Again-ness
Norman N.. Holland
Department of English
University of Florida
Again-ness: From Wish to Brain
In this essay, I hope to call attention to what I believe is the centrality in Freud's thought and psychoanalysis generally, of again-ness, of repetition, of doing something again. I use that odd coinage, "again-ness," to emphasize how specific Freud was: he was always referring to the re-creation of an earlier state of things. As his thinking developed from the Project on, this became a very far-reaching conception of repetition. "Again-ness" led him into the more mysterious and, from an empirical point of view, most harshly criticized aspects of his metapsychology, such ideas as the repetition compulsion or the death instinct. Yet I believe, and I hope to show, that his ideas are beginning to get confirmation from recent neuroscience.
As is well known, Freud shifted in the 1920s from his first, conscious-unconscious-preconscious model of the mind, the "topographic" model to the id-ego-superego model, the "structural" model. He worked out this change primarily in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920g-a) and The Ego and the Id (Freud, 1923b), but the change plays an important part in all his writings from 1923 on. In making this change, however, Freud introduced some of the murkier concepts in psychoanalysis. I am thinking particularly of such things as the repetition compulsion, the "Nirvana" principle, and the death instinct. This famous crux, I believe, brought yet again to the fore something central to Freud's thought: again-ness.
For me, Freud first put again-ness front and center with his definition of a wish in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900a). He based it on a baby's feeling hunger and being fed.
An essential component of [an] experience of satisfaction is a particular perception (that of nourishment, in our example), the mnemic image of which remains associated thenceforward with the memory trace of the excitation produced by the need. As a result of the link that has thus been established, next time this need arises a psychical impulse will at once emerge which will seek to . . . re-evoke the perception itself, that is to say, to re-establish the situation of the original satisfaction. An impulse of this kind is what we call a wish; the reappearance of the perception is the fulfillment of the wish (Freud, 1900a, pp. 565-66).
Notice that to wish is to wish to re-create an earlier (ultimately, the original) perception of satisfaction--"to produce a `perceptual identity'--a repetition of the perception which was linked with the satisfaction of the need. Because a wish is a wish to re-create a perception, one can simply hallucinate satisfaction; one can dream. "The reappearance of the perception is the fulfillment of the wish."
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Dreaming, of course, does not feed us, and, in succeeding sections of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud introduced the reality principle and primary and secondary processes. By 1900, then, he had arrived at his first, two-level theory of motivation. Pleasure or, more precisely, the avoidance of unpleasure drives the lower, impelling level. The need "to arrive at a real perception of the object of satisfaction"--reality--drives the second level. The second, the reality principle, limits and focuses the first, the pleasure principle. Reality imposes delays, physical limitation, repression, and so on, so as to get "real," not merely imagined, perceptions of satisfaction.
Freud based his idea of an unpleasure principle on simple, commonsensical observations. You feel hungry, you eat, and you cease to feel hungry. So with thirst or sexual desire or an itch. Satisfy the wish or drive--whichever you want to call it--and the desire subsides. It slowly builds up again. Then, satisfied again, it subsides.
Parenthetically, we might note that Freud's homeostatic concept of an unpleasure principle did not directly address behaviors for which there is no deficit state, such as a need to read or to fight or to explore. Neither did he address situations in which external incentives override homeostatic mechanisms as when addicts, when shown films of drug-related behavior by others, crave drugs for themselves. We ordinary folk, presented with a box from Godiva, can be tempted into a chocolate binge. To be sure, one can fit both situations to his general formula: to repeat a perception linked to satisfaction, but it's a stretch (Robbins & Everitt, 1999, p. 1245).
In this and other writings, Freud expanded his two-level theory of motivation. In all of them, however, he based his thinking on again-ness, on a repetition of a perception of satisfaction. Thus, just before this definition of a wish, he noted, "At first the apparatus's efforts were directed towards keeping itself so far as possible free from stimuli . . . so that any sensory excitation impinging on it could be promptly discharged along a motor path" (Freud, 1900a, p. 5: 565). As Strachey points out in a footnote to that page, this is the "Principle of Constancy" or the "Nirvana Principle" which appeared as early as the Project of 1895 and became central in the opening pages of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920. "The mental apparatus endeavours to keep the quantity of excitation present in it as low as possible or at least to keep it constant. This latter hypothesis is only another way of stating the pleaure principle." "The pleasure principle follows from the principle of constancy" (1920g-b, p. 18: 9).
Thus, as I read Freud (and not everyone reads him this way (Bibring, 1941)), he has in his later writings really stated a three-level theory of motivation. At the deepest level he posits the organism's wish to keep itself free of stimuli, at zero or constant excitation. The unpleasure principle derives from that lowest level, particularizing it. Indeed, later he will write that they are identical (Freud, 1920g-a, p. 9; Freud, 1924, pp. 159-61). Pleasure consists in satisfying wishes to create previous perceptions of satisfaction, i.e., in returns to zero satisfaction. The reality principle operates at a still higher level, modifying the unpleasure principle in relatively superficial ways, so as to maximize net pleasure within the limits of the environment. The two deeper principles rest on again-ness, repetition, while the reality principle serves to deal with new situations.
The importance of again-ness became even clearer with Freud's major theoretical change of the early 1920s from the Ucs-Pcs-Cs model of the mind to the id-ego-superego model. He made the change in order to address the problem of unpleasurable repetitions: the repeated re-enactings by victims of trauma; recurring nightmares; his grandson's fort-da game; the resistance of patients aroused by improvements in their condition, that is, the "negative therapeutic reaction"; repetitions of Oedipus in the transference; indeed, the transference itself. A modern psychiatrist could point to post-traumatic stress disorder or a character neurosis such as a patient's repeatedly choosing Mr. (Ms.?) Wrong over Mr. (Ms.?) Right. All these actions repeat, and all produce unpleasure, violating Freud's three-level theory of motivation.
Freud offered as explanation a "compulsion to repeat which overrides the pleasure principle" (1920g, S.E. 18: 22). In a sense, of course, this explains nothing. It merely gives the phenomenon a name. In the hands of Robert Waelder, though, inserted into his principle of multiple function (Waelder, 1936), it powerfully enables the sorting out of motivations. Despite recent psychoanalytic writing's neglect of ego-psychology, I think a fresh look at Waelder's principle will show how very cogent it really is.
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One can imagine Waelder's idea, the ego's relations of dependency, as a four-pole diagram (see Fig. 1). The ego is both the executive of the psyche and the sensor of anxiety. If something goes awry, the ego will get an anxiety signal. To test for such signals, the ego reaches out and samples, as it were, the reactions from four psychic agencies: id, superego, repetition compulsion, and reality. The last two are not, of course, agencies in the same sense as ego and superego, but ways of conceptualizing the conflicting demands the ego must meet. Freud did , however, say that repetition was a source of pleasure in itself (Freud, 1920g-b, p. 36).
Necessarily, the four agencies conflict. Id says, in effect, Do it!! Superego says, Don't do it!! Repetition compulsion says, Do what you did before, while reality demands, Do something new to meet this new situation. Out of these conflicting signals, the ego chooses the best solution it can. Looked at in the largest sense, Waelder's concept locates the ego's dependency in the two most basic of human dimensions, space and time. Do the same old thing! and Do the new thing! define the ego's position in the flow of time. Do it! and Don't do it! define the ego's position in body space: What will you put out from your body? What will you hold in?
Again-ness--repetition--acts as a key partner in Waelder's foursome, and again-ness plays a continuing role in Freud's metapsychology. If we understand wish, again-ness compulsion, and death instinct that way, they form a continuum. Wish is again-ness in a single impulse, expressed, say, in a dream, parapraxis, or symptom. The repetition compulsion is again-ness as it acts in the ego's continuous functioning, in the sequence of our impulses. And the Nirvana principle is again-ness from from the point of view of "principles" of motivation. It is again-ness in all impulses. Thus, it represents Freud's claim (1920, 18: 41) "that, apart from the sexual instincts, there are no instincts that do not seek to restore an earlier state of things."
Establishing this claim takes Freud to his two great instincts, Eros, seeking to "preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units," and Thanatos, the death instinct, "seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic state" (Freud, 1924, pp. 21: 118-9; 1920g-a, pp. 18: 42, 60n). This latter tendency, Freud links to aggression. If directed outward, then, the death instinct becomes the "destructive" instinct, the instinct for mastery, the will to power, and, if sexualized, sadism. Turned inward, the death instinct becomes masochism (Freud, 1930 [1929], pp. 21: 121-2; Freud, 1924, pp. 19: 163-4).
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Many people have doubted Freud's two instincts because there is neither bodily nor psychological evidence for them as such. Further, while libidinal instincts have a source in the body, what is the source of an aggressive instinct? Freud himself noted that "It was not easy . . . to demonstrate the activities of this supposed death instinct" (1930 [1929], p. 21: 119). As Heinz Lichtenstein wrote, "The introduction of the death instinct undermined the inner cohesion of the psychoanalytic theory, as Bibring and others have pointed out. On the other hand, the death instinct or its modification as a primary aggressive drive did seem a necessary assumption in order to apply psychoanalytic principles to numerous clinical phenomena," that is, the unpleasurable repetitions. "Freud came to postulate a death instinct in order to account for the compulsive, drivelike power of the repetition compulsion" (Lichtenstein, 1961, p. 234). Indeed, Bibring had pointed out long before, "But the theory of the primal instincts (the life and death instincts) was founded upon an essentially changed concept of instinct. According to it, instinct was not a tension of energy which impinged upon the mental sphere, which arose from an organic source and which aimed at removing a state of excitation in the organ from which it originated. It was a directive or directed `something' which guided the life processes in a certain direction" (Bibring, 1941, p. 128).
Given these difficulties, I find it convenient to think of both Eros and Thanatos as no more than logical categories to apply to more specific drives. One can, logically, divide all our drives and instincts into two opposites: drives to unite and preserve and drives to divide and destroy.
Lichtenstein, however, provided a more radical solution to the question of reconciling the positive seeking we associate with the pleasure principle and the quiescence of the Nirvana principle. He went farther than simply disbelieving Freud's death instinct. He suggested as a more reasonable substitute for the repetition compulsion, an "identity principle." As I read him, however, he has really offered a substitute for the Nirvana principle and, probably, the death instinct, although he himself modestly disclaims such novelty. This identity principle "is, however, ultimately not a new principle or even a new term. It is the repetition compulsion, the `beyond the pleasure principle,' seen in a different perspective" (Lichtenstein, 1961, p. 252).
Lichtenstein (1977, p. 245) defined identity as "invariance within change or invariance within a transformation." Most psychoanalytic writers, Erikson, for example, use identity to refer to an one's inner sense of coherence or continuity. This is identity from within. Also, most neuroscientists who talk about humans' extended consciousness (compared to animals') are addressing this identity seen from within.
Lichtenstein, however, used the term differently. He was writing about identity as seen from outside, a completely different thing. I look at you and perceive patterns of variance and invariance. In other words, one can read identity in another person just as one reads themes and variations in a piece of music.
We could then, following Lichtenstein, define an identity theme as a statement of an individual's invariant theme and plain identity as the history of the variations played upon that theme as the person being described lives a life. We humans can vary our themes infinitely. We can play variations that are positive and negative, healthy and unhealthy, creative and ritualistic, liberal and conservative, hostile and loving--all the varieties of human life. But, if Lichtenstein is right, an observer, a biographer, say, should be able to trace a sameness, a personal style if you will, within all those changes. We say things like, "That's so like him," or "He's acting out of character," things that assume a continuing personal style. It is a sameness or invariance that both psychoanalysis and neuroscience would say was created in early childhood.
As Lichtenstein saw identity, the infant achieves an identity by learning to be the child for this particular mother (or "primary caretaker"). That is, the mother, out of her unconscious needs, defenses, adaptations, or constraints, shapes her responses to the infant, and the infant adapts to those traits, and, in doing so, shapes its own identity theme. From then on, the growing child and adult plays variations on that identity theme, modifying the theme somewhat, but less and less as time goes on. Lichtenstein instances his theory with several case histories, all reported in his 1977 book). Norman Holland, who has followed Lichtenstein's ideas, has added still more: Ronald Reagan (Holland, 1989b); five subjects of an experiment in reading (Holland, 1975); Robert Frost (Holland, 1989a); F. Scott Fitzgerald; George Bernard Shaw; and Little Hans, where one can trace identity from the five-year-old boy Freud treated to the adult director of operas (Holland, 1985).
Lichtenstein, however, differentiated his identity principle from simply something within one human being. "If the identity principle is not a drive, it is nevertheless not an ego function, but a biological organizational principle, the true nature of which we do not yet completely understand" (Lichtenstein 1961, 250).
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That understanding can be improved from a somewhat surprising source, the Chilean biologists, Umberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (Varela, 1979) (Varela 1979; Maturana and Varela 1980, 1987) (Maturana & Varela, 1980). They advance a principle of autopoeisis or self-making, and they claim, with a great deal of evidence and reasoning, that it provides a fundamental biological law, extending evolutionarily from the simplest one-cell animals to the complexities of the individual human being and even human social groups. As with Lichtenstein, the principle says that an organism's deepest motivation, the one that underlies all others, is the necessity of maintaining its own inner nature. Thus, an organism's quests for food, air, water, sex, and information all serve to re-create identity. Varela puts autopoiesis this way: "Living systems . . . transform matter into themselves in a manner such that the product of their operation is their own organization" (Varela, 1979, p. 17).
At the amoeba's level, the organism accepts into itself stuff that will make more amoeba. It does not accept stuff that will not sustain its identity as an amoeba, ignoring it, and moving on. At the level of the individual human, each of us eats, drinks, relates to other human beings, heeds language, and all the rest, so as to satisfy our psychological wishes which in turn express our inner mental and physical nature of which we are largely unconscious. At the level of human social groupings, we commonly see corporations hiring only executives who will fit into that corporate culture, and the corporate culture thereby re-creates itself again and again. A given university will hire and promote those professors who will contribute to the proclaimed aims and self-esteem of that university. Nations get leaders and act in such a way as to fulfill the imagined character of the nation. "A society, therefore, operates as a homeostatic system that stabilizes the relations that define it as a social system of a particular kind." "The realization of the autopoiesis of the components of a social system is constitutive to the realization of the social system itself" (Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. xxvii, xxv).
Cyberneticist Sir Stafford Beer sums up their claim:
The authors first of all say that an autopoietic system is a homeostat . . . a device for bolding a critical systemic variable within physiological limits. They go on to the definitive point: in tbe case of autopoietic homeostasis, the critical variable is the system's own organization. It does not matter, it seems, whether every measurable property of that organizational structure changes utterly in the system's process of continuing adaptation. It survives.
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Their `it' is notified precisely by its survival in a real world. . . . The very continuation is `it' (Beer, 1980, p. 66).
Autopoiesis, in other words, as a principle covers all the ground that Freud's death instinct does. Further, it is closely tied to the repetition compulsion and that "conservatism of the instincts" of which Freud wrote. It is closest of all to Lichtenstein's identity principle.
A living system, due to its circular organization, is an inductive system and functions always in a predictive manner: what happened once will occur again. Its organization (genetic and otherwise) is conservative and repeats only that which works. For this same reason living systems are historical systems; the relevance of a given conduct or mode of behavior is always determined in the past (Maturana & Varela, 1980, pp. 26-27).
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To sum up, Freud posited a three-level system of motivation, the lowest level of which was a death instinct. The death instinct, however, lacks empirical confirmation and has been put aside as irrelevant by many analysts. One can provide a more precise and more verifiable explanation for the phenomena Freud was using the death instinct to explain. That is, one can improve Freud's metapsychology, I believe, by substituting for the death instinct an identity principle or autopoesis. The organism seeks, as its ultimate motivation underlying all others, to maintain its own nature. Identity defines what is pleasure and defines what is reality. Identity is the conclusive manifestation of again-ness. And it has immediate relevance to the clinical situation and simply to understanding our fellow human beings.
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This re-thinking of the death instinct, however, goes farther. Understanding the death instinct as an identity principle allows us to relate the psychoanalytic insight to neuroscientific discoveries.
For example, Freud conceived of an unpleasure principle as desire unsatisfied (unpleasure) followed by satisfaction and the zeroing of desire. Such a conception dovetails with the neuroscientific concept of feedback. Feedback, as a concept, dates back to 1868 when James Clerk Maxwell, the mathematical physicist renowned for the electromagnetic theory of light, published a classic paper giving the equations for feedback in the governors of steam engines (Maxwell, 1868). By World War II, scientists were able to use feedback to create devices that would calculate for anti-aircraft gunners tracking to anticipate the maneuvers of airplanes.
Imagine yourself steering a car. You want to maintain the car a certain distance from the edge of the road, one meter, say. You position the steering wheel a certain way, acting out from yourself into the environment of car and road. We could think of your action in the most general terms as trying something out, a certain position of the steering wheel. Really, you am putting a hypothesis out into the world. Will this positon of the steering wheel keep me one meter from the edge of the road? The outer reality of car and road then feeds back to you information about what it did upon receiving your output, your hypothesis. The steering gears, the road, the tires, the wind, and all the rest "out there" position the car in a certain way as a result of the way you "in here" decided to position the steering wheel. You get a response to your hypothesis. Then you sense whether the car is closer or less close to the right edge of the road than you want it to be, and you turn the steering wheel to right or left to bring that error as near to zero as possible.
In effect, on testing the environment, you are receiving information, your perception of the right front wheel's distance from the side of the road, call it D. You compare that datum to the position you had earlier decided on, your standard, call it S. From the difference between them, S - D, you estimate how far to move the steering wheel so as to position the right front wheel to achieve zero difference between its position and your standard (S - D= 0). You may not get it right the first time, and in that case you get another, presumably smaller, S - D error signal. By trial and error (and feedback is precisely what trial and error is), you eventually bring S - D to 0 or near enough to 0 so that you feel all right about it. You minimize the error signal and so close the feedback loop, setting the output (the position of front wheel and car) so that it satisfies your standard, one meter.
It was only after World War II that mathematicians and neurologists first extended the differential and integral equations of feedback to living organisms (Wiener, 1948). Today, feedback underlies contemporary "constructive" psychologies of perception and cognition. That is, today most psychologists believe that we construe or construct the reality around us, including works of art. Using various interconnected modules (in "parallel distributed processing") we bring guesses--hypotheses, schemata, narratives--to bear on the electrochemical impulses our senses deliver to our brains. Our brains compare what we take in with internal standards. If what is coming matches what the standard says should be coming in, the module is quiescent. If they don't match, the module puts out a signal, perturbing the system, presumably in a direction so as to produce satisfaction and quiescence. We try out a guess on the world. If our guess succeeds, we feel right. If it fails, it gives us uneasiness, and we try a different guess (see, for example (Kelly, 1963) or (Rumelhart, Smolensky & McClelland, 1986).
Some of these hypotheses will be physiological. Our eyes, for example, continually scan what we see for frequencies of light in the three ranges, blue, green, and red, which the cone cells in our retinas sense. Our ears serve as filters, responding only to vibration frequencies within the range of human hearing. Because they are filters, they, in effect, ask questions of the environment. Does the frequency of this sound fall within the frequency range I can sense? If so, I will do further processing. If not, not. About these physiological questions--hypotheses--and the answers to them most human beings will agree.
We can imagine similar loops for trying out cultural hypotheses: how particular features make the letter "A"; how a certain light on a post means "Stop"; how a certain green and yellow cloth on a pole stands for Brazil. Just about everybody will share the same feedback mechanisms for eyes and ears, because we share the basic human sensory equipment. So too, there is likely to be widespread agreement about cultural conventions like stop lights and flags.
Feedback in the cyberneticists' sense has a lot in common with autopoeisis. It also resembles Freud's again-ness. Freud, however, would have known feedback, not as feedback, but as the closely related medical concept of homeostasis to which he often referred. This was physiologist Walter B. Cannon's idea that the body's systems of chemicals and hormones self-correct so as to maintain various balances--standards--necessary for the organism to function and survive (Cannon, 1915).
When Freud writes about feedback (without, of course, using that word), he extends it beyond a biological principle to a psychological one. He wrote about it in terms of an "instinct towards perfection" (ein Trieb zur Vervollkommnung; with the connotation of exactly filling up). He began by drily suggesting that the present development of human beings offers scant evidence for improvement beyond animals. Our supposed quest for perfection is biologically determined by civilized repression.
The repressed instinct never ceases to strive for complete satisfactlon, which would consist in the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction [Freud's definition of a wish as again-ness--NNH]. No substitutive or reactive formations and no sublimations will suffice to remove the repressed instinct's persisting tension [(S - D) --NNH]; and it is the difference in amount between the pleasure of satisfaction which is demanded and that which is actually achieved that provides the driving factor which will permit of no halting at any position attained (Freud, 1920g-a, p. 42).
This is precisely a description of feedback. Ernest Jones (Jones, 1953-57, p. 3: 268) went so far as to claim that, in this idea (which Freud got from G. T. Fechner), he had anticipated Cannon's homeostasis and te whole science of cybernetics. I am not so ambitious on Freud's behalf. I simply want to point to the parallel.
Freud's Nirvana principle (as he describes it here, but even more precisely if we convert Freud's principle to an identity principle) states feedback in psychological terms. Organisms reach out into the environment, testing it to see if there are things that will sustain and confirm the organism's psychological character or identity. If there are, it adapts its behavior to benefit from them. Feedback pervades neuroscientific thinking about the physical circuitry of the brain. Freud, like the neuroscientists, claims such a principle is a pervasive phenomenon in the mind. Feedback, in his sense or in any of these forms, will inevitably involve us in again-ness, since the standard we try to duplicate comes from own history. That history cumulates and endures; it is permanent compared to the vicissitudes from which we try to sustain and confirm it.
Intimately related to the idea of again-ness is another idea of Freud's. In his "testamentary" essay, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable," he discussed the role of defense mechanisms in resistance to treatment (Freud, 1937c, p. 238). He made the following quite extraordinary statement--extraordinary in view of his usual objectivist position. Although the adult's ego is stronger than the child's, yet that adult ego "finds itself compelled to seek out those situations in reality which can serve as an approximate substitute for the original [childhood] danger, so as to be able to justify, in relation to them, its maintaining its habitual modes of reaction." In other words, in childhood, we embedded in our minds certain patterns of defense and adaptation. In adulthood, we seek out situations like those we met as children because those are the situations our patterns of defense and adaptation came into being to cope with. We try to find the kind of world we can deal with in order to deal with the kind of world we find. For this seeking, we can read "wish," and Freud's idea that a wish is a wish to perceive a previous situation of satisfaction. Again-ness again. Or identity: our "habitual modes of reaction" define our character or our identity. We seek in reality for situations that will allow us to "justify" them.
Freud's remarks here about defenses make defenses into one of the schemas that, according to some current theories of perception, are the ways we make sense of the world. That is, we may carry in our heads a restaurant schema, a chess schema, a subway schema, and so on. These are like scripts that tell us what to say or do or expect as we enter a restaurant, play or watch chess, or find our way in the subway system. A comes after B and at C you have to do M. You enter a restaurant and sit down and then the waiter brings a menu and you have to choose from the items listed--and so on. By means of such schemas or scripts, we negotiate our worlds. We use these schemas to ask questions of the world like, How much money should I leave on the table when I have finished eating and I stand up? These schemas allow us to interpret the feedback we get from our senses.
What schemas are to knowledge and perception of the world, defenses are to emotional coping. Defenses enable us to get from the world the emotions we would like to have. Defenses net us pleasure (or a lack of unpleasure) instead of fear. If this man is like my father, I must submit to him. If I am angry, terrible things will happen. In Fenichel's words, "The problem of [neurotic] fixation to certain defense mechanisms is but a special case of the more comprehensive problem of the relative constancy of character traits in general" (Fenichel, 1945, p. 523). "Character [is] the habitual mode of bringing into harmony the tasks presented by internal demands and by the external world" (Fenichel 1945, 467). These modes of coping together with libidinal character-types form the core of the I--identity (Holland, 1985, pp. 334-354).
One can think of character traits as schemas, and one can think of the kind of theme-and variations identity that Lichtenstein describes as the formulation in a theme of all these traits. What do they all have in common? They all persist. In Fenichel's words, "By definition, character means that a certain constancy prevails in the ways the ego chooses for solving its tasks" (Fenichel, 1945, p. 523). Again-ness, again, and it applies, of course, to a theme-and-variations identity.
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Does such an identity have any basis in the brain? Several neuroscientists have approached the idea of an overriding identity. Michael Gazzaniga, for example, describes how his split-brain subjects explain their inexplicable actions, fabulating left-brain reasons for inexplicable actions, inexplicable because dictated by a split-off right hemisphere. Gazzaniga locates this "interpreter" no more precisely than in the "left hemisphere"--
New discoveries suggested that the brain is indeed organized in a modular fashion with multiple subsystems active at all levels of the nervous system and each processing data outside the realm of conscious awareness. These modular systems are fully capable of producing behaviors, mood changes, and cognitive activity. This activity is monitored and synthesized by the special system in the left hemisphere, the interpreter. The right hemisphere does not have such a system, since it does not have other aspects of a logical-deductive system. In short, the new studies showed the error of the idea of a doubling consciousness: While many basic functions are bilaterally represented, those essential for human thought are not.
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Also, the interpreter system generates the possibility of human uniqueness. . . . I think that the built-in capacity of the interpreter gives each of us our local and personal color. After all, it works by drawing upon the unique experience each of us possesses (Gazzaniga, 1988, pp. 124, 134).
He is implying something like an identity here, but it does not match precisely, at least for me.
Psychiatrist Leslie Brothers insists on a social brain rather than an individual one. She notes that there are biologically based social responses programed in the brain. Some responses are innate to us as primates. Others, however, come from a particular experience of family and culture (Brothers, 1997, p. 53). From her survey of the relevant literature, she derives "a specialized capacity for social processing," which she calls the "editor." She locates it in an anatomical system consisting of "the amygdala and (to a lesser degree, related structures such as the orbital frontal cortex, anterior cingulate gyrus, and temporal pole cortex) and the sensory cortex reciprocally connected with [the amygdala]" (Brothers, 1997, p. 56). Such an editor, she suggests, rates events for their evolutionary value in survival and reproduction--something like Lichtenstein's identity principle or Maturana and Varela's autopoesis. The organism has become programed by its genes and its history to choose those behaviors that will sustain its own identity. "The social editor, in sum, is a set of structures in the anterior temporal lobe and areas related to it that evolved to select certain neural ensembles in sensory cortices--ensembles that encode social features--and link them to action dispositions," that is, to what other neuroscientists would call emotions (Brothers, 1997, p. 61). And emotions, we have seen, feelings, are the way an identity signals to consciousness whether actions are consistent with that identity or not. Freud's signal theory of anxiety, for example, rests on this straightforward observation.
Antonio Damasio opens up yet another possibility for a neural basis for what I have been calling identity. In The Feeling of What Happens, he homes in on what he calls "the problem of self." He concludes:
We can vary and waver, succumb to vanity and betray, be malleable and voluble. The potential to create our own Hamlets, Iagos, and Falstaffs is inside each of us. Under the right circumstances, aspects of those characters can emerge, briefly and transiently, one hopes. In some respects, it is almost astonishing that most of us have only one character, although there are sound reasons for the singularity. The tendency toward unified control prevails during our developmental history, probably because a single organism requires that there be one single self if the job of maintaining life is to be accomplished successfully--more than one self per organism is not a good recipe for survival (Damasio, 1999, p. 225).
Note the similarity in that statement to Lichtenstein's identity principle or Maturana and Varela's autopoesis.
The rich imaginings of our mind do prepare "multiple drafts" for our organism's life script . . . . Yet, the shadows of the deeply biological core self and of the autobiographical self that grows under its influence constantly propitiate the selection of "drafts" that accord with a single unified self. Moreover, the delicately shaped selectional machinery of our imagination stakes the probabilities of selection toward the same, historically continuous self. . . . In short, there are limits to the unified, continuous, single self . . . human failings and the strange condition of multiple personalities testify to the existence of such limits; and yet the tendency toward one single self and its advantage to the healthy mind are undeniable (Damasio, 1999, p. 225).
I believe that Damasio's "autobiographical self" corresponds to what psychoanalytic theorists call "sense of identity," while the "deeply biological core self" corresponds to Lichtenstein's identity seen from outside.
Thus, in the endnote to that paragraph, Damasio goes on to discuss multiple personality, but also to make some general remarks about identity:
It is apparent, however, that in spite of being able to display more than one autobiographical self, such patients continue to have only one mechanism of core consciousness and only one core self. Each of the autobiographical selves must use the same central resource. Reflection on this fact is intriguing. It brings us back to the notion that the generation of the core self is closely related to the proto-self which, in turn, is based closely on the representations of one singular body in its singular brain. Given a single set of representations for one body state, it would require a major pathological distortion to generate more than one proto-self and more than one core self. Presumably the distortion would not be compatible with life. On the other hand, the generation of the autobiographical self occurs at a higher anatomical and functional level, no doubt connected to the core self, but partially independent of it and therefore less influenced by the strong biological shadow of a singular organism (Damasio, 1999, p. 355).
Damasio goes on to comment on "the distinction between the highly constrained organization of the core self, tied to biological organization in an inevitable manner, and the organization of autobiographical memory, potentially removed from biological constraints by some degrees of freedom." While this seems to me to correspond to a distinction between a persistent identity and a sense of self, Damasio ties the distinction to very general considerations of nature and nurture and not to neurological descriptions of the brain.
Thus, all three of these writers agree on complex feedbacks from experience to some kind of long-term governing entity--Gazzaniga's interpreter, Brothers' editor, or Damasio's "core self." (This last is the one most analogous to Lichtenstein's psychological identity theme.) Moreover, none of these writers doubts that there are neural structures that support such a persistent identity. Nevertheless, none clearly draws what seems to me a clear distinction that should be drawn. None distinguishes a persistent identity felt from inside from a persistent identity inferred from outside.
* * *
If a non-neuroscientist can speculate, I would like to suggest that the key element in a personal identity (a theme-and-variations seen from outside) is again-ness. In Fenichel's description of character, for example, the key word is "habitual." Where in the brain might the habitual reside? There is a possible location one can point to: procedural memory. Current neuroscientific thinking distinguishes several kinds of memory. Two, in particular, bear on identity. One is explicit or declarative memory--story-telling memory for events and episodes. Presumably one's inner "sense of identity" comes from cogitating about past events and episodes. The other is procedural memory, the kind of preverbal body memory involved in swimming or riding a bicycle (Pally, 1997). Procedural memory, however, can be verbal in habitually recited speech like an actor's part or a too-often-repeated lecture by a professor. Such memorized verbal behaviors can persist long after other speech has deteriorated in, for example, a dementia.
In this connection, Oliver Sacks' comment on the painter de Kooning, suffering from dementia, proves pertinent. "'Style,' neurologically," wrote Sacks, "is the deepest part of one's being, and may be preserved, almost to the last, in a dementia" (Sacks, 1990). In describing the sudden moments of lucidity among brain-damaged patients, he concluded: "One's self, one's style, one's persona exists as such, in its infinitely complex being; that it is not a question of this system or that, but of a total organization which must be described as a self. Style, in short, is the deepest thing in one's being" (Sacks, 1974, p. 239n). I believe Sacks is describing here exactly what I have been calling identity, seen from the outside.
Procedural memory, if learned, draws on the hippocampus, if instinctual, on the basal ganglia. If the basal ganglia in particular are the site for habitual actions, perhaps they are also the site for preverbal drives, defenses, adaptations, and conflict resolutions learned in infancy and forming a Lichtensteinian identity. If such an early, nonverbal identity relies in part, at least, in the basal ganglia, it would therefore be connected to the reptilian brain--as Maturana and Varela's thinking would suggest.
But only possibly. It may well be better to think of such an identity as something distributed throughout the brain, like a coloration. Such a conclusion would fit researchers' current emphasis on "PDP."
* * *
PDP refers to Parallel Distributed Processing through interconnected modules, rather than feedback through schemas, and provides a more sophisticated model of what the brain does than the earlier idea of serial, computer-like processing. A PDP approach allows us to consider such details as the processing of horizontal lines or irregular verbs or nouns about tools. In vision, for example, there would be modules in the brain for processing dots, lines, edges, forms, colors, motion, three-dimensions, and so on. In hearing, there would be modules for processing pitch, amplitude, binaural delays, and phonemes. There are, apparently, modules that separately process nouns and verbs.
Some conclude from this now widely accepted idea of modules that there is no one self, but rather multiple selves, hence no identity in my sense. Thus one standard textbook states flatly, "Human selves consist of several semi-independent modules." "The hint that our continuous experience of an `I' is a fiction is its troublesome instability: the fact that we can act as though we were different people at different times and often seem relatively powerless to control who we are and when. This is because the `I' consists of a succession of emergent personalities, and which one presides at any particular time depends on the circumstances" (Bownds 1999, pp. 164, 166)). But Bownds is confusing our fluctuating inner sense of self with a persistent personal style observed from outside.
On the other hand, those who developed PDP see a consistency between modules and the schemas, which, I have suggested, correspond to our characteristic patterns of defense which in turn underlie character or identity. David Rumelhart, a principal researcher in the field points out: "We argue that the concept of the schema has a correspondence in the PDP framework" (Rumelhart, et al., 1986, p. 53). Donald A. Norman comments at the end of the big, two-volume anthology that put PDP in the center of the cognitive science landscape:
Schemas are not fixed structures. Schemas are flexible configurations. mirroring the regularities of experience, providing automatic completion of missing components, automatically generalizing from the past, but also continually in modification, continually adapting to refelect the current state of affairs. Schemas are not fixed, immutable data structures. Schemas are flexible interpretive states that reflect the mixture of past experience and present circumstances. . . . Thus the system behaves as if there were prototypical schemas, but where the prototype is constructed anew for each occasion by combining past experiences with the biases and activation levels resulting from the current experience and the context in which it occurs (Norman, 1986, pp. 536-7).
In other words, if we allow for feedback from experience onto the schemas in the mind, schemas are quite consistent with a PDP approach. And with them, identity, whichis both variation and theme, sameness and difference.
Lichtenstein posits an identity theme. If so, then identity itself I would define as the history of that theme and the variations we have lived upon it. Hence the concept implies precisely a feedback, such as Norman describes, from current experience to the selection of new variations from the infinite set of variations possible for the identity theme.
Finally, Jerry Fodor puts the argument for a centralizing, coherent self quite bluntly. Fodor is a strong advocate of modularity in the mind. Fodor notes, however, that positing a lot of small modules may account for the way we compute particular perceptions and actions, but modules can't account for overall judgments of relevance, simplicity, centrality, and the like. For those, we need a psychology of common sense, we need schemas or something like them, and we need an I who is in charge of the whole enterprise. "If, in short, there is a community of computers living in my head, there had also better be somebody who is in charge; and, by God, it had better be me" (Fodor, 1997)..
Schemas, then, and identity uniting and governing schemas and modules still prove useful, even within the framework of PDP or modularity. One could, if so inclined, spell out a restaurant or theater schema, and psychoanalytic listening could tell an analyst how my restaurant scheme differs from yours in characteristic ways. In psychoanalysis, schemas supplement the idea of a character or identity that leads us into again-ness. Without a psychoanalysis, though, I doubt if any of us could spell out our total patterns of drive and defense and probably not then. Yet the analyst observing from behind the couch probably could.
* * *
Defenses, schemas, and modules all let us cope with our world. All lead us into patterns of repetition. All underlie the concept of an identity-seen-from-outside, particularly an identity principle as a substitute for the death instinct. We may therefore need to think of identity-seen-from-outside as involving distributed sites. It seems likely that an identity-seen-from-outside resides in all, or a great many, of the brain's structures rather than some definable governing neuron assembly in a cluster of nuclei and cortices.
Hebb's work in the 1940s established a still-accepted method for writing experience into the brain. Increases in synaptic strength occur if presynaptic and postsynaptic cells fire in synchrony. Recent research suggests that these Hebbian assemblies can be formed even in adulthood (Bownds, 1999, pp. 134-38). You can teach an old dog new tricks. Most strengthened connections, however, are formed in childhood. The newborn brain has only a small fraction of the synapses it will ultimately have. Myelinization and connections grow rapidly both in genetic development and with Hebbian learning to the point of creating a supercharged brain in latency. Then in early adolescence the excess dies off. It is experience that separates the assemblies that will die and and those that will survive into adulthood. Terrence Deacon states the process:
By a simple cellular mechanism (initially hypothesized by the psychologist Donald Hebb), axons that regularly release their neurotransmitters in synchrony with the firing of the recipient cell (which indicates synchrony with a large fraction of the other input axons) will tend to have their links to that cell strengthened, perhaps by the release of some growth factors. Those that tend to fire out of synchrony will, conversely, tend to lose support, and eventually may be eliminated. Though initially proposed as a mechanism for learning, this mechanism can account for more than just the strengthening or weakening of connectional influences. In the context of the developing brain, where the numbers of connections are significantly in excess of what will be maintained to maturity, it determines which connections will "win" in a biological variant of the children's game "musical chairs," where the numbers of viable targets decrease over time (Deacon, 1997, pp. 202-3).
Where might such an identity be located? Jaak Panksepp speculates about the origin and physiology of a SELF, which he defines as "a Simple Ego-type Life Form." Based on the evidence of the mostly normal functioning of split-brain human patients and decorticated animals, he concludes that "the foundations for our subjectively experienced core of being must lie deeper within the brain than the cerebral hemispheres. Indeed, there are many subcortical channels for interhemispheric communication of information that could sustain coherence between the two hemispheres" (Panksepp, 1998, pp. 308-314)
Note that Panksepp is talking about sense of identity, "subjectively experienced core." He locates it this way: "Such diverse lines of evidence, taken together, suggest that the essential `core of being' is subcortical. In my estimation, it was first elaborated in brain evolution within central motor-type regions of the midbrain in periventricular and surrounding areas of the midbrain diencephalon that are richly connected with higher limbic and paleocortical zones" (Panksepp, 1998, p. 308) .
At other points, though, as in his comments on the "pervasive influence" of this system, he writes of what I would call an identity in Lichtenstein's sense: "Although this is not a very skilled and intelligent self its pervasive influence may often seem preconscious (especially when higher forms of consciousness have matured during ontogenetic development), it ultimately allows animals to develop into the intentional, volitional. cognitively selective creatures that they are" (Panksepp, 1998, p. 308). In the note to that sentence, he clarifies the relation he supposes between this low-level core of being and higher cognitive functinons. "A basic attribute of the primal SELF that must be emphasized is the epigenetic emergence of hierarchical controls in the developing system. Although the lower levels may be essential for the normal development of the higher levels, once those levels have matured in the brain, they have some autonomy. However, without support from the lower levels, the functions of higher levels might gradually degrade" (Panksepp, 1998, p. 420n30). In that phrasing, he seems to be discussing something that would govern networks or modules of feedback, not one's sense of identity, but identity much as I visualize it, identity inferred from outside. Such an identity would be formed early in development and would guide the growth of higher functions so that they serve that identity. "The elaboration of conscious abilities in the brain germinates and sprouts from a primal neural field that intrinsically represents a basic body image within the brain stem. This mechanism is shared by all mammals, and it is presumably grounded in various intrinsic circuits that exhibit spontaneous types of oscillatory activity" (Panksepp, 1998, p. 308). This sounds very much like a combination of a theme-and-variations identity-seen-from-outside with Maturana and Varela's autopoesis.
In a more physiological vein, he suggests that such a SELF arises from "a coherently organized motor process in the midbrain, even though it surely comes to be represented in widely distributed ways through higher regions of the brain as a function of neural and psychological maturation" (Panksepp, 1998, p. 309). Panksepp goes on to offer as a speculation, self structures in distributed networks in the midbrain and brainstem, in crucial interactions of superior colliculi, various pontine and midbrain motor regions, and periaquaductal gray. "The deep layers of the colliculi and underlying circuits of the periaqueductal gray (PAG) are the neuroanatomical focus of the intrinsic motor SELF" (Panksepp, 1998, p. 312).
The interaction of these neurodynarnics with the sensory analyzers of the thalamus and cortex and the motor systems they regulate allows organisms the possibility of various species-typical modes of emotional SELF-expression and SELF-regulation. The ensuing affective states may be the internally experienced regulatory value signals around which much of animal behavioral and cognitive activity revolves. Organisms aspire to maximize certain states of the system and to minimize others (Panksepp, 1998, p. 309).
To me, this sounds much like Freud's pleasure principle combined with an identity (Panksepp's SELF?) which defines what constitutes species-specific pleasure--perhaps also individual-specific pleasure. The "mesencephalic roots of the SELF" connect to higher brain areas, leading to the emergence of "higher forms of self-consciousness" (Panksepp, 1998, p. 312). These higher areas (stated simply as "frontal cortex") generate plans, intentions, and behavioral priorities in time, and perhaps personality. Hence such connections could form the basis for behaviors expressing a Lichtensteinian identity.
" The changing neurodynamics of the extended representation of SELF networks are essential for generating subjective emotional feelings in all mammalian brains" (Panksepp, 1998, p. 309)--joining the thinking of Maturana and Varela to sense of identity. Thus, Panksepp does not clearly distinguish subjective sense of identity from theme-and-variations identity to an outside observer. Nevertheless, he does provide at least speculation about where and how such an identity might arise in the brain.Douglas Watt also proposes a brain system for, not exactly an identity, but the repetition compulsion:
Speculatively, I would argue that such profound mechanisms outlined in the concept of the repetition compulsion are likely instantiated by right hemisphere networks interdigitating with ventral basal ganglia systems, and the more paralimbic aspects of the cortico-striatal thalamocortical loops. This would allow both the activation of old routines, via right hemisphere gestalt template matching to context, and modification or those routines in the context of new contingencies, via the important effect that [dopamine], opioid processes and other peptidergic systems have on the ventral [basal ganglia] systems such as nucleus accumbens, ventral caudate, and associated paralimbic regions in cingulate and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (Watt, 2001).
Again-ness again. Here, it takes the form of "old routines" somewhat modified by the new demands of reality.
* * *
Alan N. Schore (1994) asserts more precisely a neurophysological basis for a persistent identity theme inferred from outside, a Lichtensteinian identity. He has applied this process of growing and ungrowing neurons to personality. Although Schore himself does not do experimental neuroscience, he has scoured the neuroscientific literature (the references in his book occupy 150 pages) to support his thesis (Schore, 1994). From the neuroscientific literature he has established that, in his words,
the vitally important attachment experiences of infancy are stored in the early maturing right hemisphere, and that for the rest of the lifespan unconscious working models of the attachment relationship encode strategies of affect regulation for coping with stress, expecially interpersonal stress. These internal representations are accessed as guides for future interactions, and the term working refers to the individual's unconscious use of them to interpret and act on new experiences (Schore, 1999, p. 51).
Schore's basic premise is thus the quite traditional psychoanalytic view (the genetic or developmental metapsychological principle) that early attachment experiences with a primary caregiver lay down patterns of "affect regulation" for the individual's lifetime. To me, however, this sounds very like a Lichtensteinian identity, a persistent way of relating to the world as we formulate it from outside the individual, as, for example, a psychoanalyst behind the couch would infer it. Schore finds a neural base for these patterns of affect regulation in the right orbitofrontal cortex, more specifically, the descending pathway to the limbic system.
From the outset, maternal interactions regulate emotions as the baby-watchers, notably Colwyn Trevarthen (1979, 1993) (Trevarthen, 1979; Trevarthen, 1993), have long pointed out. Specifically, the mother serves as an external regulator of the neurochemicals in the infant's developing brain. According to Schore, there are two critical developments in that brain.
There is a first critical period. Maternal stimulation colors the end of the first year of life, particularly through gaze and experiences of joy and reunion as child (as described by Margaret Mahler) walks away and comes back. These experiences activate the sympathetic nervous system, producing neuroendocrine changes, specifically, the innervation of orbitofrontal areas, particularly in the early maturing visuospatial right hemisphere. Specifically, these positive experiences create dopamine releasing axons in the orbitofrontal cortex and the maturation of the ventral tegmental forebrain-midbrain circuit. These are ascending subcortical axons of a neurochemical circuit of the limbic system, particularly the sympathetic ventral tegmental limbic circuit. The infant develops the capacity to form an interactive representational model that underlies an early functional system of affect regulation. Engraved in the right hemisphere system for facial recognition is the maternal face and positive emotions associated with that face (Schore, 1994, pp. 69-196).
Schore finds a second critical period. In the second year, say at 14-16 months, we see the onset of socialization procedures. "Don't put your fingers in the light socket." The child has experiences of shame: you've done something wrong. This stage gives rise to a different pattern of psychoneuroendocrine alterations, the expansion of the second limbic circuit in Schore's picture, the parasympathetic lateral tegmental limbic circuit. This circuit also becomes wired into the orbitofrontal cortex, creating an inhibitory system (Schore, 1994, pp. 197-282).
What Schore says these developments have created is a pattern of affect regulation. His ideas fit psychoanalysis in that his two stages correspond approximately to oral and anal stages. I would go a step further, however. Affect regulation, it seems to me, is what regulates virtually all other brain processes. That is, the feeling you get after you look at something or hear something or eat something determines what you will do next. Feelings are what tell you a feedback has or has not succeeded.
It seems to me that in this pattern of affect regulation Schore has proposed a neurological basis for what I have been calling a style or identity. I should acknowledge, though, that Schore's ideas have been criticized on both neurological and psychoanalytic grounds (Nahum, 1999). Nevertheless, if Schore's ideas prove durable, he will have achieved something I think immensely important. He will have established confirmation from the world of neuroscience for the idea of a persistent identity as someone, a psychoanalyst perhaps, would observe it from outside the individual. Such a concept provides a foundation for a great variety of other psychoanalytic concepts. It provides an account of human nature in the broadest sense.
* * *
Whether or not Schore's ideas survive, I have to believe that there is a neural foundation for the idea of a theme-and-variations pattern of human personality. After all, we do observe persistent theme-and-variations identities. Where else could they come from, if not the brain?
Another theorist from the psychoanalytic side, Arnold Modell, has sought a northwest passage from psychoanalytic to neurological concepts of self. In effect, he poses once again a problem that apparently baffled William James. How do you reconcile our fleeting, fluctuating, flowing internal sense of self with the persistence of self which we call identity? In psychoanalytic terms, how do you relate ego to self, in Freud's senses for those terms? Or, how do you relate sense of identity to identity inferred from outside?
Modell relates his thinking to Christopher Bollas' well-known concept of the "unthought known" (Bollas, 1987). Bollas suggests that the pattern of early mother-child intreractions forms an embodied self, Winnicott's true self. "The infant is imprinted," summarizes Modell, "with the mother's theory of being and relating" (Modell, 1993, p. 153). To me, this reads very much like Lichtenstein's primary identity. Possibly the similarity comes about because, in the early 1970s, both Bollas and Lichtenstein played key roles in the Center for Psychological Study of the Arts at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
At any rate, Modell states as a firm principle: "The need to maintain the continuity and coherence of the self is a vital urge of no less importance than sexual desire or the need for attachment to others" (Modell, 1993, p. 201). I hear exactly the same idea as Lichtenstein's identity principle or Maturana and Varela's autopoesis. He goes on, "I propose that the continuity and coherence of the self is such a psychobiological homeostat" (Modell, 1993, pp. 201-202).
In a psychological context, Modell identifies this principle with Kurt Goldstein's idea of one central motive, to actualize oneself. More neurologically, however, Modell relies on Gerald Edelman, the Nobelist neuroscientist with whom he had worked. Modell derives his concept of self from Edelman's carefully developed distinction between two portions of the nervous system. One Edelman calls "nonself," and this sytem (cerebral cortex, thalamus, and cerebellum) operates through sensory interactions with the world, through experience and behavior. This system develops learned perceptual categories. What is food, a tool, another person? The other system, the "self," exists to assure the persistent dominance of adaptive homeostasis. it operates through hypothalamus, pituitary, parts of the brain stem, amygdala, hippocampus and limbic system, all parts of the brain evolutionarily older than what is presumably involved in one's sense of identity, frontal and temporal cortices. The operation of this system is to a large extent genetically constrained; it exists to assure homeostatic regulation in each individual.
These two systems, one an internal homeostatic system, the other a system to act on the world, combine. Both systems need to coordinate diverse sensory inputs, and the means for doing this, Edelman calls "reentry." The evolutionary constraints of the first system, Edelman terms "value." Values contribute to the fitness of the organism for reproduction and survival (Edelman, 1989, p. 94). Value acts as a bias on reentry. That is, through reentry connections in the brain, the organism selects perceptions and behaviors that elicit favorable values.
Previous experiences in the sensorimotor system have established memories of values matched to perceptual categories. Chocolate is good, castor oil is bad. These value-categories connect to current perceptual categories, so that the individual now will characteristically avoid castor oil and seek chocolate.
The bulk of Edelman's 1989 book goes into developing the neural circuitry for the memory of value, the categorization of perceptions, and the reentry of the value categories into current perceptions and motor actions. The picture is extremely complicated, but perhaps it suffices to say that one can draw a coherent picture of the structures and connections between the two systems such that past experiences (like mother-infant interactions) lay down the values for future perceptions and motor actions.
These remembered value-categories and the systems for imposing them on current experience Edelman calls "primary consciousness." Animals have it, and it is what enables them to reproduce and survive. This is, of course, Maturana and Varela's autopoesis, the basis for the evolutionary persistence of species and individuals. Humans have another resource besides the simple comparison of value-categories and current perceptions: language. Language systems working through such strctures as Broca's and Wernicke's areas provide another feedback such that the conceptual categories can be spoken about. This ability confers an obvious advantage in both survival and reproduction, and language makes possible the shared wisdom through culture that enables humans to form groups and even civilizations based on shared value-categories.
Interestingly, Edelman's linguistically based "secondary" consciousness and physiologically based "primary" consciousness correspond to what George Lakoff and Mark Johnson describe as the metaphorical schema by which we think, in a non-systematic, layperson's way, about the self. That is, we divide ourselves into a Subject and a Self. The Subject is the experiencing consciousness, the mind of reason, will, and judgment, which exists only in the present. Metaphorically, the Subject is always categorized as a person. The Self is the rest of the person: the body, social roles, past states, and actions in the world. Metaphorically, the self can be person, object, or location. Thus, when I say, "I lifted my arm," "I" is Subject and "my arm" is Self. If I say, "I was beside myself," "I' is again Subject and "myself" is Self imagined as a container of Subject. In "He is afraid to reveal his inner self," "he" is Subject and "inner self" is a special part of Self that fits the essence of the Subject (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, pp. 267-289). (Note how one can use this understanding of our metaphors to unpack such psychoanalytic metaphors as Winnicott's True and False Selves or Kohut's "grandiose self.") What Lakoff and Johnson call "essence," I would call the "identity theme" toward which Lichtenstein's identity principle and Maturana and Varela's autopoesis tend.
In effect, the Subject in our familiar metaphors is the experiencing system in Edelman's model of our minds, but it is constrained, unconsciously, by the value-category system. That we would characterize as our essence, an aspect of the Subject. The Self would refer to all the things the experiencing system perceives or does. The essence is something an observer would infer from outside or something the individual, using language, might infer from inside. The two inferences would, generally, not coincide. One might conceptualize psychoanalytic insight as the use of language (secondary consciousness) to make the individual conscious of a previously unconscious system of value-categories (Edelman's primary consciousness) driving current experiences.
* * *
From Freud's wish to repetition compulsion to identity principle to Winnicott's True Self again-ness pervades psychoanalytic theory. This persisting identity or style is what we see when we observe identity from outside the individual. It is not to be confused with our own fluctuating inner consciousness of who we think we are, something we are likely to express in language.
To quote Freud again, the adult ego "finds itself compelled to seek out . . . situations in reality . . . to be able to justify, in relation to them, its maintaining its habitual modes of reaction" (Freud, 1937c, p. 238). In other words, in childhood, we embedded in our minds certain patterns of defense and adaptation. As adults, we seek out situations like those we met in childhood because those are the only situations our patterns of defense and adaptation established in childhood can cope with.
This passage seems to me to correspond to ego-psychology's concept of character and, even further, to an identity observed from outside which may in turn be part of a general biological principle, not of death, but of life: autopoesis. We may be able to find a system in the brain that embodies such an identity, and if so, we may be able to anchor still other psychoanalytic concepts in neurobiological discoveries.
What the various neuroscientific writers (Gazzaniga, Damasio, Brothers, Schore, Edelman) all perceive is some brain system that establishes again-ness (style, identity, "pattern of affect regulation") in the physical brain. Although they explain it differently, they all seem to suggest that there is a lower-level consciousness that stabilizes the homeostatic processes of the brain at physiological and emotional levels around something like an identity theme. A higher-level consciousness associated with language allows self-awareness about these lower-level processes.
This low-level brain system provides a neurological basis for the central role of again-ness in psychoanalytic thought. This lower level prompts a wish in Freud's early sense. It drives the reptition compulsion which in turn became the death instinct. This last, however, can be better understood as an identity theme, which matches rather precisely the kind of primary consciousness or "pattern of affect regulation" described by neurologists. The biological and the psychological converge around concepts of style, autopoesis, or identity maintenance sustained by systems in the brain. We can state the convergences in tabular form:
Freud wish, repetition compulsion, [death instinct?] Lichtenstein identity principle, identity theme irom outside Maturana and Varela autopoesis Holland, Sacks style, [procedural memory?] PDP group defensive schemas Gazzaniga interpreter Brothers editor Damasio core self ego-psychologists character Panksepp, Watt SELF Schore "pattern of affect regulation" Edelman, Modell primary consciousness
In short, the concepts on the right all seem to me to be trying to deal with the same phenomena. They all seem to me to show similarities either in the phenemena addressed or in the explanations put forth or both.
In pointing to refinements and confirmations of Freud's speculations about a death instinct, I am not so much trying to "schore" up Freud. I hope rather to put forward a picture of the human being that makes sense, that fits our own daily observations of our fellows, that also matches the insights of psychoanalysis, and that accords with what neuroscience is telling us about our own inner development.
I believe this convergence makes what the neurologists are searching for more understandable. I believe it makes what the psychoanalysts observe more credible and more precise. I believe this is only one instance of the ways that psychoanalysis and neuroscience can each bring light for the other. I am trying to insist upon both the respect we owe Freud's achievement and the large discoveries we can hope for in the future from combining psychoanalytic insight with the discoveries of neuroscience.
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