What is the threat that Neuropsychoanalysis poses?

 Neuropsychoanalysis, Mark Solms, Antonio Damasio, Threats to psychoanalysis, purity 

Neuropsychoanalysis is something that I am drawn to – I am a big fan of the Neurologists Mark Solms and Antonio Damasio; I think works like The Unconscious Id and The Hidden Spring enhance our understanding of the mind – and provide an empirical basis for some of Freud’s basic ideas, while extending and expanding them. 

But there are many who are unsettled by the assertions of Neuroscience.  They fear that neuropsychoanalysis will be a necessarily reductive undertaking, with the neuro part of the portmanteau overwhelming the psych(e) part of the neologism. 

This came to mind when I was listening to a podcasted reading of one of Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; when Freud is describing the centrality of wish fulfillment in the interpretation of dreams.  Especially listening to his words being spoken in a slow and steady cadence and without a hint of defensiveness, I became aware that the roots of the concern about the relationship between biology and psychology run deep and are integral to Freud’s conception of the mind.

My own concerns – stirred by the objections of others – were soothed by a new appreciation of the model that Freud was working from – one that clarifies the ways in which he had to move from the topographic to the structural model of the mind and helped me also understand how the structural model (despite the criticism of authors like Phillip Adams) retains and even deepens the psychological complexity rather than mechanizing it.

I have not read the Introductory Lectures in decades.  Hearing them again, I realized that I did not get the intent of Freud’s telling a fairy tale – even though I very clearly remembered the fairy tale.  Just as Freud is about to explain how we arrive at the explanation of why and how wish fulfillment is at the base of “corrupted” dreams (dreams that don’t appear to be based in wish fulfillment), he breaks off to tell a delightful story.

A man and his wife are granted three wishes.  The wife, smelling sausages being cooked in the neighbor’s house, wishes she could have sausages, and they appear on a plate before them – and they have used one wish.  The husband, angry with the wife for using up one of the wishes, wishes that the sausages would hang from her nose – and of course they do.  Two wishes.  Of course, because they are hanging from her nose by magic, they can’t be severed, and because the man and his wife are actually a unit, they agree to use the third wish to remove the sausage from her nose.

Now when I read this the first time I was probably 20 years old and not very wise in the ways of the world.  I got stuck in an identification with the husband, and - I hate to admit this – didn’t see the necessity of removing the sausages from the wife’s nose.  In addition to this betraying something about the immaturity of my character, it led me to miss the point of the story.

Freud was explaining how the fulfillment of a wish for one person could bring unpleasure for the other, and then he clarified that we have multiple subcomponent parts that have separate and distinct agendas, but they are, ultimately, inextricably bound to each other: they are all part of the same mind.  The husband was meant to portray, essentially, part of the dreamer (his or her ego, let’s say), and the wife was another component (the id, let’s say).  Both of these parts are unconscious components of the person’s psyche.  And Freud acknowledges that his critics are going to have a field day with this.  Not only are the critics going to scoff at the idea of AN unconscious – he is now positing multiple unconscious elements!

As if this weren’t complicated enough, he then adds another metaphor.  Freud suggests that the creation of a dream involves a capitalist, who provides the wherewithal, and an entrepreneur, who pursues how to achieve the end that the capitalist has in mind.  He suggests that the feeling state forms the wish.  This is the latent content of the dream.  The entrepreneur constructs the dream to meet that wish – with the caveat that the construction likely needs to hide the actual intent of the wish fulfilling aspect from the censor.

Freud is saying that the entrepreneur, who is constructing the manifest content of the dream, can have all kinds of motives in his or her constructive process.  They may engage in a variety of problem-solving techniques, a warning, a reflection with “pros” and “cons”, but, he says, analysis always reveals that underneath these is a wish.  And the wish is generated in the immature part of the mind – the id.  This place that Solms and his colleagues have called the emotions.

The wish is the capitalist.  And the wish will out.  The entrepreneur, at least in this essay, is the day residue – the stuff that occurred in the day before sleeping.  This stuff from the day before becomes the building blocks that allow for the wish to be played out.  That said, the entrepreneur is also an active agent, the architect that arranges the building blocks, taking into account the building codes and the limitations of the site.

So, there is an emotional seat – a wish that is expressed by a feeling state – I want or need this.  The emotional seat is the core of the Latent Content of the dream.  But, the latent wish that I want fulfilled may be problematic for a number of reasons, and the entrepreneur/architect/dreamer must figure out how to construct a dream out of the available materials that will meet the needs of that underlying feeling state – that will, in a word, fulfill the wish – without tipping off to the censor that the wish has been granted, because the desire is disruptive.

Now Freud worked for a long time with only one drive – sexuality.  During the first world war, he was forced to add a second; he called it the death drive, but this morphed into an aggressive drive.  He was able to get pretty far with sex and aggression.  What the neuropsychoanalysts (and others) have added are a plethora of additional drives.

Using the work of Jaak Panksepp, Mark Solms has proposed that we have Seven Drives.  I think that this means that we have seven suspects for what may be driving the dream (and no one has said that only one can be in play – so I think we probably have seven factorial possibilities to consider).  So instead of a single capitalist, multiple capitalists are in play.

I think the emotional systems, in so far as they are universal in their functioning, would be the aspect of the “mechanism” of the mind that would be most concerning to those who object to neuropsychoanalysis.  They fear we would be reduce ourselves to these biological mechanisms that are driving our behavior (including our dream behavior – Freud generalized from dreaming to symptomatic and then to general behavior).  Even if we leave out the tremendous variation between people about the apparent strength of these drives and the manifold differential ways that they can be shaped by both biological and psychological genetics, the variety of possible combinations of drives bearing on any given behavior should give those with concern pause.  This is not a simple system.

The kicker, though, is that how we juggle those drives has everything to do with how we psychologically construct ourselves in the world.  Information comes in, managed psychologically.  I attend more to colors – you more to sounds; I listen for threat, you listen for warmth.  Our perceptions of the world are also determined by our biological and psychological genetics.  Once the perceptions have come in – once the day residue has occurred (in the case of dreams), the emotions drive the construction of those “facts” (and, of course, this happens on a moment to moment basis during the day – we may find ourselves “triggered” by this or that keyword or event, and we may experience (or not) the raw feeling erupt – or creep - through our defensively constructed exterior to assert itself).

This process of construction – while it takes place (when we are thinking as neuroscientists) in the brain, are determined by the psychological rules – the defenses, but increasingly analysts are recognizing, by the culturally formed aspects of our psyche – and we react based on an incredibly complicated and ever shifting algorithm.  Might we decode that algorithm someday?  Might we reduce ourselves to a program?

The aim of psychoanalysis has always been different than reduction (at least among its best practitioners).  The aim has been to recognize the patterns that are the result of the algorithm – to notice how they play out in various settings (including in the relationship with the analyst – the transference) – and to create a space where we can be curious about this and to interrogate it, while simultaneously practicing new ways of interacting – laying down new interactional patterns.

The neuropsychoanalytic contribution to the analytic process seems to be enhancing both the connection to the biological substrate, but also the psychological components.  I think it is also clarifying that the intermingling of the psychological and the biological is complex and, far from reducing us, it helps us appreciate our complexity, diversity, and the ways in which we are all derived from the same complex genus.

Freud’s wish at the beginning of this exercise, was to be able to describe human functioning as a result of neurology.  We might think of that as the wish of the housewife and neuropsychoanalysis is in the process of delivering this sausage on a plate.  Now we can either savor it – and incorporate it into the psychological structures that Freud was forced to elucidate when the neurology of his day was too primitive to describe the functioning of the mind, or we can wish it away – just have it hang from our noses – unintegrated, but also unremovable, when we will be forced to use our third wish to undo the mess (as we did with Freud’s wish to ignore any other empirical instrument than analysis to evaluate his hypotheses, letting that wish hang on our faces so long that we almost became irrelevant). 

Let’s learn from the past, embrace this new way of thinking and allow it to be another springboard to move our ideas forward.

  

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