From Julia Rydzynska, Haslemere, Surrey, UK
I read with great interest the interview with Michael Pollan, but was struck by a notable omission. He suggests we may need “a kind of science” capable of incorporating first-person experience into our understanding of consciousness. Yet disciplines such as psychoanalysis have been working precisely in this space for over a century, building on much older philosophical traditions and treating subjective experience, including the unconscious, as meaningful and analysable rather than problematic (4 April, p 26).
While these traditions may not fit neatly within conventional empirical frameworks, they arguably represent exactly the kind of enquiry Pollan is calling for. This raises the question of whether the issue is a lack of tools, or a reluctance within contemporary science to engage with them.
Advertisement
