Bases biológicas da cognição: : consequências para a educação e para a psicanálise
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The author draws attention to a paradigm shift that occurred in the last century: the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm took man to the moon but is incapable of showing how the human mind learns or how to predict the weather — tasks that require greater complexity. Freud (1940/1961, p. 182) wished to see psychoanalysis included among the sciences of man: “that all our psychological properties might one day be founded on an organic substrate.” Matte-Blanco left his project on an epistemology of emotions unfinished, while Bion concerned himself with how we know, and Solms revisited the “Project” using today’s technologies. It was psychoanalysis’s success in alleviating emotional suffering that caused it to drift away from its biological foundations—foundations we are now revisiting. We are all living human beings, and thus dependent on our biology; we are defined by our structure and the way we couple with our surrounding environment. These insights are proposed in the Santiago Theory of Maturana and Varela (1997), summarized here in terms of what matters to us as psychoanalysts and educators: the transmission of knowledge is impossible, yet learning is inevitable—so how does it happen? An attempt is made to conceptualize psychoanalysis within this new Paradigm of Complexity, just as the aim is to understand the “setting” in alignment with these proposals
Source: Revista de Psicanálise da SPPA
Author: Cabral Pellanda, Luiz Ernesto
Language: Portuguese
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7224984986