Now, it seems that psychoanalysis remains blind to this cerebral autoexcitation. However, does Freud not say that homeostasis, or the “principle of inertia,” is regulated precisely by the pleasure principle? We recall here the celebrated remark that “the most highly developed mental apparatus is subject to the pleasure principle, i.e. is automatically regulated by feelings belonging to the pleasure-unpleasure series.… [U]npleasurable feelings are connected with an increase and pleasurable feelings with a decrease of stimulus.”12
Nevertheless, in Freud, the pleasure principle does not produce any pleasure to the extent that it doesn’t affect itself. The mechanism of the pleasure principle remains impassive, insensitive to that of which it is the principle. Even Damasio insists that pleasure is not exactly an emotion, although, unlike Freud, he ties the pleasure-pain spectrum quite closely to affective phenomena.13 Moreover, Damasio affirms that emotion is a reflexive structure through which vital regulation affects itself: “the status of life regulation is expressed in the form of affects.”14
The cerebral sites that produce emotion occupy a zone which starts at the level of the brain stem and goes up to the cortex. Outside of a part of the frontal lobe called the prefrontal ventromedial cortex, the majority of these sites are subcortical—sites that Freud had considered as being without relation to the unconscious. The principle subcortical sites are located in regions of the brain stem, the hypothalamus, and the basal telencephalon. The amygdala, or the amygdala complex—this is the almond-shaped group of neurons situated in the temporal lobe in front of the hippocampus—is equally a determinant subcortical site in the triggering of emotions. It forms that part of the limbic system implicated notably in fear and aggression.
What the anatomy of the relation between the triggering and execution of emotions shows is that the distribution of emotional processes over many sites permits the brain to discipline and treat the internal sources of excitation without being overwhelmed by them, without producing, contrary to what Breuer affirms, “short circuits.” These sites are not rigid and fixed, but instead constitute functional systems. Damasio emphasizes that “none of these triggering sites produces an emotion by itself. For an emotion to occur the site must cause subsequent activity in other sites.… As with any other form of complex behavior, emotion results from the concerted participation of several sites within a brain’s system.”15 It is hence clear that the intensity of internal sources of excitation is treated from within the nervous system in a functional and interactive manner that assumes the collaboration of many sites. The psychical detour of neural or nervous energy is no longer necessary. Thus, there are no longer two types of energy.
Hence, the brain takes the drives and energetic tensions upon itself alone. This supposes that there exists a cerebral activity of representation different from that put forward by Freud under the name of representation (représentance), which was examined earlier. This change of conception has considerable consequences, since it has to do with nothing less than a change in the very meaning of the unconscious.
We do not seek here to situate biologically this unconscious in opposing emotion and drive. Researchers such as Mark Solms, for example, categorically refuse to localize the unconscious. In any case, writes Solms, it is not a question of saying that “the unconscious is located in the right hemisphere” nor that it merges with the inductive sites for emotions. If a cerebral unconscious exists, related to the emotional brain, then it necessarily is, like the emotional brain, also a distributed functional system and, consequently, cannot be situated in this or that anatomical “region.”
All the same, anatomy plays a major role here. To insist on the biological spatiality of the sites for emotion permits establishing that the cerebral unconscious is first of all related both to the brain’s treatment of internal excitations as well as to the autorepresentative activity that is tied to this treatment there. This unconscious is constituted by the “core” (noyau) that corresponds to the neuronal elaboration of a representation, constant and changing, of the psychosomatic rapport and that determines the original, primitive attachment of the attachment to life.
The representative activity internal to the brain and the unconscious corresponds to a certain type of image-making (mise en image). Damasio writes: “core consciousness occurs when the brain’s representation devices generate an imaged, nonverbal account of how the organism’s own state is affected by the organism’s processing of an object.”16 This cartography of the relationship between the inside and the outside reveals the biological history of the organism “caught in the act of representing its own changing state as it goes about representing something else.”17
The core “protoself,” the primitive form of identity, is therefore a constant interaction between the internal milieu and the external world. The state of the internal milieu, the viscera and the musculo-skeletal framework (the elementary homeostatic indices), produces a continuous, dynamic representation by which life maintains itself in producing constant loops of information. Second after second, the brain represents the interaction between internal state and external stimuli. The sources of internal excitation are thus always identified: “The proto-self is a coherent collection of neural patterns which map, moment by moment, the state of the physical structure of the organism in its many dimensions. This ceaselessly maintained first-order collection of neural patterns occurs not in one brain place but in many, at a multiplicity of levels, from the brain stem to the cerebral cortex, in structures that are interconnected by neural pathways. These structures are intimately involved in the process of regulating the state of the organism. The operation of acting on the organism and of sensing the state of the organism are closely tied.”18
The devices described here form part of a set of structures that simultaneously regulate and represent bodily states. Therefore, in the brain, there is no regulation without representation. This double economy precisely defines cerebral identity as a constant synthesis of different states of relation between body and psyche, as an equilibrium, in a word, of the organism.
A question poses itself at this moment of the analysis: Is not defining the unconscious as a nonconscious activity to fall back into the famous trap, denounced by Freud, that consists in conflating the unconscious (Unbewußt) and the nonconscious (Bewußtlos)? Would this not be to remain outside the significance of the psychical unconscious?
It is certain that if one simply characterizes the cerebral unconscious as the nonconscious place where homeostatic processes are afoot, one risks, in effect, falling into this trap and clinging to an insufficient and uncritically pre-Freudian definition of the unconscious. Things proceed entirely otherwise if one calls “cerebral unconscious” the “cerebralization” of affects,19 that is to say, an active and sui generis process of regulation. All the data that the brain gives (itself) on the internal state of the organism and on the relations of the organism with objects is accompanied by the production of affects. The autorepresentative activity of the brain, which ceaselessly maps psychosomatic states, hence scrutinizes its own inside, putting it into images and affecting itself by this activity of which it is, as seen, the receiver and addressee. The “cerebral unconscious” consequently designates less the ensemble of nonconscious processes than the autoaffection of the brain in its entirety.
From the start, homeostatic processes, the birth of the self, and the birth of the object intertwine themselves in the brain as a single and the same phenomenon. The logic of cerebral autoaffection does not presume the intervention of an extra supplementary energy that is endowed with the status of the libido. The distinction between the self (moi) and the object appears before any and every narcissism and sexual investment. The psychical apparatus appears hence as the core that gathers together, in the same energetic economy, the constant exigency of survival, the relation to self, and the desire of the other.
How can one comprehend more exactly the concept of the brain’s autoaffection? Traditionally, as I have sh
own in my analysis of wonder, the notion of autoaffection designates, in philosophy, the original and paradoxical manner in which the subject feels itself to be identical to itself in addressing itself to itself as to another in the strange space of its inner depths. It has to do with a sort of primordial touching of self—the subject senses itself, speaks itself, hears itself speaking, experiences the succession of states of consciousness. This contact produces the difference of self to self without which, paradoxically, there would be neither identity nor permanence. Autoaffection is the original power of the subject to interpellate itself, to autosolicit itself and constitute itself as a subject in this double movement of identity and alterity to self.
Homeostatic regulation is, in a certain sense, a mirroring structure of specularity within which the brain informs itself of itself.20 Emotion plays a fundamental role in the constitution of this cerebral psyche: the brain affects itself, that is to say, modifies itself in the constant course of vital regulation. The stakes of neurobiological research consist in drawing out from the elementary rapport of the brain with itself and with the other the idea of a cerebral identity that is the unconscious part of subjectivity.
This is the paradox that I have sought to illuminate in my essay: autoaffection is not opposed to the idea of the unconscious; instead, the former constitutes the latter. In this resides one of the most important teachings of contemporary neurobiology. Cerebral autoaffection is not of the same nature as the autoaffection of a subject such as philosophers define it. Cerebral autoaffection does not redouble its specularity up to the point of giving itself the form of consciousness. Nobody feels his/her brain—nobody any longer speaks to him-/herself of it, hears him-/herself speak of it, or hears him-/herself in it. Cerebral autoaffection is paradoxically and necessarily accompanied by an impassibility and neutrality of the conscious subject as regards it. If the subject can affect itself, it is really thanks to the brain: the first contact with the self that is homeostasis renders this contact possible. But, at the same time, this original solicitation dissimulates itself in the very thing that it makes possible. My brain never appears in my inner depths. The brain is not visible except in an objective manner through the snapshots produced by brain-imaging techniques. Hence, original emotions remain forever lost for consciousness. But, this does not signify that the cerebral unconscious limits itself solely to the nonconscious. In effect, an entire history hides itself in primitive emotions, and it is evident that events lived by the subject play a role in cerebral autoaffection in the manner in which the conatus informs and maintains itself.
The neurobiologists seem in other places sometimes to recognize a certain proximity between the functioning of the protoself and the ego (moi) of the Freudian second topography.21 The ego, like core consciousness, effectively appears as a perceptive surface where internal excitations and external demands meet each other coming from opposite directions. Jaak Panksepp elsewhere defines the protoself as a “Simple Ego-like Life Form” (SELF). Solms comments that “this primal SELF forms the foundational ‘ego’ upon which all our more complex representations of our selves are built.”22 The “ego” of Freud and the “self” (soi) of the neurobiologists have the common characteristic of being frontier or limit concepts between the perception of internal states and the perception of external events, interfaces between inner sensations, sensibility, and mobility.
But, the analogy brings itself to a halt abruptly. Damasio point-blank compares the self to a “homunculus,” this “little man” that many psychologists and neurologists—Freud included—have conceived of as “inhabiting” the interior of the ego. In The Ego and the Id, Freud declares that, as regards the ego, “If we wish to find an anatomical analogy for it we can best identify it with the ‘cortical homunculus’ of the anatomists, which stands on its head in the cortex, sticks up its heels, faces backwards and, as we know, has its speech-area on the left-hand side.”23 The homunculus corresponds to a figural representation of a part of the nervous system. There is, in a sense, a sort of subject in the subject, devoted to interpreting the images and representations formed in the brain.24
Damasio affirms that “the protoself” is not “to be confused with the rigid homunculus of old neurology.”25 It is necessary to avoid this confusion to the extent that “the proto-self does not occur in one place only, and it emerges dynamically and continuously out of multifarious interacting signals that span varied orders of the nervous system. Besides, the proto-self is not an interpreter of anything. It is a reference point at each point in which it is.”26 Certainly, we know and can localize the cerebral structures necessary to the constitution of the protoself. But, the latter remains paradoxically unlocalizable, dynamic, and distributed.
In the brain, affect does not cut itself off from its own energy, does not delegate or metaphorize itself. But, it is not, for all that, an expression of a unity. In effect, the “self” is not substantial. Its manifestation is fundamentally temporal. The self is not what it is except inasmuch as it endures and fabricates itself at each instant: “The story contained in the images of core consciousness is not told by some clever homunculus. Nor is the story really told by you as a self because the core you is only born as the story is told, within the story itself. You exist as a mental being when primordial stories are being told, and only then; as long as primordial stories are being told, and only then. You are the music while the music lasts.”27
Cerebral autoaffection is the biological process, both logical and affective, by which finitude is constituted in the core of subjectivity without ever being able to become, at the same time, the knowledge (savoir) of the subject. The cerebral self has no presence-to-self. In this sense, it is always anonymous; it is no one in wholly being the most elementary form of identity.
It is thus possible to measure the entire distance that separates the neuronal unconscious from the unconscious as traditionally defined. The former merges in a certain fashion with the passage of time, whereas the latter ignores time. Freud writes, “The processes of the system Ucs. are timeless; i.e. they are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time; they have no reference to time at all. Reference to time is bound up … with the work of the system Cs.”28 To these assertions are related those according to which the unconscious does not know death: “Our unconscious, then, does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal.”29 By contrast, cerebral autoaffection is the announcement and the incessant internal reminder of mortality. Damasio declares, “We do not have a self sculpted in stone and, like stone, resistant to the ravages of time. Our sense of self is a state of the organism, the result of certain components operating in a certain manner and interacting in a certain way, within certain parameters. It is another construction, a vulnerable pattern of integrated operations whose consequence is to generate the mental representation of a living individual being. The entire biological edifice, from cells, tissues, and organs to systems and images, is held alive by the constant execution of construction plans, always on the brink of partial or complete collapse.”30
The brain never conducts itself as if it were immortal. The cerebral unconscious, in diametrical opposition to the Freudian unconscious, is therefore fundamentally a destructible unconscious. This is why emotions and affects are exposed to their potential disappearance. Faced with a menacing event, the self, as we have seen, can detach itself from its own affects.
I have perhaps been more negative than Adrian in my critique of psychoanalysis here. He departs from a recognition, by Freud and by Lacan, of misfelt feelings and concludes from this that there is a point of common passage between analysis and neurobiology. I certainly also think this, but I believe that it is necessary to insist all the same that the contempt of psychoanalysis vis-à-vis the brain and neurobiology in general has been erroneous. This lack of regard is also shared with contemporary philosophy, something that I have, for my part, tried to show.
Despite everything, the recent teachings of the neuro
biological approach to emotions permit us, Adrian as well as me, to revisit the two traditions of psychoanalysis and philosophy with a new gaze and to discover there theses or positions on the subject of affects that had not necessarily been discovered previously.
The cutting edge of the cerebral unconscious passes through anxiety to wonder, an unconscious via which, as we teach, one can become a stranger to oneself at any moment, as well as a stranger to every kind of tradition that one believes to be immortal. Today, a new subject arrives in the world, a subject potentially denuded of the feeling of guilt, of wonder, of the capacity for surprise, of moral sentiments. Is it only the sick subject that presents itself thus? Where is the new face of the unconscious? Contemporary neurobiology is caught up in this paradox: insisting on the fundamental importance of affects, it describes their possible loss. Hence, at the very heart of biological life and homeostasis, a new chapter in the history of the death drive (Todestrieb, pulsion de mort) writes itself.
Catherine Malabou
Paris, August 2011
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: FROM THE PASSIONATE SOUL TO THE EMOTIONAL BRAIN
1. Gilles Deleuze, Lectures on Spinoza at Vincennes, BDSweb: University Courses, 1978.
2. In the French translation of the Ethics, “affects” appears as “emotions.”
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