The Mysterious “Split”: A Clinical Inquiry into Problems of Consciousness and Brain

Felix Deutsch, a pioneer in psychoanalysis and psychosomatic medicine, took for his title of another symposium a phrase of Freud’s: “The Mysterious Leap from the Mind to the Body.” My modification focuses, as did the conference as a whole, on the notion of bifurcation or splitting. It is further intended to suggest that many conceptual problems concerning consciousness and brain are sophisticated present-day heirs to the problems of mind and body.