Good Reasons for Bad Feelings

by Randolph M. Nesse

  I returned home from the Animal Behavior Society meeting determined to figure out why we have repression and psychodynamic defenses. They distort reality. They create symptoms. They cause interpersonal conflicts. Psychotherapy that helps people get in touch with previously unconscious material can be very helpful. You would think that our minds would provide us with accurate self-knowledge without all the time and trouble of psychotherapy. But actively maintained obstacles block access to much that could otherwise be conscious. Something very interesting is going on.

  That mechanisms outside of consciousness guide behavior isn’t surprising. Bacteria and butterflies get along just fine without anything like human consciousness. The origins and functions of consciousness of the human sort have been debated for centuries. This is not the place to review them, but there is some agreement that the capacity to create internal models of the external world can be useful.11,12,13,14 Mental manipulation of such models allows comparing the likely outcomes of alternative strategies without the risks of actually doing things. Which is why, as you consider pressing “send” on your carefully crafted angry resignation email, your ability to predict the future makes you pause.

  Coping with the inordinate complexity of social life has selected for larger, more capable human brains. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar has shown that the brain size of a given species of primates is strongly correlated with group size and social complexity.15 He and others argue convincingly that for humans, most resources are social resources, and getting and keeping them requires constant mental processing of possible outcomes of alternative courses of action.16

  Modern media boost the stakes exponentially. Perhaps you heard about the woman who thought she was sending a cute tweet to a few friends, just as she got on a flight to Africa, about being unlikely to contract a sexual disease because she is white.17 When she arrived, she turned on her smartphone to discover that her tweet had gone viral and she was now unemployed and the object of worldwide scorn. The mechanisms our minds use to anticipate the results of our actions are inadequate for coping with modern media.

  The question is not why there is an unconscious; it is why some events, emotions, ideas, and drives are actively suppressed and kept from consciousness: in a word, repression and ego defenses to enforce it. There are two global alternatives. Repression could simply be an unavoidable limitation of the cognitive system. Perhaps selection could not shape a system with access to everything, or the obstacles are useless by-products of some other system. Those explanations are just barely plausible. Much unconscious content is not just unavailable; it is actively blocked from consciousness by specialized mechanisms called ego defenses.

  A brief pause here, as I return after procrastinating for a day. I tried to force myself to write; a deadline is looming. But I just couldn’t. I asked myself why and decided I was just tired. Then I let my mind wander. It went quickly to imagine critics who might dismiss this entire book just because it says that some aspects of psychoanalytic theory are correct and useful. Worse, I realized that I have been writing as if only fools don’t recognize the reality of repression. This led to the memory of my first meeting with Robert Hatcher, the psychologist who supervised my first psychodynamic therapy case. I began by telling him that I really didn’t believe all that stuff about the unconscious. He didn’t argue with me. He simply said, “You will make your own decision about that. But to see for yourself, you need to listen carefully for many sessions, say very little, and write down everything the patient says, so we can review the transcript together.”

  Listening carefully as someone says whatever comes to mind reveals connections between apparently meaningless jumps from topic to topic. One minute a patient is talking about having coffee in an outdoor café, the next about a Japanese colleague. The sun reflecting on the glass tabletop created an association with the rising sun, and thoughts veered off to Japan. One minute a young woman is talking about her resentment that her father is more interested in her brother’s football games than her soccer matches, and then she goes on immediately to criticize her father for having so many tools. My conviction about the reality of unconscious influences comes from hours of listening to free associations.

  Psychological Studies of the Adaptive Unconscious

  These are, however, only anecdotes. They have convinced me that the mind has mechanisms that actively block access to certain kinds of mental content. Appropriate skepticism is countered by the dozens of studies conducted by social psychologists to document the reality of the adaptive unconscious. Social psychologists hardly see eye to eye with most psychoanalysts. The University of Michigan psychiatrist/psychoanalyst/philosopher Linda A. W. Brakel is one of the rare psychoanalysts whose work bridges the gap. She has reviewed the evidence that most of our actions are influenced by primary process thinking, that is, the a-rational machinations of the unconscious mind, and concludes that primary process thinking can enhance Darwinian fitness.18 Another is Timothy Wilson, who describes many experiments that demonstrate unconscious processing in his lovely book Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious.19

  Wilson conducted a particularly influential project with the University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett.20 They showed the same movie to two groups. One group watched the movie over loud noises from a jackhammer, the other in a quiet room. Afterward, the subjects were asked if the noise influenced their ratings of the movie. The ones who had heard the jackhammer were confident that it lowered their ratings. However, the data showed that it had had no effect. In another study, two groups of students watched different versions of an interview. In one version, the actor was warm; in the other, the same actor was cold. They rated the warm actor as attractive and his foreign accent as appealing. When the actor was cold, he was viewed as unattractive and his accent seemed irritating. However, the subjects attributed their dislike of the cold version of the actor to his appearance and his accent.

  John Bargh and colleagues provide many more examples of unconscious thinking.21,22,23 We imagine that our decisions about who to vote for are products of thoughtful deliberation, but studies show that most decisions are evident in the first second of exposure to a photo of the candidate. You can tell if a sentence is grammatical even though you may have no idea about the rules of grammar. You awaken in the night with the answer to a complex mathematical problem—or the realization that you forgot to include a big item on your income tax form.

  Split-brain research provides more dramatic examples. The pioneering neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga studied P.S., a patient who had had surgery to divide the right and left halves of the brain to relieve intractable epilepsy.24 Gazzaniga arranged an apparatus that projected an image of a winter scene to the right half of the brain and a chicken claw to the left half of the brain. The patient was able to describe the chicken claw, thanks to language processing happening in the left half of the brain. P.S. had no conscious awareness of the winter scene. However, when he was asked to choose one of several pictures using his left hand (which is connected to the right half of the brain), he pointed to a snow shovel. When asked to explain the choice, the patient said, “You need a shovel to clean out the chicken coop.” He made up the story to explain a choice that was influenced by the unconscious influence of the winter scene. As Gazzaniga put it, “The interpreter tells the story line of a person. It’s collecting all the information that is in all these separate systems that are distributed through the brain.” An article by Carl Zimmer summarizes Gazzaniga’s discovery by saying, “While the story feels like an unfiltered picture of reality, it’s just a quickly-thrown-together narrative.”25 We make choices outside of consciousness, then make up stories to explain our behaviors.26 As Wilson put it in his book, we are sometimes like children at an arcade race car–driving game who imagine that they are steering the car, when they are only watching a video preview.

  Hundreds of research studies show that prejudice is influenced by unc
onscious biases. One method flashes pictures of people of different races paired with neutral or positive images. Implicit bias is confirmed by the faster reaction times to negative images paired with faces from a racial out-group.27,28 Subjects in such experiments protest that they are not biased, but powerful mechanisms keep unconscious processes out of consciousness.

  Why Can’t We Access Our Motives and Emotions?

  Unconscious cognition is ubiquitous. Psychodynamic defenses such as denial and projection are real and powerful. The question is if and how they could have provided selective advantages. Like most everyone else, I began by assuming that we should look for one explanation. Soon I found two. Now I realize that there are many.

  The idea proposed by Alexander and Trivers, that selection shaped the unconscious to make people better at deceiving and manipulating others, spread fast because it is paradoxical and disturbing. It amplifies the selfish-gene meme by making even the most moral acts appear to be disguised selfishness. Cynics take delight in the idea because it confirms their beliefs that everyone is selfish and that moral pretensions are mostly hypocritical. As the evolutionary biologist Michael Ghiselin put it, “Scratch an ‘altruist’ and watch a ‘hypocrite’ bleed.”29 Others are appalled by an idea that undermines the possibility of genuine moral commitments. I certainly was.

  A year spent learning more about psychoanalysis and the evolution of altruism breached my defenses. I finally acknowledged that Trivers and Alexander were at least partially right. Sometimes, even often, people pursue selfish aims even as they strenuously and sincerely deny that they have any such motive. Women sometimes act seductively and then, when a man responds, express outrage at the idea that they had any such intention. Men sometimes make convincing and sometimes sincere midnight expressions of undying love that evaporate like a mist in the morning sun. Especially when sex is involved, people sometimes deceive themselves in the service of better deceiving others.

  Although benefits can come from deceiving others, this provides only a partial explanation. Self-deception can also help preserve relationships by keeping us unaware of the inevitable minor betrayals in everyday life.30 If someone stands you up for a lunch date, it is often best to just carry on with an otherwise good relationship; otherwise it is easy to slip into a critical mind-set that calls attention to previously invisible minor violations. Relaxed relationships are hard for people who are acutely aware of every tiny defection.

  Another possible explanation for repression is that it minimizes cognitive disruption by keeping upsetting thoughts out of consciousness. If you are about to give a lecture, it is better to forget temporarily that your spouse said at breakfast that a serious conversation is needed soon. Avoiding distraction fits many examples. However, something more intense seems to be involved in cases like that of the woman with the paralyzed arm. Also, repression is rarely perfect. The mind returns to current life problems the same way the tongue returns to a canker sore. And sometimes the unconscious insinuates itself in surprising ways: putting the keys in the garbage, forgetting the way to the wedding.

  The benefits of focusing the mind’s limited processing power on a few important things can explain suppressing certain thoughts or motives, but it does not necessarily explain the active way that repression prevents all awareness of some things. I suspect that keeping some desires out of consciousness is a major function of repression. We can get only a fraction of what we want. Gaps between what we have and what we want generate envy, anxiety, anger, and dissatisfaction. Keeping unsatisfiable desires out of consciousness not only avoids mental suffering, it also allows us to focus on projects that are possible, instead of ruminating about those that are not. More important, it allows us not only to appear to be, but also to actually be more moral than would be otherwise possible. Thanks to social selection, being good increases fitness. Repression makes it easier to appear good and to be good.

  Too Aware of What Is in There

  The utility of repression is revealed by cases where it is missing. During a psychotic episode, people experience unconscious content that the rest of us are never aware of. Their sexual and violent visions can be frightening. It is chilling to listen to cannibalistic fantasies. However, such patients are experiencing a global collapse of cognition, so their experiences are not that helpful for understanding ordinary repression.

  Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have a more focused repression deficit. People with OCD do things over and over again, such as washing their hands or checking to see if they locked the door. This isn’t simply because they are careful; it is because they fear that some tiny misstep or momentary memory lapse might lead to a catastrophe that will harm others.31,32,33,34 A graduate student could never be sure she had turned off all the gas jets when she was the last to leave the laboratory for the night. Visions of the building blowing up made her go back to check, not once but five times or more. Another woman couldn’t get to work because she kept returning home to check to see if her curling iron had been turned off. She unplugged it and put it in a drawer. But when she left the house, she wondered if it might still have been hot, so she drove home to check yet again.

  Another patient had trouble in large grocery stores whenever he saw elderly women with thin necks. He feared that he might suddenly put his hands around one of those necks and twist it. While driving, patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder often fear that they might suddenly swerve into oncoming traffic. Others fear that they have inadvertently hit someone and didn’t notice. Some drive around the same block again and again, sometimes calling the police to ask if anyone has reported an accident. Then there was the physician who had to wash his hands for hours before going home for fear that he might give a dire infection to his wife and children.

  People with OCD don’t carry out the horrendous actions they fantasize, and the terrible outcomes they fear don’t happen, but they are never sure, so they engage in repetitive protective rituals. The symptoms give the strong impression that OCD patients are aware of hostile wishes in a way that normal people are not.

  OCD can be caused by brain damage. A part of the brain called the caudate nucleus is smaller than usual and contains excesses of inflammation markers in people with OCD.35,36,37 The caudate is abnormal even in children with mild OCD symptoms.38 The changes are too small to be diagnostic, but they are real. Further intriguing evidence suggests that autoimmune responses to streptococcal infections can damage the caudate the same way rheumatic fever damages joints and heart valves.39,40

  OCD is, in some ways, the flip side of paranoia. People with paranoia have an unreasonable fear that someone else might harm them. Many people with OCD have an unreasonable fear that they might harm someone else.

  Patients with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder are very different from those with OCD.41 Obsessive-compulsive personality illustrates the perils of excess objectivity and conscientiousness. Such patients tend to follow rules, fulfill their obligations, and expect others to do the same. Their expectation that everyone should comply with their high standards puts other people off. A light left on in an unoccupied room becomes a moral transgression of the highest order. Confronting energy-wasting miscreants becomes an exercise in frustration that wrecks relationships. Extreme objectivity and conscientiousness have a high price. Less awareness of obligations and minor mistakes makes life better.

  Some patients are incapable of making decisions. This is a big problem in the ER in the middle of the night when a patient vacillates for hours about whether or not to accept an offer of hospitalization. But it is also a problem for many people whose decisions don’t stick. One woman spent months deciding that a BMW was the perfect car for her, then, hours after the purchase, became convinced that it was a mistake. Most of us are protected against such ambivalence by what social psychologists call dissonance.42,43 Once a decision is made, people see all the reasons why their decision was smart and why the other choices were not
as good. In a typical psychological experiment, people are asked to examine several coffee mugs and say how much they value each one. Then they are given one of the mugs. The people who are given their second-choice mug soon find reasons why it is superior to their first choice. This is irrational. However, such subjectivity puts decisions in the past so people can move on to other concerns.

  Inhibiting Selfish Motives

  People repress selfish motives and those that violate local mores. Freud’s original model of mental conflict fits this well. He viewed the unconscious as a swirling cauldron of socially unacceptable impulses that are inhibited by the superego. The ego mediates, allowing acceptable impulses and repressing the rest. Our fantasies wander across wide realms of possible actions. Anxiety blocks some routes completely without us even being aware of it. Other fantasies go a long way down a pleasurable but unrealistic path. A few paths are open all the way. However, there is always a tension between desires and inhibitions.