Mind & Life Europe Podcast Mind & Life Europe

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)
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to this podcast, donating to Mind & Life Europe, and becoming an MLE Friend. We would also encourage you to visit our website for upcoming events, as well as our YouTube Channel, where you can find dozens of free talks, dialogues, symposia, and cutting-edge educational materials.
"Slate Tracker" and "Lemon and Melon" by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 second part of my conversation with Amy Cohen Varela, we do a deep dive into some of the conceptual frameworks that Amy is most passionate about, including the field of participatory sense-making (as developed by Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo) and the notion of epistemophilia. You’ll hear us reference the work of Gemma Corradi Fiumara, who first theorised this notion in the field of psychoanalysis. It was particularly evocative to hear Amy think about the body as the site of sense-making, the importance of desire in the sense-making process, the crucial role of adaptivity, Hans Jonas’ notion of ‘needful freedom,’ the idea of theory and practice playing together, and the work of letting be and always becoming an analyst in the psychoanalytic situation. I found it particularly illuminating when Amy defined sense-making as “adaptive self-regulation in precarious circumstances.” What better way to describe the state of being human, and conscious? So with that, I hope you’ll enjoy this segment of the conversation as much as I did. And if you haven’t listened to the first episode yet, we’d encourage you to go back and give it a listen!
Mind & Life Europe’s European Summer Research Institute (ESRI), where Amy’s paper was delivered in 2023
Hanne De Jaegher’s website for material on participatory sense-making
An introduction to Gemma Corradi Fiumara’s work on epistemophilia: The Mind’s Affective Life: A Psychoanalytic and Philosophical Inquiry (2001)
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to this podcast, donating to Mind & Life Europe, and becoming an MLE Friend. We would also encourage you to visit our website for upcoming events, as well as our YouTube Channel, where you can find dozens of free talks, dialogues, symposia, and cutting-edge educational materials.
"Slate Tracker" and "Lemon and Melon" by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. 
We decided to divide this conversation into three parts, reflecting the three major movements that began to emerge over the course of the recording: HISTORICAL, CONCEPTUAL, and ETHICAL. The first part walks us through the origin story of Amy’s earliest encounters with Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson, her reading of The Embodied Mind when it was still in manuscript form, Amy’s and Francisco’s collaboration at key moments in the development of both of their thinking, the early dialogues with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Francisco’s intimate involvement in them, as well as the final weeks of Francisco’s life, when he took a trip to his birthplace in Montegrande, Chile. It was a moving conversation and I mostly let the stories speak for themselves without too much intervention. For those who are interested in Mind & Life Europe’s historical beginnings, this conversation is probably for you. In the next two episodes, we’ll dive much more deeply into the conceptual work of Mind & Life Europe and Amy’s own thinking, as well as the important interplay between theory and practice that informs our work at MLE today. So we hope you’ll stay on for all three episodes. 
Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleonor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (revised edition, 2017)
Francisco J. Varela, Organism: A Meshwork of Selfless Selves (1991)
Mind & Life Dialogues Archive (1987-2022)
Franz Reichle’s documentary trilogy on the life and work of Francisco J. Varela 
If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to this podcast, donating to Mind & Life Europe, and becoming an MLE Friend. We would also encourage you to visit our website for upcoming events, as well as our YouTube Channel, where you can find dozens of free talks, dialogues, symposia, and cutting-edge educational materials.
"Slate Tracker" and "Lemon and Melon" by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After a careful period of incubation, we are thrilled to announce the official launch of the new Mind & Life Europe Podcast! 
We are particularly excited because the intimate, conversational nature of podcasts lends itself to the specific tenor of our work at Mind & Life Europe (MLE), emphasising the importance of exploratory dialogue, radical candour, intersubjectivity, and listening as an epistemology. In 2024, our conversations will be "Opening Up the Space Between Us," engaging our guests through the prism of our yearly banner theme. And in the background of these conversations, you'll hear a central preoccupation of ours that has been the lodestar of MLE since its founding: the continuity between mind and life, or in Francisco Varela’s own formulation, “living as sense-making.”
Our guests for Season 1 will be Amy Cohen Varela, Evan Thompson, and Michel Bitbol. Beginning the podcast series with these three foundational figures will allow us to open the space between our past and present, and hear from three thinkers who exquisitely embody the idea of "always keeping the question open." 
"Slate Tracker" by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.