In his foreword to Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull’s book The Brain And the Inner World, Oliver Sacks declares: “Neurology [has] evolved, from a mechanical science that thought in terms of ‘fixed’ functions and ‘centers,’ a sort of successor to phrenology, through much more sophisticated clinical approaches and deeper understandings, to a more dynamic analysis of neurological difficulties in terms of functional systems, often distributed widely through the brain and in continual interaction with each other. Such an approach was pioneered by A. R. Luria in the Soviet Union.”2 Luria shows that the nervous system is organized through different functional systems, which implies that functions such as emotion and memory as well as consciousness itself are not localized in any of the component structures, but rather between them.3 The nervous system is then a distributed structure, acentered and with shared receptivity. Disturbance—that is, the malfunctioning or rupture of neuronal connections—causes the entire system to malfunction. That is why the ensemble formed by functional systems is said to be plastic. There is an internal law of mutual compensations between these particular systems. The entire structure has to maintain itself through a constant cooperation in order to be able to receive internal or external modifications without being destroyed. Disturbance begins when the force or the impact of events are stronger than the brain’s capacity to bear them.
The well-known metaphor of the brain as a computer has become absolutely obsolete, as is shown in a great number of neurobiological developments. We may consider, as an example, Ramachandran’s statements in Phantoms in the Brain: “Popularized by artificial intelligence researchers, the idea that the brain behaves like a computer, with each module performing a highly specialized job and sending its output to the next module, is widely believed. In this view, sensory processing involves a one-way cascade of information sensory receptors on the skin and other sense organs to higher brain centers. But my experiments with [my] patients have taught me that this is not how the brain works. Its connections are extraordinarily labile and dynamic. Perceptions emerge as a result of reverberations of signals between different levels of the sensory hierarchy, indeed across different senses.”4
This account of neural plasticity helps us to understand that emotional and affective mechanisms are not predetermined. Experience plays a major part in forming neural connections. These connections are highly modifiable—their shapes change—which shows that the brain is not a rigid structure, closed in on itself. On the contrary, it is open to external influences and affects. Plasticity means a new kind of exposure of the nervous system to danger and, consequently, a new definition of what “event,” “suffering,” and “wound” mean. When the brain is damaged, it is our whole “self,” our subjectivity itself, which is damaged or altered.
In The Brain and the Inner World, Mark Solms affirms: “There is a predictable relationship between specific brain events and specific aspects of who we are. If any of us were to suffer a lesion in a specific area, we would be changed and we would no longer be our former selves. This is the basis of our view that anyone with a serious interest in the inner life of the mind should also be interested in the brain, and vice versa.”5 “Brain events” are intimately linked with our identity. We may even say that they constitute them. That is why there is a profound correspondence between the brain and subjectivity, between the brain and the “inner life.” We have to understand today the way in which the brain “produces” our subjective mental life. This subjective mental life appears to be a new name for the psyche.
Neuro-Psychoanalysis
These new definitions of the relationship between the brain and subjectivity, or between the brain and personal identity, put Freud’s conception of “psychic events” into question. Confronting Freud’s definition of events, accidents, and traumas with their current neurological definitions and asking ourselves how and to what extent the psyche is open to what occurs (and, more specifically, to changing and destruction) has become necessary.
Before articulating this confrontation, let’s remark that this neurological challenge to Freud does not imply a rejection of psychoanalysis. On the contrary, a new trend in neurology, “neuro-psychoanalysis,” is gaining influence and power. In the 1990s, Solms founded a small group that explored neuro-psychoanalysis, or “depth neuro-psychology.” This group became the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society.
On the society’s webpage, one can read a quotation from one of the society’s members: “Freud, in his 1895 ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology,’ attempted to join the emerging discipline of psychoanalysis with the neuroscience of his time. But that was a hundred years ago, when the neuron had only just been described, and Freud was forced—through lack of pertinent knowledge—to abandon his project. We have had to wait many decades before the sort of data which Freud needed finally became available. Now, these many years later, contemporary neuroscience allows for the resumption of the search for correlations between these two disciplines.” A statement of the society’s purpose follows the quotation:
Neuroscientists have begun to investigate various topics that have traditionally been the preserve of psychoanalysts, which has produced an explosion of new insights into numerous problems of vital interest to psychoanalysis.
Because neuroscientists are tackling these complex psychological problems for the first time, they have much to learn from a century of psychoanalytic inquiry. A need for sustained scientific rapprochement between researchers and clinicians is essential to learning about and enhancing each other’s perspectives and knowledge on matters of mutual interest.6
The clinical neuro-psychoanalytic approach is dual. First of all, it is necessary “to make the most detailed neuro-psychological examination of patients with brain damage and then to submit them to a model psychoanalysis.” Second, the therapist must “bring the mechanisms of the brain and the inner world of the patient together.” It is then within the perspective of a reconciliation which intends to bridge the two approaches that the neurological critique of Freud takes place. Solms adds: “People who suffer brain tumors, strokes and so forth are people just like ourselves—they have developed personality, complex histories, and rich internal worlds. Since these things are the stuff of psychoanalysis, these people can be studied psychoanalytically just like anyone else. In this way, basic clinico-anatomical correlations can be drawn, directly linking psychoanalytic variables with neurological ones and thereby integrating them with each other on a valid empirical … basis.”7
Brain Events Are Not Enough
These developments help us set the frame for the general discussion that I intend to conduct here. They indicate that the current neurobiological analyses of the relationship between the brain and subjectivity do not involve a reductionist approach and that it is not a question of founding emotions and affects upon sound material principles. Another proof of this fact is given by Damasio when he refuses to reduce “brain events” to purely biological data. To reduce the body to the “brain” appears also as another attempt to “disembody” subjectivity! Isn’t it what happened with Descartes himself? Damasio writes: “There may be some Cartesian disembodiment also behind the thinking of neuroscientists who insist that the mind can be fully explained solely in terms of brain events, leaving by the wayside the rest of the organism and the surrounding physical and social environment—and also leaving out the fact that part of the environment is itself a product of the organism’s preceding actions.”8
Descartes’s so-called error resides, of course, in the mind-body dualism. But, in a more subtle way, it consists in delegating to the brain (and to the brain only) the task of uniting mind and body (think of the pineal gland). The brain, as it is presented in The Passions of the Soul, becomes then a kind of logical link or “software” that bridges the soul and the body without unifying them in a system or in a genuine organism. Taking the whole body as well as its natural and social environments into account entails that we develop a new approach to the brain according
to which the brain appears as an open structure, but, once again, as a fragile one. The brain is part of a “biologically complex but fragile, finite, and unique organism.”9 Only if we acknowledge this fragility will we be able to regard and consider the bodily effects of psychological conflicts that are, in other terms, the psychosomatic dimension of brain events.
These relationships between the inside and the outside (between the brain and the body proper, or between organism and environment) help us to articulate the neurobiological determination of the auto- or heteroaffection relationship.
A New Approach to the Self
One of the most striking elements of Damasio’s contribution to the current approach to the brain is his affirmation that the brain is primarily a sensuous and affected organ. Affects are older than reason, and all cognitive mechanisms, even the most sophisticated, need to be rooted in emotion to be able to function. Such is the case for reasoning and decision making. Damasio argues against Descartes that consciousness, or the soul, is not a pure activity of reflection that only secondarily gets stained by emotions. He asserts the existence of a constitutive, necessary link between emotion and consciousness: Consciousness itself is an emotional reaction to the intrusion of the outside. Consciousness, at its most elementary, is the awareness of a disturbance of the organism’s homeostasis caused by a repeated encounter with an external object. This is why consciousness is inherently emotional. It is an interested reaction to a disturbance.
This point has many consequences for the present discussion. First, it places the issue of affects at the center of the neuroscientific approach to subjectivity. Second, it helps to articulate the problem of neural kinds of auto- and heteroaffection. Third, it challenges the traditional deconstructive approach to these same issues in allowing the emergence of a new definition of the body.
Homeostasis and Autoaffection
According to Damasio, primordial affects or emotions are those that are involved in autoaffection. Here, autoaffection doesn’t designate a conscious, subjective “self-touching” procedure; on the contrary, it characterizes the nonconscious homeostatic processes that maintain the living organism. Interestingly, Damasio shows that emotion is deeply involved in homeostatic regulation.
The primordial affects that attach the self to itself are thus nonconscious. In this sense, neural autoaffection may be regarded as a kind of biological heteroaffection to the extent that the “I” which is affected has no idea of “itself.” We will have to compare this lack of self-knowledge with the psyche’s ignorance of its own extension as per Freud. Let’s notice for the moment that such a nonconscious autoaffection leads to a profound redefinition of the “self.”
The Structure of the Self
Damasio distinguishes three kinds of self within the self:
(1) the protoself
(2) core consciousness
(3) extended consciousness and the autobiographical self
(1) The protoself is the nonconscious, purely organic-neural self. It is made of the interconnected and coherent collection of neural patterns that, moment by moment, represent the internal state of the organism, that is, the neural “map” the organism forms of itself. This map helps the organism to regulate and maintain its homeostasis, which is continuously disturbed by intruding objects. This preservation of life implies an attachment of the self to itself. Emotion plays an important part in this process.
(2) Then, the conscious core self emerges, which is the zero-level form of consciousness (also called “thick consciousness”), the locus of the “feeling of ourselves.” The feeling of existence coincides with the being of an individual. As the first form of subjective ownership and agency, it is a modification of the protoself, which implies the distinction between me and others. The core self may be determined as a pure affective awareness with no cognitive function.
(3) Eventually, the core self is supplemented by the autobiographical self. “The autobiographical self,” Damasio writes, “is based on autobiographical memory which is constituted by implicit memories of multiple instances of individual experience of the past and of the anticipated future. The invariant aspects of an individual’s biography form the basis of autobiographical memory.”10 Contrary to the preceding types, this autobiographical self is conscious.
Insisting upon the nonverbal and even nonpictorial character of the protoself, Damasio asserts: “The basic neural device does not require language. The metaself construction I envision is purely nonverbal, a schematic view of the main protagonists from a perspective external to both. In effect, the third-party view constitutes, moment-by-moment, a nonverbal narrative document of what is happening to those protagonists. The narrative can be accomplished without language, using the elementary representational tools of the sensory and motor systems in space and time. I see no reason why animals without language would not make such narratives.”11 It is very clear for Damasio that there is a self which cannot be identified with consciousness: “The focus on self does not mean that I am talking about self-consciousness.”12
In using the notion of self, I am in no way suggesting that all the contents of our minds are inspected by a central, single knower and owner, and even less that such an entity resides in a single brain place. I am saying, though, that our experiences tend to have a consistent perspective, as if there were indeed an owner and knower for most, though not all, contents. I imagine this perspective to be rooted in a relatively stable, endlessly repeated biological state. The source of the stability is the predominantly invariant structure and operation of the organism, and the slowly evolving elements of autobiographical data.
On Wonder, Fragility, and Impairment
A long chain of affects, linking primordial biological emotions with social emotions and eventually with feelings, accompanies and structures the formation of subjectivity.13 In this chain, wonder plays a major role because it coincides with the passage from core consciousness to the autobiographical self. Wonder marks the opening of the self to experience. From autoaffection to surprise, curiosity, and the relation to objects in general: this is the normal path followed by the primordial emotions up to conscious feelings. Wonder is, in a way, at the interface between the nonconscious homeostatic attachment of the self to itself and the conscious autobiographical experience.
Why then does Damasio always talk about wonder when it is absent? Why does his description of wonder seem to take place in a negative phenomenology, as if one could speak of it only when it is not there? “Absent,” “not there”: these expressions refer to the emotional loss that occurs after most serious brain lesions. Damasio’s descriptions of some cases of brain damage show that the autoaffective structure may be impaired and that, consequently, the whole emotional process is damaged or altered. It is then possible to lose the ability to wonder, as happens in anosognosia or other pathologies. The patients become “cold.”
We will develop more about these cases in a later chapter. What I want to underscore here is that the neurobiological approach to emotions allows us to think a strangeness or estrangement of the self to its own affects. I mean this in two senses. First, regarding the nonconscious character of autoaffection, the self knows nothing about it. Second, regarding the possibility, for the self, of being detached from its own emotions after brain damage, the patient becomes indifferent and disaffected.
The “self,” as we saw, is a state rather than a substance, a state constituted by different strata both unconscious and conscious. There is no possible awareness of this complexity. It is only negatively, when the self is impaired or when the emotional process is seriously altered, that it becomes possible to determine what the self and its affects are. Damasio declares: “At each moment the state of self is constructed, from the ground up. It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade unless something goes wrong with the remaking.… Our self, or even better, our ‘metaself,’ only ‘learns’ about that ‘now’ an
instant later.”14
There is no direct access for the self to itself. In normal situations, this access is only delayed (“an instant later”). In pathological cases, this access is impossible: patients suffering from anosognosia, for example, are unable to refer their trouble to their self. We understand why Damasio considers brain lesions as constituting a kind of “method.” They allow the scientist to approach negatively, in the absence of the phenomenon that one seeks to describe, this very phenomenon itself, namely, here, the self, its autoaffective procedure, the way it is rooted in emotion. The neural self can be lost or definitely damaged, and this possibility is the only way to give an account of the self. Autoaffection becomes sensible only when we lose it or at least when its fundamental mechanism is impaired. Autoaffection, which is the root of all other affects, is subjectively invisible.
It thus seems that the neurobiological approach provides us with a radical concept of heteroaffection. This concept does not follow from the deconstruction of subjectivity; it describes the very essence of subjectivity. The subject is fundamentally, immediately, biologically a stranger to itself, which never encounters itself, which never touches itself.
This type of heteroaffection, unlike that brought out by Derrida, proceeds from a resolutely materialist inquiry. Heteroaffection originally is nothing other than the unconscious character of autoaffection, which places the subject straightaway in the position of being unable to accede to the origin of the feeling of self. This situation is determined by the structure of the brain, and not by that of consciousness, which is derived from the brain.
Self and Emotional Life Page 6
