The Emotional Brain: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion

The Emotional Brain: Lost and Found in the Science of Emotion is a work by Dean Burnett (2018).

Core claims

• Burnett inadvertently demonstrates the very problem depth psychology diagnosed a century ago: that neuroscience, when it approaches emotion without feeling-tone or mythic context, produces a cortical map of the psyche that has amputated the psyche itself.
• The book’s greatest unintentional contribution is as a case study in what Hillman called the “boxed-in psychology” of cognitive-behaviorism and neuroscience—a flatland where emotion is explained but never encountered as a soul event.
• Burnett’s popular-science framing of emotion as brain mechanism reveals, by stark contrast, why Jung’s insistence on the irreducibility of feeling as a function of consciousness—not a byproduct of neural firing—remains the essential corrective to materialist psychology.

Related questions

• How does Hillman’s distinction between emotion as “divine influx” in Re-Visioning Psychology challenge Burnett’s neuroscientific reduction of emotion to brain mechanism, and what would a reconciliation between these positions require?
• In what ways does Neumann’s concept of the transition from “medullary man” to “cortical man” in The Origins and History of Consciousness predict and critique the popular neuroscience genre that Burnett represents?
• How does Cody Peterson’s retrieval of the Middle Voice in The Iron Thūmos expose the therapeutic limitations of the cognitive-behavioral framework implicit in Burnett’s approach to emotional regulation?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-body/burnett-emotional-brain-lost/

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