Hybrid Psychology: The marriage of discourse analysis with neuroscience

Abstract

As the 21st Century opened the controversial and unstable discipline of ̀academic psychology' seemed to separating into two radically distinct and perhaps irreconcilable domains. Discursive psychology focused on the management of meaning in a world of norms while Neuropsychology focused on the investigation of brain and cognitive processes. These two domains can be reconciled in a hybrid science that brings them together into a synthesis more powerful than anything psychologists have achieved before. In this paper means Hybrid psychology depends on the intuition that while brains can be assimilated into the world of persons, people cannot be assimilated into the world of cell structures and molecular processes. The project of setting up a hybrid science, in which the symbol using capacities of human beings are brought into a unified scheme with the organic aspects of members of the species homo sapiens, demands the dissolution of the mind-body problem, somehow setting it aside as an illusion, based on a mistaken presupposition.