Self and Emotional Life

by Adrian Johnston

  However, one also, perhaps less charitably, could construe Žižek as envisioning a total and thorough denaturalization befalling those living entities transubstantiated into $s by being taken up into the networks and webs of symbolic orders. In an essay entitled “From objet a to Subtraction,” he indeed sounds as though he endorses an excessively extreme antinaturalism, hypothesizing a denaturalization without remainder that is brought about by the processes of subjectification affecting human beings (as he similarly sounds in the previously mentioned discussion of life 1.0 versus life 2.0 from In Defense of Lost Causes). In that essay, Žižek depicts “Freud’s basic lesson” as the idea that “there is no ‘human animal,’ a human being is from its birth (and even before) torn out of the animal constraints, its instincts are ‘denaturalized,’ caught in the circularity of the (death-)drive, functioning ‘beyond the pleasure principle.’”134 Subsequently, in the same paragraph of this text, he suggests: “In a step further, one should even venture that there is no animal tout court, if by ‘animal’ we mean a living being fully fitting its environs: the lesson of Darwinism is that every harmonious balance in the exchange between an organism and its environs is a temporary fragile one, that it can explode at any moment; such a notion of animality as the balance disturbed by the human hubris is a human fantasy.”135

  Without contesting in the least the accuracy of this interpretation of Darwinian evolutionary theory, it ought to be noticed that Žižek appears partially to denaturalize nonhuman animals typically considered to be elements of “nature,” which is imagined as a balanced harmony. (Žižek’s larger body of philosophical work, especially in terms of his materialist ontology and corresponding theory of subjectivity, compels a radical rethinking of the protoconceptual pictures and metaphors constituting the images of nature informing standard varieties of naturalism.)136 And although he partially denaturalizes nonhuman animals, he completely denaturalizes human animals, depicting such beings as always already “torn out of” their biological, instinctual animality. Although Damasio unambiguously evinces naturalist sympathies problematic from an orthodox Lacanian point of view, he and his like-minded brain researchers (such as LeDoux, Panksepp, and Keith Stanovich) don’t subscribe to any sort of essentialist naturalism that unreservedly reduces cultural nurture to natural nature, the more-than-biomaterial subject to the physiology of the biological body in and of itself. In fact, in Damasio’s defense, his multitiered model of the embodied self avoids the trap of the false dichotomy pitting antinaturalism against naturalism as an either-or choice (again, in Leninist-Stalinist phraseology, “both are worse!”). Sometimes Žižek himself elegantly navigates around this impasse. But, at select moments, he seems to force this false choice in elaborating his critical observations as regards, in particular, the neurosciences, evolutionary theory, and ecology.

  Žižek points to a peculiarly human “dis-adaptation, mal-adaptation” as a fact that the neuroscientific perspectives of Damasio and LeDoux allegedly ignore or discount. However, as I will make evident in chapter 13 through a close reading of Panksepp’s Affective Neuroscience in conjunction with further parsing of the proposals of Damasio and LeDoux, those aspects of neuroscience most relevant for forging a Freudian-Lacanian neuro-psychoanalysis are far from trafficking in the clumsy, unrefined oversimplifications of reductive strains of evolutionary psychology dogmatically insisting upon the ultimate centrality of “natural adaptation.” (The non-Lacanian neuro-psychoanalysis of Solms and his collaborators will also be mentioned later in tandem with critical reflections on the engagements with the neurosciences elaborated by the Lacanian Pommier and the former Lacanian Green.) A specific combination of neuroscience and psychoanalysis requires critically amending and qualifying Žižek’s Lacanian emphasis on the breadth and depth of human beings’ identifying denaturalization: this denaturalization, as non- or antiadaptive relative to the presumed standards of deeply entrenched evolutionary rhythms and routines, is quite a bit less than absolute and all-pervasive.

  The dis- or maladaptation of which Žižek speaks fails to break neatly and cleanly with older traces of “adaptation” as patterns of cognition and comportment laid down by much more archaic temporal strata of evolutionary history. A dis- or maladaptation as a sharp, absolute rupture with anything “natural” is, in a number of ways, far more adaptive than the partial and incomplete denaturalization that leaves humans stranded, as malformed Frankenstein-like jumbles of mismatched fragments thrown together over the course of unsynchronized sequences of aleatory events, halfway between nature and culture, between the lingering adaptations of evolutionary histories and those demanded by human histories past and present.137 Additionally, when surfacing within the context of contemporary sociocultural circumstances, previously “adaptive” behaviors conditioned by ancient evolutionary pressures can be much more maladaptive than the thoughts and actions of subjects steered by the sociocultural mediators responsible for human disadaptation. Put differently, in the “inverted world” of human reality, dis- or maladaptation can be more adaptive than adaptation itself.

  Related to this, the conflictuality of overriding interest to psychoanalysis (i.e., those conflicts analytic metapsychology portrays as tense fissures central to the structuration of psychical subjectivity) almost certainly includes conflicts between evolutionary nature (associated with adaptation) and nonevolutionary antinature (associated with dis- or maladaptation) as well as conflicts internal to the latter category. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud indicates that one of the root causes of this Unbehagen perpetually afflicting socialized humanity generation after generation is a defiant, rebellious constitutional base hardwired into the fundaments of “human nature” (the chief example of which is presumably innate instinctual quotas of id-level aggression and destructiveness).138 “Civilization” (Kultur) can and does partially appropriate this base in a number of fashions to be turned to its own ends. But, whatever the extent of its partial successes, it repeatedly fails fully to tame and domesticate savage, resistant undercurrents whose archaic flows, however diluted by “civilizing” influences, continue to spill over into the present. Human subjectivity is constituted by neither nature nor antinature, but by the uneasy comingling and chaotic cross fertilizations between the poles of these two extremes, by the collisions of disparate temporal-structural layers sandwiched together so as to form multiple fault lines of tension. Nowhere are the consequences of humanity’s abandonment to a limbo that is neither natural nor antinatural more apparent than in the peculiarities of human beings’ emotional lives.

  13.

  AFFECTS ARE SIGNIFIERS

  THE INFINITE JUDGMENT OF A LACANIAN AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE

  Before turning to the task of elaborating a Freudian-Lacanian approach to the science of the emotional brain, a few general, preliminary remarks are in order. An irony acutely painful to partisans of psychoanalysis is that, over the course of the past several decades, Freud repeatedly has been pronounced dead and buried right at the moment when the life sciences are coming to confirm many of his core discoveries and insights, a moment of scientific vindication he anticipates starting with his earliest (proto)psychoanalytic writings.1 The time of Freud’s apparent defeat is precisely the time of his actual triumph. A little over a century ago, in the context of turn-of-the-century Europe, Freud was forced to argue fiercely against a deeply entrenched, widespread tendency to equate the mental with the conscious, a tendency responsible for some of the resistance to his central, fundamental ur-concept of the unconscious. Today, the assertion that not all of mental life is conscious is uncontroversial: every branch of nonpsychoanalytic psychology and neuroscience accepts as an empirically well-established truth the fact that the vast majority of mental life transpires below the threshold of explicit conscious awareness.2 Nobody nowadays bickers about whether significant portions of the cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes of the brain or mind unfold in nonconscious ways. A number of eminent figures in the neurosciences ha
ve no problem whatsoever with acknowledging the existence of the psychoanalytic unconscious as a crucial, influential subsector of the broader category of the nonconscious. Additionally, there is an observation that ought to alleviate a typical Freudian-Lacanian worry aroused whenever anything having to do with the physical sciences is put forward as potentially relevant to psychoanalysis: contemporary neuroscientific research is far from pointing in the direction of a vulgar mechanistic materialism crudely reducing nurture to nature, the more than biological to pure biology alone. If anything, the neurosciences arguably are generating out of themselves a spontaneous dialectical materialism of a nonreductive sort in which the concepts and distinctions underpinning debates between already recognized varieties of naturalism and antinaturalism are being subverted and sublated in various fashions yet to be adequately appreciated.3

  Reassuming a more precise angle of focus, Panksepp’s Affective Neuroscience, a comprehensive overview of research into the emotional dimensions of both human and animal brains, provides a number of points of departure for the endeavor to entwine together the neurosciences, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the specific metapsychological perspectives on affective life outlined previously here. The fact that Panksepp refuses to limit his discussion of the emotional brain to human brains alone is based on his conviction that likely would ruffle more than a few Lacanian feathers: He insists that human and nonhuman mammals in particular share a great deal in common in terms of basic brain structures and functions, including emotional configurations and dynamics at various neural levels (especially at the most primitive levels of evolutionarily conserved neuroanatomy).4 Panksepp hypothesizes that evolution has wired into the archaic base of the mammalian central nervous system a fixed set of seven rudimentary, elementary emotions and corresponding experiential tonalities. His taxonomy of the “major ‘Blue-Ribbon, Grade A’ emotional systems of the mammalian brain”5 identifies four such systems, which are labeled “SEEKING” (stimulus-bound appetitive behavior and self-stimulation), “PANIC” (stimulus-bound distress vocalization and social attachment), “RAGE” (stimulus-bound biting and affective attack), and “FEAR” (stimulus-bound flight and escape behaviors).6 Plus, there are, in mammals particularly, three additional systems, which are labeled “LUST,” “CARE,” and “PLAY”.7 These seven emotions and their accompanying tones of feeling are depicted as the primary colors of mammals’ multihued affective lives.8 (Solms and his coauthor Oliver Turnbull, in their sizable manifesto for a non-Lacanian neuro-psychoanalysis The Brain and the Inner World, adopt Panksepp’s hypothesis concerning “basic emotions”).9 Panksepp maintains that human beings are just as moved as nonhuman mammals by this set of foundational emotional elements. In this vein, Damasio, surveying a similar emotional landscape of primary affective phenomena, observes that the brain sculpted by evolution certainly looks as though it’s much more prone to pain over pleasure: “There seem to be far more varieties of negative than positive emotions.”10 It would not be inappropriate to call to mind, in association with this, the factual detail that the early Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams, originally christened the fundamental law of psychical life the “unpleasure principle” (later to be redesignated with the more familiar phrase “pleasure principle”) so as to emphasize the avoidance of pain and suffering as the primary tendency of the psyche (instead of emphasizing the “positive” side of this principle, that is, the tendency to pursue ecstasy, gratification, joy, satisfaction, and so on).11

  LeDoux, in his treatment of affective neuroscience, similarly proposes that “brain evolution is basically conservative.”12 LeDoux, like Panksepp, sees human affective life as resting on a base, shared with other mammals, of primitive emotional reactions and repertoires installed by ancient, long-gone evolutionary contexts and challenges. It should be noted once more that the “conservative” lingering-on of out-of-date neural machinery and programs is precisely part of what produces some of the tensions characteristic of the peculiarities distinguishing the unique “human condition” of such concern to psychoanalysis. As was stated in the earlier critical assessment of Žižek’s reading of Damasio (in chapter 12), it would be mistaken to respond to the neuroscientific account of the persistence of evolutionarily archaic emotional systems hardwired into humans’ brains with an antinaturalism, Lacanian or otherwise, which goes so far as to deny (at this juncture, quite untenably, not only theoretically but also empirically) that speaking subjects, thanks to the “castrating” intervention of symbolic orders, retain any significant links with their material or physical bodies as analyzed specifically by the natural sciences. (This response, often voiced by Lacanians and like-minded theorists, posits an always-already complete denaturalization as essential to the existence of subjectivity proper.) As partial rather than complete, the denaturalization that befalls those submitted to sociosymbolic subjectification splits human subjects between, as it were, nature and antinature, failing fully to liquidate the former retroactively and without remainder; the antagonisms and discrepancies between natural and antinatural residues embedded as strata and currents uneasily cohabitating within the psychical apparatus contribute to the splitting (Spaltung) central to the barred subject ($). Moreover, despite the understandable insistence of Panksepp and LeDoux on the reality of basic emotional systems in the brains of all mammals alike, neither of these researchers advance a naturalism according to which humans are nothing more than highly elaborate animal organisms whose sentiments and subjectivities can be entirely explained away through appeals to the secular god of Evolution with a capital E, an incarnation of Nature as really-existent big Other.

  In light of my nascent version of neuro-psychoanalysis, LeDoux’s work on the brain is appealing for several reasons. Apart from generally being sympathetic to psychoanalysis insofar as he both admits the existence of the analytic unconscious and highlights the significant role of language in the neuromental lives of human subjects, LeDoux claims again and again that, apropos affective phenomena, conscious awareness is the exception rather than the rule.13 (Panksepp concurs,14 likewise asserting, “Most of emotional processing, as of every other psychobehavioral process, is done at an unconscious level.”)15 And, in line with an established consensus in the neurosciences, LeDoux is adamant that a dialectic between genetic nature and epigenetic or nongenetic (with “nongenetic” encompassing behavioral and symbolic factors) nurture shapes emotional and other brain functions such that neither a simplistic biologism nor an equally unsophisticated social constructivism can offer remotely plausible explanations for affects (and many other things) in human beings.16 (Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb’s four-dimensional analysis of evolution, taking into consideration genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic dimensions, provides perhaps the best evolutionary-theoretic complement to this neuroscientific research and its results.17 These two authors contend that “it is bad biology to think about the nervous system in isolation”18 and that “the boundaries between the social sciences and biology are being broken down. People are aware that neither social nor biological evolution can be studied in isolation.”)19 The potentials of LeDoux’s neuroscientific delineations of human emotional life for a Freudian-Lacanian neuro-psychoanalytic metapsychology of affect are manifest in the closing pages of his book The Emotional Brain: “Consciousness is neither the prerequisite to nor the same thing as the capacity to think and reason. An animal can solve lots of problems without being overtly conscious of what it is doing and why it is doing it. Obviously, consciousness elevates thinking to a new level, but it isn’t the same thing as thinking.”20 After these statements echoing Freud’s century-old gesture of decoupling thinking from consciousness—the psychoanalytic unconscious involves forms of thinking minus an accompanying reflexive self-awareness (i.e., “I think without thinking that I think”)—LeDoux proceeds to discuss affective phenomena:

  Emotional feelings result when we become consciously aware that an emotion system of the brain is active. Any organism that has consc
iousness also has feelings. However, feelings will be different in a brain that can classify the world linguistically and categorize experiences in words than in a brain that cannot. The difference between fear, anxiety, terror, apprehension, and the like would not be possible without language. At the same time, none of these words would have any point if it were not for the existence of an underlying emotion system that generates the brain states and bodily expressions to which these words apply. Emotions evolved not as conscious feelings, linguistically differentiated or otherwise, but as brain states and bodily responses. The brain states and bodily responses are the fundamental facts of an emotion, and the conscious feelings are the frills that have added icing to the emotional cake.21

  According to LeDoux’s dialectical model, the initial impetus and oomph underlying affective life originates with and arises from evolutionarily primal and primary corporeal emotions of a fundamental and foundational nature (i.e., the emotions identified by Panksepp in his seven-category taxonomy). However, in the exceptional animals that are human beings as parlêtres, the energetic, vital flows of these old mammalian juices run smack into language, being channeled through the mediating networks of the linguistic-representational structures constitutive of speaking subjectivities. Such structures then come to exert a reciprocal counterinfluence on these archaic influences, refracting, for instance, the effects of the FEAR and PANIC systems into a much more fine-grained spectrum of feelings (i.e., “fear, anxiety, terror, apprehension, and the like”: Damasio, in Descartes’ Error, similarly distinguishes between “primary emotions” and “secondary emotions”).22 But, a pressing question must be posed at this juncture: do these thus refracted feelings react back on their emotional bases, dialectically transforming their corporeal causes or sources, and, if so, to what extent?