Relational Minds

"Humans are all spontaneous psychologists," states Dan Sperber in the MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (2001, 541). This accounts for the enduring attraction of narrative fictions; they exploit our obsession with other human beings (Vermeule 2010, 2). Hence, psychology is arguably the scientific discourse most fundamental to literature. Fictional narratives are often seen as augmenting social skills and training empathy and mindreading: "the historical function of the novel is social and global strategy testing, its vehicle is other minds" (2010, 41). However, how these minds are constituted is a matter of historically determined knowledge and imagination. No matter whether novels aim to depict consciousness realistically or not, their depictions will use as a starting point the specific assumptions that arise from what is thought to be cognitively realistic at a particular period. Therefore, narrative conventions of representing the self will respect certain givens dominant in cultural knowledge systems. Since literary fictions describe human beings' thoughts, motivations and mental interactions, they must – at least implicitly – presume some ideas of consciousness. When literary narratives register or prompt such speculation about other minds, they reveal their preconceptions about the way the human mind works. In some cases literature has participated in the revision of concepts of the mind and intermental processes, maybe even anticipated recent concepts of shared and empathetic consciousness. In this engagement with interiority and interpersonal consciousness literature's discursive interdependence with psychology and philosophy comes into play. The western philosophical tradition from René Descartes to Kant generally assumed that the human mind is inherently separate in its purposes and experiences. This conception of the self as autonomous, isolated in its consciousness and responsible for its destiny is a residue from the enlightenment that has seen a slow decline and death. In the course of the 20 century, a major shift in the conceptualization of the mind occurred – from the Freudian "ego-psychology" (Metzler 1995, 157) with a conscioussubconscious dichotomy to more interconnected and interdependent models of the mind. In the past, Freud's main ideas were absorbed rapidly into commonplace discourses and included in folk psychology. It is to be expected that the more recent changes in the psychological and philosophical conceptualization of the mind will also proliferate into the collective imaginary and make their way into literary fictions. Experimental findings in the neurosciences, especially the discovery of mirror neurons – "one of the most important findings in neuroscience" (Zak 2007, 1158) – have radically altered conceptions of the mind, contradicting in particular enduring popular assumptions about consciousness derived from Freud's psychology. According to the psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow, "Freudian psychoanalysis [. ] bifurcates the subjective world into inner and outer regions, reifies the resulting separation between the two and pictures the mind as an objective entity that [. ] looks out at an outside