Emotion and the Psychodynamics of the Cerebellum

This is a book about cognition, emotion, memory, and learning. Along the way it examines exactly how implicit memory ("knowing how") and explicit memory ("knowing that") are connected with each other via the cerebellum. Since emotion is also related to memory, and most likely, one of its organising features, many fields of human endeavour have attempted to clarify its fundamental nature, including its relationship to metaphor, problem-solving, learning, and many other variables. This is an attempt to pull together the various strands relating to emotions, so that clinicians and researchers alike can identify precisely, and ultimately agree, upon what emotion is and how it contributes to the other known activities of mind and brain. It is hoped this book will help our understanding of emotion psychoanalytically if we patiently delineate the complex picture of the human experience of emotion and integrate this with the efforts of brain scientists and psychoanalysts to understand how the mind view of emotion and the brain view of emotion connect. In the belief that the cerebellum plays a decisive role in emotion, we have tried in this book to convey this newest part of the story of emotion and the cerebellum with the utmost clarity and accuracy.