On the other side of the aisle are evolutionary psychologists and cross-cultural sociologists, who point out that the American habit of sleeping sepa… - Thomas Lewis

The emotional mind likewise transcends the facile and appealing dualism separating its psychological and biological aspects. Physical mechanisms produce one’s experience of the world. Experience, in turn, remodels the neurons whose chemoelectric messages create consciousness. Selecting one strand of that eternal braid and assigning it primacy is the height of capriciousness.

Because other mammals have expressions, does that mean they have feelings — a subjective experience of the emotional states they display? That idea was scientifically risible not so long ago. Now some emotion scientists endorse the proposition that other mammals possess emotional consciousness — that they feel. This reversal delights animal advocates eager to make an argument for panprotoplasmic parity. But when the zoophile Mark Derr writes, “The question of whether animals possess consciousness, intelligence, volition, and feelings has long been settled in the affirmative,” he must be reporting the consensus from a species other than our own. Animals may have decided the matter to their own satisfaction, but human beings, as far as we know, are still debating it.

you might think that treatments like group therapy after breast cancer would now be standard. Guess again. Affiliation is not a drug or an operation, and that makes it nearly invisible to Western medicine. Our doctors are not uninformed; on the contrary, most have read these studies and grant them a grudging intellectual acceptance. But they don’t believe in them; they can’t bring themselves to base treatment decisions on a rumored phantom like attachment. The prevailing medical paradigm has no capacity to incorporate the concept that a relationship is a physiologic process, as real and as potent as any pill or surgical procedure.