframes the history of
psychoanalysis and the neuro disciplines, revealing that the
correlation between them is much deeper than hitherto thought. The
chapters are easy to follow, the translation of original German
phrases is provided in a consistent manner, and the author's
careful organisation of the book enables the reader to perceive a
meaningful sequence in the order of different sections."-- "The
British Society for Literature and Science"
"Localization and Its Discontents is a brilliant new account of the
intellectual formation and basic problems of neuroscience,
incorporating contributors to the field as diverse as Sigmund Freud
and Wilder Penfield. Guenther's intervention into the mind-body
problem challenges historians of science, medicine, and philosophy
as well as current laboratory investigators of nervous system
functioning. A fresh description of the framing of neuroscience,
superbly researched and powerfully argued."-- "John C. Burnham,
Ohio State University"
"As one of the more compelling contributions in the emerging genre
of 'the genealogy of the present', Katja Guenther's book not only
diagnoses the past development of psychoanalysis and the neuro
disciplines - including the ruptures that took place within, across
and between them - while offering a state-of-theart overview of the
current debate, but it also aims to make a distinctive intervention
with an eye towards actively shaping the future of the
relationship between the fields. By shifting the conversation away
from the more popular, at times vulgar, interpretation that reduces
psychoanalysis's
object of research to the metaphysical psyche and neuroscience's
object of study to that of soma alone, Guenther proposes an
alternative construct
that one might use in thinking about the two fields."--
"Psychoanalysis and History"
"By restoring the reflex to the histories of both the neurosciences
and psychoanalysis, Guenther effectively links their disconnected
histories, and suggests productive new lines of inquiry for
historians of the brain and mind sciences beyond the simple
division of psyche and soma. Likewise, for those interested in
rethinking the categories of analysis within the history of the
human sciences, Localization and Its Discontents will prove to be
indispensable reading."
-- "British Journal for the History of Science"
"One of the most exciting contributions of Katja Guenther's
Localization and Its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and
the Neuro Disciplines is that it turns this opposition between
nature and culture on its head and shows how, in fact, the history
of psychiatry is more complicated and how these two fields are
actually quite porous. . . . This is an important and stimulating
book that puts into perspective the supposed triumph of
neuroscience and that challenges some of the most commonly held
assumptions that have governed the history of medicine and the
history of psychoanalysis, but also our basic understanding of
science, subjectivity, and self."
-- "American Historical Review"
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