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We interrupt this broadcast for a word from the unconscious ...
There's an old joke in which one psychoanalyst says to another: "Boy,
I made the most embarrassing Freudian slip the other day." His colleague
asks what happened, and the first explains that the awkward incident had
occurred while having dinner with his mother. "What I meant to say, was,
'Mother, would you please pass the salt,'" he explains, "but what actually
came out was, 'You bitch, you ruined my entire life.'"
It's easy to make fun of psychoanalysts and their earnest enthusiasm for
hidden and not-so-hidden meanings. For Freud, as everyone knows, the unconscious
had a way of breaking through the surface of consciousness in slips of
the tongue, double-entendres, cigar jokes and so forth. At the time he
came up with this notion, it seemed radical, but in our current, post-repressive
society there's something quaintly Victorian about it. Who is shocked
by unintended meanings nowadays?
In the '70s, a group of neuroscientists led by Roger Sperry conducted
research on split-brain patients that suggested a simpler way of understanding
the scenario described above. Working with patients whose two brain hemispheres
had lost the ability to communicate with one another, this research demonstrated
that the emotional meaning of the stimulus "mom" ("You bitch") can reside
in a part of the brain completely separate from the perceptual awareness
of "mom" ("Mother, please pass the salt"). Like Freud's binary theory
of consciousness and unconsciousness, this neurological discovery suggested
there were indeed two channels of human experience ... but it has also
thrown the Fruedian worldview into question.
Since then, researchers in the field of cognitive neuroscience have continued
recasting psychoanalytic ideas in anatomical terms. Slowly but surely
these researchers are forcing their way into the stronghold of the Freudian
worldview: the unconscious. What's at stake in this is nothing less than
a revolution in the way we understand our emotions and psychological defense
systems.
I'm peering into a refrigerator whose shelves are lined with tubes containing
rats' brains. These brains are about the size of macadamia nuts, their
surfaces wrinkled and whitish, each with a large crevice running across
the top dividing it into two halves. They occupy a corner in the laboratory
of Joseph LeDoux, professor of neural science at New York University.
These brains contain the raw material for LeDoux's research into the neurophysiology
of emotion. LeDoux is especially interested in one particular brain structure,
the amygdala. This modest-looking, kidney-bean-shaped structure, roughly
a couple of millimeters in diameter, is one of the newest frontiers in
brain research, though it belongs to the oldest part of the brain.
With his reddish goatee and piercing eyes, LeDoux could pass for a psychoanalyst
himself. When I ask how he identifies himself, he laughs and shifts uncomfortably
in his chair before responding: "I'm a behavioral neuroscientist with
a psychological orientation." As this statement reveals, LeDoux wants
to speak to different audiences, including experts in the neural sciences,
behavioral psychologists and orthodox Freudians, as well as the general
public. Originally from Louisiana, he participated in the aforementioned
research on split-brain patients in the 1970s before becoming interested
in the field of emotions, long a blind spot in the cognitive neurosciences.
His pioneering work in this field was described in his 1997 book "The
Emotional Brain." He's now a celebrity, with a recent article in the New
York Times Magazine highlighting his contributions to the new field.
The particular emotion that interests LeDoux is fear. It is our most primitive
emotion, and the one most closely identified with the amygdala, the least
evolved structure in our brains. This makes it easy to reproduce and study
in animals, through techniques of fear-conditioning. LeDoux explains to
me that when we encounter something dangerous, such as a snake or a bear,
the danger-stimulus is conveyed first to our amygdala, which initiates
the proper sequence of responses: sweaty palms, adrenalin, pounding heart,
flight. These are all automatic responses (as are about 90 percent of
our responses). We don't need to be conscious of them; if we were our
brains would rapidly be overwhelmed. It's a secondary set of networks
activated by the amygdala that produces the conscious feelings we know
as "fear." The awareness of fear only comes after the response, a paradox
William James first noted in the 19th century.
James' notion that civilization had freed us from the grip of fears that
dominated the lives of our primitive ancestors has an anotomical correlative
in the new neurological findings. The cortex, a more recently evolved
brain structure, offers a distinct, more self-conscious line of defense
against fear. Whereas it takes only 12 milliseconds for an auditory stimulus
to reach the amygdala, it takes up to three times as long to reach the
cortex. This is a significant lapse of time, one that allows certain conscious
mechanisms to be activated and to impose control over our reactions. For
obvious reasons, this is an advantage in the modern world, where fears
may erupt but need more sophisticated responses than a club to the head.
In people suffering from fear disorders such as phobias, however, the
neural links between cortex and amygdala seem to break down chronically,
plunging the individual back into a world of archaic fears. In this state,
the amygdala has essentially taken over the mind, like a parasite or an
evil troll. Unfortunately, as LeDoux puts it, "Fear learning is forever."
Once fears are learned they cannot be unlearned. Phobias are especially
difficult to cure, but we all carry inside us fears we don't want. It's
estimated that more 20 million Americans suffer from some form of anxiety
disorder, including panic, social phobia, post-traumatic stress disorder,
obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety.
A couple of weeks after my meeting with LeDoux, I go to Washington for
the weekend. On the train down I skim back issues of "Shadow of the Bat,"
a spinoff of the original Batman comic book series. In them, a mad scientist
called Jonathan Crane (aka "Scarecrow") experiments on people's fear reactions,
turning them, with the help of Pavlovian fear-conditioning methods, into
puppets ready to carry out his scheme to take over the city of Gotham.
By releasing fear-gas in the city, he intends to turn its inhabitants
into a population of wildly hallucinating, panic-stricken people ready
to worship him as the "God of Fear." It's an entertaining read, reminding
me a bit of the paranoid scenarios Rudy Giuliani likes to peddle to the
citizens of New York City.
It also reminds me of the reasons for my interest in LeDoux's work. Having
just ended six years of psychotherapy, I'm intrigued by his theories for
a number of reasons. The central conflict between my therapist and me
concerned my resistance to her efforts to get me to verbalize my feelings.
We talked about dreams, but my abysmal failure to free associate, my doubts
about the existence of my unconscious, weighed heavily on me. I invented
emotions just to cut short the awkward silences that ensued when she'd
ask me, for the millionth time, "Do you remember how you felt when your
mother insisted that your whole family sleep in one bed in that B&B in
Ireland?" I felt like a failure as a patient and wished for a simpler
explanation of my "blocked" relation to my feelings.
In this respect, the notion of the amygdala has a lot to recommend it.
It provides a simple, tidy model of the brain's primitive, reptilian core,
very different from the old Freudian unconscious, which has a certain
messy, amorphous quality. Unlike the idea of amygdala, the idea of the
unconscious also provides a social theory about how humans interact. It
oozes over its boundaries, showing up like an uninvited guest at the dinner
table or in more programmed ways in comic books. It helps explain who
we are culturally as well as psychically.
While in Washington I check out the Freud exhibit at the Library of Congress.
I'm particularly interested in Freud's favorite images of the unconscious:
a print of an excavation site in Rome; a popular child's toy called the
mystic writing-pad (waxy paper from which written words were erased while
traces were left in the soft tablet underneath); a small, exquisite statue
of Athena, goddess of wisdom and warfare. It's obvious why Freud treasured
this last piece. It speaks to one of his strongest beliefs, if one that,
later in life, he seems to have harbored doubts about: that self-knowledge
frees us from the grip of archaic impulses.
Freud's "talking cure", as he conceived of it, released patients from
their traumatic memories, creating insight and awareness where previously
there had only been darkness. But Freud's work rests on certain postulates
now widely under attack. Does psychoanalysis still have anything to teach
us about the obstinate irrationality of our minds? Can it truly help us
gain insight into our feelings? Are we better off looking elsewhere?
Back in New York, I ask LeDoux about his views on Freud. "My work is quite
compatible with Freud's," he claims. Both drugs and the talking cure,
he suggests, are equally valid ways of "rewiring the brain." On the other
hand, LeDoux feels that Freud's concepts of repression and the unconscious
don't stand up to scientific scrutiny. Unconscious processes do dominate
mental life, though not for the reasons Freud believed: "They're unconscious
not because they're repressed, but simply because they're not conscious."
Consciousness -- that 10 percent slice of the psychic pie -- is, in a
word, "un-unconsciousness."
LeDoux's model places powerful biological forces at the center of mental
life. Indeed, his book makes it sound as though consciousness is little
more than an appendage to these forces. It's somewhat incongruous, therefore,
that he frequently illustrates his views with references -- as though
this were unusual -- to the problems of the "neurotic" who suffers from
"poor insight" into his feelings; to the poor soul who has a difficult
time verbalizing his emotions, or who finds himself in a condition of
emotional arousal without knowing why. These references seem ironic, given
the powerful role he ascribes to the amygdala. A further incongruity comes
in the closing pages of his book when he optimistically depicts a future
of greater cortical control over amygdala-driven behavior. Hints of what
this might mean come when he cites research suggesting that using drugs
to block the production of adrenalin might help prevent the creation of
traumatic memories among soldiers.
The therapeutic implications of LeDoux's work have already been explored
by David Goldman, a Manhattan psychiatrist. Told that I'm writing an article
for Salon, he enthusiastically endorses it as the "magazine of cortically
active-amygdala- modifying progressives." Goldman has recommended LeDoux's
book to some of his patients. Learning about the amygdala seems to help
them objectify their anxieties and fears. By clueing patients in to the
automatic nature of much of their mental life, it allows them to think
about their problems in physical terms rather than as products of a runaway
mind. Paradoxically, this discovery seems to ease their sense of hopelessness
and guilt. "It helps them to think of automatic behavior in a more relative
way," he explains. This is the first step toward insight.
All this makes sense to me. By physicalizing our mental life, LeDoux's
work lifts some of the stigma of personal responsibility often associated
with debilitating fears. Yet I can't help wondering about another aspect
of LeDoux's work: its appeal to my desire for easier, simpler explanations.
The danger of a certain reductivism seems to lurk within his model, especially
insofar as it provides support for the new psycho-pharmaceutical contract
between us and our feelings: We let medication take care of the dirty
work, meanwhile cultivating that 10 percent of the mind accessible to
consciousness.
Moreover, how realistic are the possibilities he envisions? It's nice
to think of a world in which amygdala-driven behavior is controlled. But
in a book otherwise dedicated to a hard-nosed view of the ineradicable
forces dominating mental life, LeDoux's optimism seems like a false note,
a sop to human vanity. If Freud has taught us nothing else, it's that
our mental life is stubbornly irrational. The evidence of this is all
around us, in the fear-gas scenarios of "Shadow of the Bat" and in the
increasingly whacked out rhetoric of New York's mayor, to cite just two
examples.
William James, that great 19th century spokesman for the civilizing process,
probably never envisioned the possibilities of "Shadow of the Bat." This
is where Freud comes in. For there can be no doubt about it, fear has
become a strange thing in our modern world, severed from any simple evolutionary
narrative. If evolution has freed most of us from an existence filled
with real danger, it's delivered us into a world in which primitive impulses
are kept on permanent overdrive by the fear-programming of mass culture
or by fear-mongering politicians. We may well have more fears than we
know what to do with, and medication may indeed help to control fear on
an individual level. But fear proliferates in the cultural and political
landscape; it's become ubiquitous, with entire industries devoted both
to controlling it and to therapeutically detonating it.
Strangely, while I went to LeDoux looking for some sort of reassurance
that my alienation from my feelings was not at all a sign of failure but
rather perfectly normal, I now find myself worrying about what is lost
and what gained in the paradigm shift from the unconscious to the amygdala.
Ultimately, the price seems to be a kind of flattened mental landscape,
in which fear is either the pathology of maladapted individuals or a condition
that civilized society subjects to increasingly precise forms of prediction,
control and exploitation. In either case, there seems to me to be little
ground for optimism. On the other hand, I have to admit that I still like
the idea of a pill that would make it possible for me to ask my mother
for the salt without fear of interruption from my unconscious.
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