Biology of Freedom: Neural Plasticity, Experience, and the Unconscious
One of us (J.B. has watched with amusement the early days of neuropsychoanalysis (npa) and the other (E.S. has recorded the history of this movement (Stremler, 2006) and the well meaning efforts to bring Freudian orthodoxy in line with neuropsychology and brain function (e.g, Solms, 1997) In this volume, the authors a neuroscientist and a Lacanian analyst state the premise as follows (p. 11) "We suggest that psychoanalysis be linked to the neurosciences by the concept of plasticity," which refers to synaptic plasticity and epigenesis, and that through plasticity one is, in a striking oxymoron, genetically programmed to be free. Yet it is a platitude that cognition is malleable, creative, and altered by experience; indeed, experience is never repeated or recollected exactly. We learn, grow, and change. What do biological correlates at the synaptic level add to our understanding of mentation apart from a protest against fixed circuitry? Although the authors postulate nothing short of a philosophical breakthrough in the concept of plasticity, the fact is that change and stability, novelty and permanence, becoming and being, debated since Heraclitus and Parmenides, are not decided by synaptic modifiability, which is, in the hands of these authors, a mantra that adds nothing to the debate between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, much less the philosophical issues. They go on to ask (p. 78) "how do we move from several dozen indeed thousands of facilitated synapses in the course of an experience to the representation of this experience," responding that 1000s of synapses consolidate experience by repetition, i.e. a manifold of synapses reinforced by repeated occurrences. Does multiplying synapses explain how we name or recognize a chair? They postulate chains of signifiers but do not explain the origin of a sign. They postulate meta representations but do not explain a representation. Before we get to the complex scenarios of the couch, please explain how the word chair is stored, recognized, and revived. To say the trace is dynamic means what? On one view, the trace is the entire process through which an act, object, or word is realized. The trace of the word chair consists of the unconscious activation of precursor configurations linked to respiratory timing, i.e. the breath group, to posture and prosodic contour, object and lexical concepts, the realization of a lexical frame into which the phonological segments of the word deposit, and the final articulatory innervation. This is a specification out of generality, not an association of synapses. Surely, the relative synaptic strengths of myriad neuronal configurations at successive phases in the mind/brain state (the description of which would be a good place to begin) are involved, but it seems more likely that a traveling wave of qualitative transformation is the likely bearer, bottom up, of the cognitive process with contents in consciousness dead on arrival, replaced from below. The talking cure works, if it does, by serially exhausting the potential of underling concepts into surface actualities idea, image, object that are not the source elements. The authors decompose complex events in perception, feeling, and memory into constituents that, by way of associations and somatic markers, travel through the unconscious. Explanation is by association related to synaptic strength with no discussion of the intrinsic structure of events associated. A Christmas dinner and a love affair are conceptual wholes that elicit reactions by associative chains. The authors lapse into brain talk when a cognitive account is needed and into case histories where neuroscience breaks off. One cannot reduce the vocabulary of psychoanalysis, no more than experimental psychology, to synapses, associations and brain areas without at least a pass through neuropsychology. For instance, a Lacanian signifier refers, to some extent, to the fact that some other is implicitly involved in the analytic relationship. Naturalizing a signifier by assimilating it to a synaptic trace does modify the concept of a signifier. If the latter does not retain its original complex texture, one is left wondering about the reductionism in the transformation of a set of reinforced synaptic connections to a purely conceptual entity. This transformation is merely assumed without elucidation. In their hands, neuroplasticity is bare description, not explanation. For Freud, fantasy had a phrasal structure. The mechanisms that underlie fantasy postulated by the authors through trace or signifier recombination (here called internal reality) are unexplained. How is a perception or image encoded in neurons as a dynamic set of synaptic traces? Sadly ignored are the process thinking of Henri Ey and Paul Giraud, Schilder and Rappaport, Pribram and the metapsychology (Brown, 1988; 2000) not to mention other dynamic psychologies, percept genesis (Smith, 2001) comparative and Gestalt psychology (e.g. Werner, 1948; Wertheimer, 1945) Those who link psychoanalysis to the brain, and especially to mapping procedures, have hitched their wagon to an exploding star (Uttal, 2001; Stremler, 2007) Two fictions, it must be said, do not make a truth. The idea of somatic markers, profusely employed, supposes bodily feelings associated with perceptions, mediated by limbic areas and mesocortex (amydgala, insula) that revive those events in fantasy and memory. Limbic formation has long been correlated with emotion and memory, but the entrainment and functional roles of these systems in the brain state are poorly understood. Love, fear, anxiety are the usual examples, but what feeling is involved when I recall a daily route to work, a parking lot, the furniture in my bedroom? The same event may arouse a different feeling, or no felt feeling, on separate occasions, and similar feelings may occur with different experiences. In our view, perceptions are not secondarily associated to feelings, but individuate with an affective tonality. This combined "conceptual feeling" in a preobject is transformed at successive phases out of drive and the core self. The forming object and its affect develop out of the phase of conceptual feeling to extrapersonal space as affect flows into the external object as value or worth (the transition from personal feeling to object value is discussed in Brown, 2005) The body is engaged in preliminary phases of the object in relation to archaic structures in the evolution of the forebrain. All this has been detailed in prior works (e.g. Brown, 1988; 2005) The authors suggest that as memory images are weaker than perceptions so too are revived emotions. We think the reverse is the case, and that Wordsworth was closer to the mark in writing of feelings as "emotions recollected in tranquility." Regarding the putative sites of somatic marking, one of us (J.B. has seen cases of insular lesion and bilateral amygdalotomy without notable alterations of emotion or memory. Peripheral autonomic activity might account for anxiety but not the varieties of pleasure and displeasure, not to mention the subtler affect ideas such as annoyance, pride, envy, humiliation, and so on. On the James Lange theory, sham display could occur without inner feeling but not the reverse, e.g. a patient with brainstem lesion who said she felt unhappy but was unable to cry or display other emotions (J.B. personal observations) Central to the connection of feeling and trace, and unresolved in or since the Project, is how association (cathexis) works. Is a pool of undifferentiated affect (libido) specified by the idea (trace) does an idea have a signature that lures an affect, or is an affect differentiated from the start? Every concept has an affective tonality, every affect a conceptual or categorical frame.