WORKS IN PROGRESS

When people say, "the brain," what do they mean? They don't mean the cerebrum, which is a subsystem of the central nervous system. They mean, roughly, what's in here (pointing to my head). What's in here is not unifying in the same way in which a liver or a heart is unified. There's no obvious single thing that the brain is doing. 

...before we even begin to worry about the mind-brain problem, namely that it might be the case that the mind is nowhere nearly as unified as we think, just as the brain might not be as unified. If the mind is not unified, if there is a sense in which there is no single self (maybe many selves in one animal), why would the brain be unified as the underlying material-energetic reality?  ... parts of the self can truly be understood, and much better, by way of insight into brain function. ...  You treat adolescents very differently if you think of them as undergoing hormonal change. It's not a revolt; it's a very different biological process. 

https://www.edge.org/conversation/markus_gabriel-the-paradox-of-self-consciousness

Doctors Ask: What Happened to You, rather than, What's Wrong with You?

  Interviewed by Paula Erizanu for the Institute of Art & Ideas::

 So you believe in agency more than neuroscientists and materialists might? 

Marcus Gabriel: Yes, absolutely. I think that the situation that we think we’re in – ...subjects to Freudian unconscious drives, etc. – is really the situation that we’re in. I’m against illusions. 

PE: Why? 

MG: Because that is exactly what propaganda leaders, the so-called ‘populists’, use to spread fake news. So if you tell people, ‘Oh, it’s more complicated, things are not what they seem; ...Donald Trump might not be an idiot. Things are probably much more complicated than you think’, you then don’t trust your senses, your sensibilities, because people tell you that you shouldn’t. 

‘Don’t trust your rational deliberations, you’re full of biases.’ That is what behavioural economics has shown – that you’re never in control of your rationality. But all this critique of rationality that we have seen for the last two decades serves the same function as Lacan and the French postmodernism that has been criticised by analytical philosophy for undermining reason. 

If philosophy saw anything as bad, that would precisely be the undermining of reason. 

PE: Interviewer: But acknowledging and understanding our irrationality is important. 

MG: Yes, but understanding irrationality is not irrational. If our biases applied to the study of biases, we couldn’t conduct it. So if behavioural economics and psychoanalysis were subject to the biases they said they discovered, then they wouldn’t be discovering anything. They would be subject to the same illusions.  

Freud's first trio of academic papers, The Aetiology of Hysteria, claimed that hysteria (mental health challenge) resulted from sexual seduction by close relative, at an early age. His great disappointment was that his colleagues and friends had a strong reaction and began rejecting his ideas and his friendship, resulting in his isolation.  He shifted focus, developing the theory of childhood sexual obsession and the Oedipal complex, much happier blaming the mother.

Freud's male acquaintances were happy to believe their own biases, blinding them to reality thereby impacting the history & development of trauma treatment for decades: see my work 

A Diabolical History: Omnipotent Psychiatry.