Mark Solms' The Hidden Spring

 

Mark Solms, consciousness, psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, unconscious functioning, feelings, cognition, determinism

I started this book two summers ago on vacation.  Not your typical light summer read, this book is difficult.  Though Solms intended a “lay” audience to be able to read it with ease by placing the technical material in footnotes, he is also writing for a professional audience and defending his take on the “hard problem”, so, even before the footnotes, he is dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s. 

I am no physician, much less a neurologist, but I am an informed psychoanalytic and neuroanatomical reader, and this is hardly as easy a read as I think Solms imagines it to be.  That said, I am a big Mark Solms fan and have written about his prior writing and his speaking, and I have taught his ideas in psychoanalytic courses, in graduate courses and in undergraduate courses.  I think he may be among the most important thinkers about the human condition alive today, but as I neared the conclusion of this book, I became disturbed by it – by its impending conclusion and the implications of that conclusion.  So, I set it aside.

I dutifully picked it again this past summer, thinking that it might have rested long enough (or I might have) that I could see it through to its conclusion.  A year’s rest did me (or it) good.  I am less disgruntled with it than I was before and am able to keep it at more of a healthy distance.

Solms imagines himself to be picking up the mantle of Freud the neurologist – the Freud who believed that we would one day be able to describe human consciousness (and unconsciousness) as a biological function.  Freud set that “Project” aside (he wrote a book early in his career, “Project for a Scientific Psychology”, never finished it, and never published it during his lifetime, but it was described by one of my teachers as containing the blueprints for what he would work on throughout his career).  Freud harbored the belief that when neurology matured it would be able to support the hypotheses that he was putting forward, and Solms has been working to prove Freud right – while also revising big chunks of Freudian theory: see his The Conscious Id.

The conclusion that Solms was hurtling towards that I could not stomach had to do with consciousness.  Arguably the most interesting unfathomable aspect of the human experience.  Not directly observable by anyone else – and therefore discarded by the behaviorists as a legitimate area of scientific inquiry, consciousness is, of course, the most human of our faculties and immediately apparent to each of us when we awaken every day.  It is the seat of all that is beautiful, poetic, and wonderful in human experience, as well as much that is evil and cruel.  Solms (and others – Damasio among them) have been working diligently to crack this impenetrable egg of our existence for quite some time.

This book is his attempt to explain to us others who are not quite as bright and not conversant in all the math and science that he is what he has discovered (and to preach to those who have those chops in the footnotes).  Much of that is really cool and, like my best posts, leads the reader to think about the world in manifold new and different ways.  But the thing that he seemed most proud of was, in my estimation, not something to crow about.  He concluded that he was able to described consciousness mathematically.  Consciousness was reduced, in his ninth chapter, to an equation.  Please.

I am not a poet.  The amount of Shakespeare that I understand is much less than the amount that I don’t.  But I believe that there is something sublime – even sacred – about human consciousness – this faculty that allows us to appreciate beauty and to be cruel.  And reducing that to a mathematical equation seemed to strip all of the poetry away.  We do what we do because it is the mathematically best means of accomplishing the goals that have been set for us.  Please.

Fortunately, this past summer found me in a more charitable mood.  I was willing to cede, for the sake of argument, something that I find personally repugnant; to revisit this work and see what emerges from it if I am less resistant to its message.  And my attitudinal shift has been rewarded.  Weirdly one of my guides in doing this is an artist of pop fiction (though she is also a scientist) the author of “Where the Crawdads Sing,” Delia Owens.  Owens has her protagonist note that Einstein helped us realize that gravity is not the poetic attraction that any two bodies have towards each other, but the alteration in the space/time continuum that occurs as the result of their proximity.  Despite this shift, Romeo and Juliet, when not being lampooned, still holds us in its gravitational spell.  We feel pulled by these two bodies as we watch them being pulled by each other towards their inexorable end.

Similarly, despite Solms’ anti- poetic stance, poetry is still enthralling, so let’s take a look under the hood and see what it is that he has to say.  Secure in our knowledge that poetry won’t be killed by science, let’s see if science can illuminate something about the experience of the poetic, and something important about the human condition itself.

This fall, I assigned pages 133-147 to my psychoanalytic psychotherapy class.  This is a class taken by third year graduate students.  At the beginning of the class, I ask them to articulate their preconceptions of psychodynamic psychotherapy.  These preconceptions are overwhelmingly negative.  They have heard psychoanalytic ideas pilloried by faculty members in psychology departments all across the country throughout their undergraduate careers.  I am the lone practicing psychodynamic therapist left in my department, which was once evenly split between those espousing psychoanalytic approaches and behaviorally based approaches.  They have heard little from our faculty to dissuade them of their prejudices.

At the beginning of the course, I have them read Jonathan Shedler’s 2010 American Psychologist paper demonstrating empirical support for psychodynamic therapies across a wide range of disorders.  We then begin to look at how these psychodynamic psychotherapies work.  Having discovered that psychodynamic psychotherapy makes some sense to them, I offered the Solms reading in the middle of their learning about the middle phase of psychodynamic psychotherapy.

They were mystified by the reading, and by the positioning of it in the midst of learning about how to do psychodynamic psychotherapy.  When I was reading, because I knew both Solms and psychotherapy, I was able to translate his experience distant terms into a sort of guide for doing psychoanalytic therapy.  I offered the following notes on the reading that I made as I read it:

1. The patient needs to learn to behave in new ways – that is the goal of psychotherapy.
2. In order to achieve that goal, we need to understand (assess) how the patient is currently behaving.
3. The patient will, because of how they are wired, re-enact what they have experienced previously (Solms maintains that memory is a faculty that we have primarily to predict the future.  So, we remember to re-enact; to automate – so that we don’t overburden consciousness).
4. In order to change behaviors, we have to interrupt the normal (unconscious, memory driven) way of functioning.  That is, we need to get the patient to be conscious of what they would otherwise be automatically doing.
5. One way to do that is for the therapeutic moment between the patient and therapist to become actively alive and therefore to have the patient consciously experience it and make novel conscious choices about how to handle this kind of situation.
6. Because memory is predictive, we have to lay down new memory tracks (We can’t erase the old ones, but we can add new options to the library of available responses to a situation). 
7. Psychotherapy is a developmental process that parallels all other developmental processes.
8. We want to help the patient fulfill wishes in the real world rather than exclusively in fantasies or in dreams.
9. We want them to have the confidence to act effectively – this means that they have to practice the newly acquired behaviors and lay down the tracks that are so hard to learn in muscle memory.

We then reread together the 15 or so pages and discussed them as we went through them.  A student in the first section spontaneously said that this is what she came to graduate study to study.  In the second section, a student similarly appreciated that this writing, once she understood it, was consistent with what she is trying to do in psychotherapy with the children that she is working with.

A little context.  Solms spends the first 100 or so pages articulating that consciousness is something that takes place not in the cortex, as neurologists from the time of Freud onward have thought, but in the older sections of the brain.  And, he goes on to assert, consciousness is a very limited resource.  We decide what to attend to (what to be conscious of) based on a hierarchy of emotional urgency.  Those things that need our attention get it.  So, for instance, when we can’t breathe, we work on that problem first.  The task of the mind, then, is to automate as much of our actions as possible so that consciousness is not necessary for most of what we do – but is only called up when it is essential.

Most of our interactional patterns – the ways that we manage situations with other human beings – have been over learned and over practiced.  And these overlearned behavioral patterns are stored in a type of memory that is like muscle memory – hard to learn, but also hard to forget – like remembering how to ride a bicycle.

The pages that I had the students read spell out how the system of consciousness works – a system that is used only when necessary.  Mostly our patients (and we) don’t recognize most of what is going on when we are meeting together (Glen Gabbard makes this point when talking about therapeutic action).  We have to make the psychotherapeutic process urgent and real enough that the patient feels that it deserves being attended to in a way that will allow for learning something new about how to interact with others.

When we are conscious of our experience, we make new decisions about how to handle situations that have been handled automatically.  Solms makes the point that not only is consciousness called up by emotions, the ultimate decision about what course of action, though informed by cognition, is not a cognitive decision, but an emotional one.  We feel that this is the best course of action in this particular situation based on all of the imperfect, conditional information that we know about it.

The human condition, then, is an interesting one.  When we don't know what we are doing (when we act unconsciously) we are reasonably certain that we are doing the right thing - we are not alarmed enough to call in consciousness to help us work through what needs to be done.  When we are alarmed - when we are conscious, we do not act rationally and with certainty, but with what we feel is the best solution.

I think this book may be the most important organization of neuropsychological empirical results through the lens of psychoanalytic thinking, and therefore perhaps the greatest contribution to psychoanalytic and neurologic thinking in the twenty first century.  I think that Daniel Stern’s Interpersonal World of the Infant was perhaps the most important psychoanalytic work of the latter half of the twentieth century because it organized the empirical developmental literature in much the same way.  Fortunately, these two pieces of work nicely interdigitate with each other.  Stern was articulating how we learn, as infants and then as children, how to interact with others.  Solms is specifying the brain mechanisms that allow this learning to take place. 

Stern proposes that it is emotion that drives the learning system because it is emotion that allows for the transfer of information from one sensory system to another (this piece of cloth feels like what it looks like – it looks like it feels soft and smooth), and Solms clarifies that the emotional system is at the root of how we make decisions about the world and how to act in it. 

It is ironic, then, that at the moment that Freud’s ideas are getting the strongest empirical support they have ever had – in developmental science and in neurological science – while simultaneously there is increasing data that suggest that psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are at least equivalent and perhaps superior to other means of addressing the woes of the human condition (medication and cognitive-behaviorally based interventions), that psychology and psychiatry are turning away from the psychodynamic and towards more mechanistic means of describing and altering behavior.

Solms himself is trying to heal this rift by demonstrating that, yes, at root, psychoanalysis is the true mechanistic explanation of human behavior.  Look, he says, we can reduce human behavior (and experience) to a mathematical equation.  We are the true science!  Ironically his book is centrally about how mistaken scientists have been in looking to the cerebral cortex as the seat of human experience – we are not essentially thinking creatures but essentially feeling ones, he would prove.  But he substantiates that with the most cerebral argument of all – we can ultimately predict behavior with an equation.

Never mind that the equation would be immensely complicated and never worked out for any practical purpose.  I think he is trying to reassure us – just as the behaviorists would – that we can control and articulate and predict, with certainty, how things will occur.  And he does this by clarifying that this is how our mind is built – to predict, and therefore to be able to ignore – to make the mundane process of living unconscious and automatic.  He would have us not act with uncertainty, but know - as if that were possible in the system that he is describing!

In graduate school, a friend proposed that by the time we are thirty years old we have lived 80% of our perceived lives.  Time speeds up as we get older because more and more of what we do becomes routine.  And what do we do when we get together with family and friends?  We reminisce.  We remember when the world was a more complicated place and we were trying to figure it out, because that is when we were most alive.

Yes, Dr. Solms, memory is predictive and we may lay down those tracks primarily to be able to be less observant of the world around us.  But perhaps we turn to the artists when we have finished with our daily, mundane tasks mostly done unconsciously because they are inviting us not to foreclose on our experience, not to predict it, but to be open to it – to feel what this world is made of.  To be free, if only for a moment, to take in something new and to feel it, to experience it, to luxuriate in it.

When working at the Menninger clinic – where, at the time, we were practicing psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis (it has become a more behaviorally driven place) – we were surprised to discover that we were included in a list of great spas of the world.  But perhaps that was appropriate.  If psychotherapy allows us to be conscious in a relationship, what could be more restorative?  What could help us be more alive?

But we also flee from these moments.  They are scary.  We don’t know what will occur in them.  We don’t know what feelings will emerge.  My novice therapists prefer the safety of cognitive behavioral interventions, with their worksheets and prescribed outcomes.  We will talk in therapy about what we know about – not what we don’t.  But when we have been exposed to that for a few years, at least some of them think – this is not what I came to graduate school to learn about.  I did not come to learn a script, but to learn something essential about the endlessly fascinating thing we call the human condition.  How much fun, and scary, might that be? 

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