Split Subject vs Split Brain
Discussion
Cadell Last:
"McGilchrist basic thesis is that the right/left hemisphere are split (not between reason/emotion; or language/imagination), but broadly speaking between a wide-attention to embodied cognition and context-dependence (right); and a more narrow-attention to abstract thinking and context-independence (left). His claim is that Western culture broadly favours the left hemisphere over the right hemisphere, and as a consequence we have too much focus on reductionist thinking and an under-emphasis on holistic thinking.
This basic thesis that we have a "split-brain" is not against or undermining Lacan and Zizek in any way, mostly it is a scientific support to their psychoanalytic and philosophical projects, and in a very interesting way. What is the central claim of Freudo-Lacanianism? That we are split-subjects. Now a split-subject is not a split-brain. To reduce Lacan to McGilchrist would be the true materialist trap, since you cannot reduce subjectivity to the brain. I have spent years attempting to make this point, and hopefully it will be included in future thinking at the intersection of neuropsychoanalysis (see). To put it simply: the fact of a split-brain supports, but does not undermine, the fundamental premise that we are split-subjects. The real philosophical thinking precisely lies, not in reducing us to the split-brain, but in understanding how neuroscientific understandings of the brain do not solve the real problems of split-subjectivity (that requires analysis and other embodied practices outside of the neuroscience laboratory). Zizek's work on the philosophy of neuroscience also points in this direction.
The Freudian-Lacanian tradition emphasizing the split-subject, if anything, is a radical proof that now has a neuroscientific support in the idea of a split-brain."