"Epistemology Matters"

Amy Cohen Varela is Chairperson of the Mind & Life Europe Board and has been involved with Mind and Life since its inception. She is also a clinical psychologist specialised in psychodynamic therapy and philosophy. Amy studied comparative literature at Brown and Columbia Universities before moving to Paris in the early ’80s, where she received her degree in clinical psychology at the University of Paris 7, with a specialty in psychodynamic theory and practice, and in parallel, completed psychoanalytic training. For context here, we should also mention that Amy is the former wife and partner of Francisco Varela and was intimately involved in the intellectual ecosystem of Francisco and the evolution of his thinking during the height of his intellectual productivity. And as you’re hear, she has her own unique and uniquely lush ways of thinking about epistemology, intersubjectivity, embodiment, and particularly participatory sense-making, which we’ll dive into together.

In this final segment of my conversation with Amy Cohen Varela, this is where the rubber hits the road and we talk about the ethical dimension of enaction and participatory sense-making, and how enaction can provide a robust and compassionate framework for relating with one another. One of the points that most fascinated me about this conversation was our discussion of the imagination, as it shows up for both the scientist and the psychoanalyst. We also discussed the very risky business of owning the 1st-person perspective as a scientist and owning a way of working in an organisation like MLE that is unfinished, processual, and frictive. Ultimately, this was a conversation about ethics and ethical ways of being, whether as a scientist, a psychoanalyst, or a team working collaboratively to advance interdisciplinary work in the world. What kept ringing true for me well after the conversation ended was that great quote from Francisco: “epistemology matters.” We hope you enjoy, and if you haven’t listened to the first two episodes, we’d encourage you to go back and give them a listen.

Francisco Varela: The Logic of Paradise (Varela’s 1978 lecture at the Lindisfarne Fellows Meeting, “The Cultural Contradictions of Power,” courtesy of Lindisfarne Tapes)

Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, Enactive Ethics: Difference Becoming Participation (2021)

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