Freud also believed in "a collective mind, in which mental processes occur just as they do in the mind of an individual. In particular, I have supposed that the sense of guilt for an action has persisted for many thousands of years and has remained operative in generations which can have had no knowledge of that action." 7
What's the status of the collective unconscious these days? A March 2005 search of the MEDLINE database, using the phrase "collective unconscious" as the search term, turned up twentythree results published between 1984 and 2004. Here are a few of the most interesting:
• In a 1984 article from a German psychiatric journal, the author relates the case of an adolescent in the throes of severe depression, whose drawings, sandplays, and dreams are compared by the author to the symbols used in primitives' initiation rites. "Astonishing parallels are found," in terms of the basic motifs, which the author feels are manifestations of the collective unconscious.
• From the Journal of Aiutlytic P+ychoh~gy, we have "Primordial Image and the Archetypal Design of Art," in which the writer notes that while lower primates can draw, only humans create pictorial repre- sentations-i.e., images of things that really exist. Jung's work refers to primordial images (archetypes) peculiar to our entire species, spontaneously generated, and consistent throughout time and geographic area. Often these archetypes contain dual and opposing images-the wise old man and the youth; the hermaphrodite. The author of this article analyzes double-figure art imagery from prehistoric and modern societies, which potentially validate Jung's postulates.
• In a slightly different vein is "Antisemitism and Jung's Concept of the Collective Unconscious," a letter from two Austrian doctors to the rImeriean Journal of Psychiatry, noting that the mechanism of' transmission of' Jung's archetypes, over many generations, "excludes rigorous experimental analysis." They feel that the pervasiveness, particularly over time, of anti-Semitism may qualify it as a Jungian entity.
• "The Perspective of the Female Archetype in Nursing" comes from Portugal, where two researchers feel that this profession has not changed much throughout its history. They believe that the essence of' nursing-caring-is a feminine archetype from the collective unconscious, associated with the protection, promotion, and preservation of the human being. I must say that while over half the entrants to American medical schools these days are women (versus ten percent when I entered school thirty-five years ago), the nursing profession still remains overwhelmingly female.
• Lastly, in an article describing the healing rituals of' the Xhosaspeaking peoples of'South Africa, reverence of ancestors is stressed, body and mind are linked through dancing and drumming, and the community participates. The author believes the ancestors to be archetypal representations of the collective unconscious.
Despite the fact that the collective unconscious may still be a part of modern psychiatric philosophy, a system where memories and images spring from a communal repository-rather than from direct experiences during one's actual lifetime-did not slide smoothly down the gullets of the scientific cognoscenti. Jung was much criticized for his collective unconscious because of what it implied: that people "knew" or "remembered" things that they hadn't learned or experienced. Were these concepts encoded into our DNA, like animals' instincts? Could they enter the brain (i.e., consciousness) from without, like a far-away broadcast enters your radio, if properly tuned, through its antenna? What is, in fact, the nature of memory, and where is it stored?
I Remember it Well
Believe it or not, we don't quite know how memories are kept in the brain. They are not site-specific, like on your hard drive, and this has been frustrating for neuroscientists. While certain anatomic areas of the brain are involved in processing and storage of memories, no area can be found that stores a specific memory. Shepherd Franz, an American neuropsychologist who experimented with cats and monkeys and with humans with brain lesions, concluded in 1912 that the exact localization of mental processes in the brain is impossible.
Franz's student Karl Lashley taught rats to find their way through a maze (for food, of course), and then damaged different parts of their cerebral cortex (where the higher brain functions reside) to see which parts might be responsible for the maze-memories. Lashley found that the amount of tissue damaged, rather than its location, impacted the rats' retention. He concluded, in 1929, that all cortical areas were equipotential (equal) for learning, and could substitute for each other where learning was concerned; he also found the reduction in learning to be proportional to the amount of tissue destroyed. In other words, the more cortex obliterated, the longer it took the rat to find the food, regardless of where the damage occurred. Lashley felt, ironically, that the only legitimate scientific conclusion, after thirty years of research, was that memory was theoretically impossible, since it could not be localized.
Lashley's work is reminiscent of the hologram, long into the future, where the entire picture can be regenerated from any of its parts, the only caveat being: the smaller the part, the less clear the picture.
I am always amazed by the amount of human brain that can be removed without removing any specific memories. A physician colleague of' mine suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, and medication failed to control his seizures, as is sometimes the case with this type of epilepsy. In this situation, as a last resort, brain surgery can be performed, to remove the tissue from which the electrical chaos emanates: the epileptic focus (which we usually can localize). Two inches of my colleague's right temporal lobe was excised. Although this is a brain area intimately involved with memory, not only didn't my colleague lose any memories, but he actually felt that his memory got better after the surgery, as he no longer needed to take anti-epileptic medications that fogged his recall.
The Brain, the Mind, and the Neurosurgeon
The Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield pioneered this type of surgery. Beginning in the late 1930s, he was able to stimulate the brain's surface directly, with a weak electrical current, to find the seizure focus. Since the brain contains no pain sensors, the skull can be entered using local anesthesia, meaning Penfield's patients could remain awake while this was done. (Nowadays, high-resolution MRI scans and other closed-skull techniques localize the seizure focus; my colleague had general anesthesia.)
Penfield knew that in the throes of a temporal lobe-based seizure, visual or auditory hallucinations sometimes occur, and this rendered him even more curious as to what effect localized electrical stimulation of various parts of the brain would produce. Since his patients were able to converse during the surgery, Penfield had only to ask them what they experienced. It turned out that the reaction of subjects to focal brain stimulation was generally unpredictable. Repeated stimulation of the same spot evoked responses of the same sensory modality (e.g., visual or auditory), but the content generally differed. Sometimes you could stimulate the same spot on the brain any number of times and get a different reaction in every instance. For example, in a 1963 report on the surgery of a twenty-one-year-old man, several stimuli of a single point in the temporal lobe produced the following reactions, respectively:
"Like footsteps walking, on the radio."
"Like company in the room."
"... like being in a dance hall ... at the gymnasium-like at Kenwood High School."
"... like a lady was talking to a child."
"Radio. I think it was Philadelphia; it was news."
It was as if this man's "radio," tuned to the same channel, was picking up different stations every time it was turned on.
Penfield noticed some other interesting things about direct brain stimulation. Within the temporal lobes, it produced "interpretive illusions," like those of the patient above. These often were auditory, and they seemed to evoke memory snippets from the patient's past. (In some cases, it could not be proved that the experiences were actually from the patient's past, although usually they were.) But excitation in other brain areas, like those for speech or vision, did not produce words or images fr
om the past, and Penfield could find no area of the brain where his activation could cause a patient to believe or to decide. This was judgment, the province of the mind.
His 1975 book The My.itery c f the Mind was published shortly before he died. Penfield had become fascinated by the fact that his electrical probes could not, in essence, locate a person's mind. He believed it was "impossible to explain the mind on the basis of neuronal action within the brain" and that "a second fundamental element and a second form of energy" must exist.
Magnetic Fields and Memory
Electrical stimulation is not the only tool scientists have used to try to unlock the mysteries of memory. Michael A. Persinger, the neurophysiologist in Ontario, Canada, employed an external device (which has obvious practical advantages over poking into the naked brain) to examine memory processing. Subjects listened to a short narrative during which they were exposed to weak, non-perceptible low-frequency magnetic fields from a device applied externally to the side of the head. Direct recall was unaffected, but the number of inferences made from the story doubled in the exposed group, compared with shamtreated controls, suggesting an influence on the details of recall. Persinger's work on magnetic fields and memory will be the subject of a later chapter.
Finally, in "Are Neuronal Activity-Associated Magnetic Fields the Physical Base for Memory?" ( !will ,al Hypotheoc,, 2002), M. A. M. Banaclocha, from the pathology department in Castellon, Spain, speculates that information could be stored in the brain in the form of magnetic fields, similar to the way videotape holds data. Normal brain activity produces measurable electricity, which in turn produces weak electromagnetic fields (EMF's); there is abundant evidence that externally applied, weak EMF's affect cellular function. And there is a line of research that found magnetite-the naturally occurring ironbased mineral of which the first magnets were composed-to be widely distributed in human brains, so magnetic storage is plausible. (Scientists at the California Institute of Technology first documented magnetite in human brain tissue in 1992. Previously it had been known to exist in bacteria and lower animals.)
We do know that there are different types of memory. Recalling what you had for breakfast this morning, the names of your children, and how to drive a car all depend on different areas of the brain and are affected by different diseases. A patient of mine-a man in his mid-seventies, with Alzheimer's disease so severe that he could not remember, ten seconds afterward, that I had given him a flu shot-drove a car with no problems, as long as his wife, sitting beside him, fed him the directions (I don't recommend this). We know that certain parts of the brain are more intimately involved than others in our abilities to store and retrieve memories (we just don't know quite where the vault might be). The temporal lobes, on the sides of the cortex, where Penfield performed his stimulations, are needed for normal recall, as are the hippocampi (seahorseshaped structures) beneath them. Injuries to both hippocampi destroy short-term memory, the fate of the main character in the movie Memento (Columbia Tri-Star, 2000). Interestingly, magnetic material has been found in the hippocampi, and even visualized there through sophisticated microscopy.
So, while we in the twenty-first century know a lot more about brain function and anatomy than Jung knew at the turn of the twentieth, we still don't know enough about the physiology of memory to prove or refute his theory of memory collectively shared by all of humankind.
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Partying with the Devil:
Satanic Ritual Abuse
Where, exactly, do memories go? You have an experience, you learn something; where is this knowledge stored? In the brain, we presume, but don't try to locate the memory in any particular spot: you can't. Only the brain's apparatus for storing and retrieving information is anatomically understood.
And where, exactly, do memories come from? The obvious answer is from life experiences; but, like Jung's collective unconscious, there are many remembrances that just don't seem to jive with things past.
Remembering Satan
Consider the tragic case of the Ingram family of Olympia, Washington, beginning in 1988, as written by Lawrence Wright in The Neu' Yorker ("Remembering Satan," May 1993). Paul Ingram, forty-three, was a family man, a religious man, and a model citizen. Then two of his daughters (he had five children) accused him of repeated sexual abuse. That's the "normal" part of the story; the rest just gets weirder.
The allegations began when the older daughter Ericka, twenty-two, attended a two-day fundamentalist church retreat led by a charismatic Christian "healer," during which memories of childhood sexual abuse by her father were evoked. There are some differences between the police report and eyewitness accounts of what happened at the retreat, but Wright's narrative describes a "mesmerized" group of sixty girls, two of whom suddenly recalled childhood sexual abuse before Ericka's revelations emerged. The actual evocation process consisted of the healer, believing that she (the healer) was being prompted by the Lord, telling Ericka that she (Ericka) had been sexually abused as a child. In Wright's account, taken from the healer, Ericka never spoke.
Thus began a chain of events that spread like an out-ofcontrol fire. A few months later, Ericka told her mother of repeated sexual molestation by her father, and now included the victimization of two of her brothers as well. Her sister Julie, eighteen, told of suffering the same sort of abuse. The police interviewed both girls, then arrested their father. Although he could not remember ever sexually abusing any of his children, Paul Ingram believed that if his daughters accused him of this, it must be true. In essence, he confessed to crimes he did not remember committing.
With prodding from his interrogators, Paul recovered dream-like scenarios of having sex with his daughters, specifying what he "would've" done rather than what he had done. The events unfolded to him, in his words, "like I'm watching a movie." He assumed that he had repressed what he had done, and that "there may be a dark side of me that I don't know about." Throughout these proceedings, he remained emotionless and detached, in a way quite unlike any that the police had seen before in this type of crime.
The dark side got darker. Ingram believed he housed a demon and asked his pastor for an exorcism (some mild modification, aimed at evicting bad spirits, was arranged). Then he had memories of people in robes kneeling around a fire, perhaps with the Devil on hand. The daughters had never mentioned satanic rituals in their accusations. (That would change.) Meanwhile, they implicated two of their father's friends, frequently at the house for poker games. Ingram, under questioning, was able to provide recovered details of sex acts with his daughters that also involved these friends. One of the men, confronted, remembered nothing of the sort, but allowed for the possibility that he could have unconsciously obliterated such horror from his brain.
Paul's wife also did not believe the allegations made by her daughters. But then she too came to doubt the reliability of her own memory. In some of Ericka's accounts, her mother had even been an observer of, and participant in, the abuse. What a thing not to remember!
The oldest son Chad, twenty, was then located (he had left home a few years earlier and was estranged from the family). He expressed dislike for his father but did not recall any sexual abuse within the household, nor any recollection of having been abused himself, despite his father's claim that Chad, too, had been a victim. Questioned by police, "a now familiar fixated expression came over his [Chad's] face," according to Wright, and "his voice took on the monotonous quality of a trance-like state." (Police notes also mention a "trance-like state.") Under suggestion that something horrible had happened to him that was repressed within his memory, the memories came. Repeated sexual abuse, often by some kind of cult, had occurred during most of his life. The father's two poker buddies were also involved: Chad remembered seeing his mother tied spread-eagle to a bed, having sex acts performed by her husband and his friends.
Enter Satan. About a month after Ingram's arrest, Ericka wrote out a detailed statement describing a satanic ritual involving many people, including
her parents. Part of this ritual, among other things, was the sacrifice of a live human baby. Ingram had alluded to the possibility of an evil within, but now came the gory details. Ericka described sexual acts with goats and dogs, repeatedly from kindergarten to high school, in which her mother was sometimes included. She described orgies in the woods in which babies were sacrificed and buried, and estimated that she had attended eight hundred and fifty rituals and had watched the sacrifices of no less than twenty-five babies.
Many of the abuse particulars involved cuts and incisions on the two daughters, at least some of which would be expected to leave scars. These were, in fact, looked for, but never found. Human sacrifices leave behind blood and bodies. The Ingram property was dug up in a search for just such traces. None were found, even though the girls had provided maps of where to look. The details of each family member's accounts of the abuse never coincided, with discrepancies of dates, persons present, and events. Ericka herself was not consistent in her stories. Two academic psychologists were called in to evaluate the situation, and their determination was that the abuse had never happened.
But Paul Ingram was convicted and did his time: fourteen years in prison. There are some who believe that satanic cults are commonly operative in the United States, and the Ingram case is just one example. Ingram's prosecutors believe he was justly convicted. He, however, no longer believes he had any involvement in sexual abuse of his children, ritualistic or otherwise. His younger daughter, Julie, has recanted, at least privately (Ericka has not). A Web site (The Ingram Organization) is independently maintained; it is devoted to an understanding of the false-memory syndrome and to clearing Paul Ingram's name.
The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine Page 10
