A resurgence of interest in the power of introspection and thought helped Freud's ideas return to the field of science.
In the office of my old psychotherapist there was a photograph signed by Sigmund Freud. It was received as a gift from one of the former patients who worked with fake documents in some business of dubious legality, and was a typical photo of a psychoanalyst: a suit, an empty look from under the brow, a half-smoked cigar. One day at an appointment, I asked my doctor what she thought of Freud's theories. “I hardly think about it at all,” was the answer.
This kind of attitude did not come as a surprise to me. Whatever one may say, Freud was one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. After his death in 1939, the British poet Wystan Hugh Auden, in his poem In Memory of Sigmund Freud (1939), declared that he represented "a whole world of views," and the next two decades marked the heyday of psychoanalysis. But everything has changed. Outside of academia, people who think about psychoanalysis tend to think that it went to the trash bin of psychological research after phrenology and animal magnetism. Boys who are attracted to their own mothers; girls thirsting for a male - these are all the stereotypes that persist in the public imagination, ridiculous to the point of disgust.
What happened? In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote that "the demise of Freudianism can be summed up in one word: lithium." An American journalist described how in the early 1950s, after years of lack of results in the field of psychoanalysis, one pill became capable of bringing physical relief to those suffering from manic-depressive psychosis. The decline of psychoanalysis paralleled the rise of modern neurobiology, whose physicalistic approach is the engine of modern psychiatry. Nowadays, almost anyone can be prescribed serotonin, dopamine, or Prozac. However, few people have heard of the concepts of "primary scene" or "super-self". As the American writer Siri Hustvet put it in her book "Beyond a Nervous Breakdown" (2010), Freud is now perceived by many as "a mystic, a person whose ideas have nothing to do with physical reality,a kind of monster of mirages, which undermined the foundations of modernity, feeding all nonsense to the gullible public until his ideas were finally destroyed by a new scientific psychiatry based on the wonders of pharmacology."
But in recent decades, the picture of philosophical antagonism has become more complex. About 20 years ago, a new field emerged with the predictably cumbersome name neuropsychoanalysis. Adherents of this amorphous research program - led by South African neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms of the University of Cape Town - seek to restore Freud's reputation in our age of reason. They recall that Freud began a career in neuroscience and spent two decades studying natural sciences. They point to Freud's attempts in the 1890s to “create a psychology that would become a natural science,” and underscore his lifelong belief that one day his theories will be refined and refined by empirical research into our gray matter. Neuropsychoanalysts published the first issue of their academic journal in 1999 and held their first conference a year later. Since then, more and more psychoanalysts have questioned what exactly neuroscience has to offer their theoretical and practical research. Conciliatory attitudes were adopted by some of the most influential scholars of the era, including Antonio Damasio, Joseph Ledoux, Jaak Panksepp, Vileyanur Ramachandran and, of course, Eric Kandel. Jaak Panksepp, Vileyanur Ramachandran and, of course, Eric Kandel. Jaak Panksepp, Vileyanur Ramachandran and, of course, Eric Kandel.
Is it possible that Wolfe was wrong in arguing that the era of lithium marked the end of Freudianism? What can a couch in a psychiatrist's office and an MRI have to offer each other?
Freud believed that throughout history, humanity has experienced three serious "blows to their pride." The first was done by Copernicus, who discovered that the Earth revolves around the Sun, and proved that we are not at the center of the universe. The second was done by Charles Darwin, who, using his theory of evolution, showed that we came out of the animal kingdom and never existed separately from it. And finally, the third was inflicted by Freud himself (he was never humble), whose psychoanalysis showed that man “is not a master in his own soul” due to the influence of the unconscious. Overall, neuroscience supports Freud's third impact theory. The idea of a vast and powerful unconscious is a central concept in psychoanalysis that is said to have been confirmed with a CT scanner.
The most famous proponent of neuropsychoanalysis is the Nobel laureate in neuroscience Eric Kandel. In the book "The Age of Self-Knowledge" (2012), he repeats Freud's opinion that "our mental life, including emotional, consists mainly of unconscious processes, and only a small fraction of the psyche is available to consciousness at any moment." He also points to two other important points about which Freud was right. First, "the instincts for aggressive and sexual behavior, like the instincts for food and thirst, are an integral part of the psyche and are imprinted in the genome." Secondly, "normal mental life and mental disorders form a continuous series."
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There are other more specific objects of convergence of theoretical positions, especially with regard to our understanding of memory. Casey Schwartz, in his work In the Expanse of Mind (2015), analyzes the assumptions of modern research in the field of memories that long-term memories are changeable, thereby supporting Freud's theory of dynamic memories. The psychoanalytic concept of suppression, in which shameful or traumatic thoughts are held back by the mind and repressed into the subconscious, seems rather bizarre. But it has been found to be supported by brain science - at least in part. When we are in an extremely stressful situation, the experience does not pass through the hippocampus that forms our memory, but is registered immediately in the cerebellar amygdala, the so-called center of fear, creating somethingwhat Ledoux, in his book Psychoanalytic Theory (1999), called "unconscious memory."
There are also many areas of Freudian theory that neuroscientists are reluctant to confirm. Freud was wrong in many ways, and in the most absurd way. Very few people accept even one of the components of his idea of the Oedipus complex, according to which children experience an unconscious sexual attraction to a parent of the opposite sex. No serious psychologist shares his opinion about the stages of psychosexual development. There are other important questions as well. The central principle of psychoanalysis is called psychic determinism - the idea that all psychic and verbal processes without exception, even those that may seem random or insignificant, actually mean something.
On the other hand, modern neuroscience considers a huge number of theories to be ephemeral cognitive activity and perceptual junk. (The phrase "Freudian slip of the tongue" is used as a sarcastic remark precisely because people generally do not believe that what is said means exactly what is meant.) Similarly, Freud's central idea that "every dream is it is a mental phenomenon in the full meaning of this term. " Dr. John Allan Hobson, professor emeritus of the School of Medicine at Harvard University, and others have spent decades arguing that dreams are nothing more than randomized images and confabulations that have nothing to do with significant unconscious secrets and exaggerated fulfillment of desires.
One of the reasons why it is difficult to analyze Freud's ideas in any scientific way is that he was very convincing as a philosopher and cultural critic. In 1930 - as much as 15 years before mankind witnessed the destructive power of the atomic bomb - Freud wrote the following in his book "Dissatisfaction with Culture":
“Nowadays people have gone so far in their dominance over the forces of nature that with their help they can easily destroy each other down to the last man. They know this, hence a great deal of their present concern, their misfortune, their anxiety."
This idea seems convincing to me. But we cannot verify its validity by studying the blood flow in the brain. The truth is, you can spend an entire day listing the points on which Freud was right or wrong. Much more interesting is that although neuropsychoanalysis always starts with formal descriptions of research on which scientists have largely consistent points of view, this is not really what this area is about. The most important issues she touches on are of a much deeper nature. In discussions, neuropsychoanalysis dramatizes the tension between two main ways of thinking about the essence of human being: as a subject and as an object. Or, in the language of the now unfashionable dualism, as the owner of the mind and as the owner of the brain.
Our idea of mental functioning has always reflected the idea of improving it. A man of the Neolithic era considered mental disorders to be the intrigues of evil spirits and tried to expel them by drilling holes in the skull. In the Middle Ages, a melancholic character was considered a sign of excess black bile in the body, so a person was treated with bloodletting, laxatives, and sometimes with exorcism sessions. The same feedback loop between schematizing the brain and healing the mind applies to psychoanalysis. By forcing people to lie on a couch in a dimly lit room and talk about childhood traumas, Freud was simultaneously uncovering the structure of the mind and looking for ways to calm it down.
Today we live in the heart of what some scientists have dubbed neuroculture, defined by both the public and scientific minds taking a course towards understanding human life as what Fernando Vidal of the University of Barcelona called "being, not just having a brain." In this regard, the modern psychological feedback loop attracts attention with its materialism. The reason a depressed person is given selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac is because we perceive emotion as a physical phenomenon that requires physical intervention. Your own thoughts in your own head about your own situation are irrelevant.
This grand "naturalistic turn in the image of humanity", as described by the philosopher Thomas Metzinger of the University of Mainz in Germany, underlies everything from the slow death of religion to the rapid emergence of incomprehensibly related to religion transhumanism. This is also the reason why many people perceive psychoanalysis as absurd, amateurish and ineffective.
And it's not just about medical prescriptions. The most prominent modern form of what was once called "therapy conversations" - cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) - has a distinctly anti-Freudian connotation. May, the old psychotherapist who had a signed photo of Freud on her wall was a CBT specialist. She was a good woman and took real pain away from me, but in terms of CBT, we didn't get any further than half-mystic attempts to reach the dark corners of my mind. In CBT, the nature and form of painful states of mind is largely ignored, and the depressing or fearful mindset is simplified into a flawed algorithm, addicted to an annoying song. Why you think your life is empty and want to die does not really matter. The point isto learn how to analyze and correct useless thought patterns. If we imagine psychoanalysis as a Catholic confessional, CBT is more like a meditation pillow or a chapter from Marcus Aurelius. The focus is on how a person responds to thoughts, rather than the deeper psychic meaning that thoughts may carry.
In everyday life, things are similar. Self-analysis is going out of fashion, and very rarely modern ideas about mental self-improvement are not based on an appeal to our physical "I" of flesh and blood. We consider happiness, whatever it may be, from a physical point of view. You may have noticed that nowadays people have stopped simply "sunbathing" or "playing sports"; they now "raise vitamin D levels" and "release endorphins." If you are a fan of meditation and mental practices, how do you feel about what happens when a monk is put in a tomograph? You eat salmon, but are you happy to be absorbing the notorious omega-3 fatty acids? A friend of mine recently shared that he got over depression with a paleo diet, natural sleep patterns, long walks, and lots of leafy greens. It,Of course, not Prozac, but the principle of action is the same: external influence on physiology in order to improve well-being. In the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932), the creation of the “ideal remedy” implies the complete elimination of unwanted emotions and immersion in a permanent state of “azure bliss”. Huxley's imaginary world is a famous dystopia. But as the character in Michel Houellebecq's novel Elementary Particles (1998) notes: “Usually Huxley's world is declared a totalitarian nightmare … but this is just sheer hypocrisy. Brave New World “draws us a paradise.” In a sense, this book represents the ideal logical conclusion of the modern era, in which introspection is completely replaced by perfectly calibrated physiological intervention.external influence on physiology in order to improve well-being. In the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932), the creation of the “ideal remedy” implies the complete elimination of unwanted emotions and immersion in a permanent state of “azure bliss”. Huxley's imaginary world is a famous dystopia. But as the character in Michel Houellebecq's novel Elementary Particles (1998) notes: “Usually Huxley's world is declared a totalitarian nightmare … but this is just sheer hypocrisy. Brave New World "draws us a paradise." In a sense, this book represents the ideal logical conclusion of the modern era in which introspection is completely replaced by perfectly calibrated physiological intervention.external influence on physiology in order to improve well-being. In the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932), the creation of the “ideal remedy” implies the complete elimination of unwanted emotions and immersion in a permanent state of “azure bliss”. Huxley's imaginary world is a famous dystopia. But as the character in Michel Houellebecq's novel Elementary Particles (1998) notes: “Usually Huxley's world is declared a totalitarian nightmare … but this is just sheer hypocrisy. Brave New World "draws us a paradise." In a sense, this book represents the ideal logical conclusion of the modern era, in which introspection is completely replaced by perfectly calibrated physiological intervention. In the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932), the creation of the “ideal remedy” implies the complete elimination of unwanted emotions and immersion in a permanent state of “azure bliss”. Huxley's imaginary world is a famous dystopia. But as a character in Michel Houellebecq's novel Elementary Particles (1998) observes: “Usually Huxley's world is declared a totalitarian nightmare … but this is just sheer hypocrisy. Brave New World “draws us a paradise.” In a sense, this book represents the ideal logical conclusion of the modern era, in which introspection is completely replaced by perfectly calibrated physiological intervention. In the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932), the creation of the “ideal remedy” implies the complete elimination of unwanted emotions and immersion in a permanent state of “azure bliss”. Huxley's imaginary world is a famous dystopia. But as a character in Michel Houellebecq's novel Elementary Particles (1998) observes: “Usually Huxley's world is declared a totalitarian nightmare … but this is just sheer hypocrisy. Brave New World “draws us a paradise.” In a sense, this book represents the ideal logical conclusion of the modern era, in which introspection is completely replaced by perfectly calibrated physiological intervention. But as the character in Michel Houellebecq's novel Elementary Particles (1998) notes: “Usually Huxley's world is declared a totalitarian nightmare … but this is just sheer hypocrisy. Brave New World “draws us a paradise.” In a sense, this book represents the ideal logical conclusion of the modern era, in which introspection is completely replaced by perfectly calibrated physiological intervention. But as the character in Michel Houellebecq's novel Elementary Particles (1998) notes: “Usually Huxley's world is declared a totalitarian nightmare … but this is just sheer hypocrisy. Brave New World “draws us a paradise.” In a sense, this book represents the ideal logical conclusion of the modern era, in which introspection is completely replaced by perfectly calibrated physiological intervention.
Psychoanalysis is based on the fundamental belief that subjective experience is primary and that introspection is a powerful force in itself. The therapeutic model is thus based on conversations. Which have been going on for many hours, and often years. The basic point of view of psychoanalysis is that the mind has its own resource, and if you learn to look inside yourself from the right angle, you can see and schematize your inner world. Transformations may not happen - Freud once said that the goal of conversational therapy was “to turn neurotic suffering into ordinary discontent” - but there will be some effect. As Hustvet says, the only question to ask when evaluating psychoanalysis and its derivatives is"Can Talking Relieve Symptoms?" It is based on the belief that only subjectivity is capable of reworking the inner world.
The tensions between the brain sciences and psychoanalysis are analogous to those that underlie the so-called "hard problem of consciousness": the seemingly insoluble clash between objective and subjective perceptions of reality. The obsession with the value of a first-person perspective and the drive to incorporate it into neuroscience is what really forms the foundation of the neuropsychoanalysis project. As Solms explained to me, neuropsychoanalysis is not interested in the long and convoluted history of psychoanalysis, but in Freud's original philosophical position, which mingled respect for the natural sciences and a privileged attitude towards the human mind.
"Psychoanalysis itself is not important," said Solms, quoting himself when talking to students. "It does important things."
Solms and others are passionate about brain research, but are somewhat alarmed by the "eliminativism" - a rejection of the study of beliefs, desires, and sensations - by thinkers such as Patricia Churchland of the University of California at San Diego and Daniel Dennett of Tufts University in Massachusetts. Neuropsychoanalysis supports the ideo that “there are things that can be learned about the nature of the mental apparatus from this point of view, things that can never be seen with the eyes, no matter how skillfully you operate with scientific instruments,” as Solms put it in one of his works 2011 year. Much of modern brain science, Solms told me, is constrained by the mind, and the main goal of neuropsychoanalysis is to end it.
For this reason, Freud himself is less important for this area than what his ideas carry. I kept wondering why to cling to Freud? He is a very controversial figure; so much so that the 1980s and 90s were marked by a real war, one of the sides of which was a whole team of thinkers driven (as the historian of science John Forrester put it in 1997) by a sincere desire that Freud was never born, or at least that all his work and influence became nothing. Indeed, the main problem in writing this essay was the inability to find at least someone with a dispassionate attitude towards psychoanalysis. The belief that what I have written will anger some readers does not leave me when I think about the upcoming review of the comments. You need to be subjective, I thought. But why not abandon the heavily contested Freudianism in favor of psychotherapy by Irwin Yalom, who views life's core issues from an existentialist perspective? Why not appreciate Viktor Frankl's logotherapy, which prioritizes our indispensable desire to give meaning to life, or the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, the first principle of which is subjectivity above all else?
Within the framework of neuropsychoanalysis, Freud symbolizes the fact that, quoting the book Phantoms of the Brain (1998) by the neuroscientist Ramachandran, the laws of mental life can be searched in much the same way as a cardiologist studies the heart, and an astronomer studies the movement of planets. From a clinical point of view, before Freud, there was no such thing as therapy in the modern sense of the term. In Yalom's novel When Nietzsche Wept (1992), Freud's mentor Joseph Breuer is at a loss as to what advice to give the titled German philosopher in a difficult moment: “There is no cure for despair, there are no doctors for the soul,” he says. All that Breuer can recommend are health resorts "or maybe ask a priest."
After Freud, however, doctors for the soul were divorced in abundance. And the healing itself begins with a person and his unique inner view of existence. Adherence to Freud's core beliefs - that subjectivity-based science is possible and can help us live - is what supports the legacy of neuropsychoanalysis. As deeply misleading as Freud is, for Solms and others, the influence, prominence, and sincerity of what he aspired to is that he still deserves intellectual reverence. I think it's quite possible to prove that keeping Freud's ideas is not worth reputation is quite realistic. But as Solms himself told me, “we do not need Freud, but a responsible approach to the psychic nature of mind. And since Freud made the most thorough research in this area, it seems to me that it is worth starting from here."
The allure of the idea of restoring and preserving the subjective point of view demonstrates a kind of intellectual duplicity regarding our era of brain research and tomography. Even when the facts speak of our desire for complete physiological control over the "brave new world", this world remains one of the most famous literary dystopias of our time. There is still a fear of the idea of relegating our personal experience to the niche of the species logic of physiology. Most of us, deep down, want to give priority to the inner world - our ideas about ourselves and the feelings associated with the kind of life we want to lead, what we fear and desire. Psychoanalysis is attractive in part because it makes a person rich and mysterious to himself. Life ceases to be a textbook and becomes a novel.
We are flattered by the thought that the depths of our being are reminiscent of teeming Greek myths. By imagining that our dreams are meaningful, we fuel innate narcissism. (The one that pushes us to tell people everything we think about them, and makes those of them that do not suit us infinitely boring.) But there is one important point: no generalized theory is able to analyze the mind of even one person, not to mention all of them at once. Rationalization of ourselves brings some relief, destroys uncertainty; everything is measurable and changeable.
And yet, at some level, we do not want to live according to the laws of biochemistry alone, the same as that of seven and a half billion other people. In this situation, something is always lost, even if it is difficult to say what exactly. It is not for nothing that psychoanalysis has undergone the least changes of all the humanities. Freud's works mentions "Hamlet" and "Macbeth", as well as "Faust" by Goethe. Like psychoanalysis, the humanities (especially literature) attach particular importance to the richness of human life, and the reality is perceived not by objects, but by subjects. Like psychoanalysis, the humanities are often portrayed as in decline, lost amid the technocratic exsanguination of the scientific age. Both spheres function on the basis of the same instinct: the stories that we tell ourselves can influence our inner world.
In this controversial context, neuropsychoanalysis presses to supplement brain research with experiences of what it means to emerge from it. So that neural explanations do justice to what Vladimir Nabokov wrote about: "the miracle of consciousness is a sudden window that opens onto a sunny landscape in the midst of the darkness of nothingness."
In Illness as a Metaphor (1977), Susan Sontag wrote that “the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology is largely due to its sublimated spiritualism: a secular, seemingly scientific way of confirming the primacy of“spirit”over matter.” Freud was a staunch atheist who was downright irritated what he called “oceanic feeling.” But today, believing in the transformative role of introspection involves integrating with the concepts of identity that spiritual traditions refer to more often than modern science. And spirituality in all its mutating forms will not die for the same reason live and psychoanalysis.
Now it has become very fashionable to say that the overvalued “I” does not exist, and in its own way this idea is tantalizingly liberating - but living with this thought is damn hard. It seems to the brain that our perspective on the long journey from cradle to grave is of great importance - and that the kaleidoscope of experience constantly merges into one strange bright point, which is still hung with the outdated label "soul." Friedrich Nietzsche believed that we had not yet come to real atheism and had just put humanity on a religious pedestal. Can you blame us? Our main religion is human exceptionalism. If we really worship ourselves, then in a sense, the sublimation described by Sontag manifests itself as a kind of double bluff, in which matter is considered primary, but permeated with something else.
Neurobiology is a miracle of science. We need them, and we are delighted with them. I am also intellectually duplicitous, hungry for vitamin D and omega-3 acids. There is a certain charm in Freud's ideas, despite the fact that they are initially unfounded. I remember spending 10 minutes many years ago with an exhausted work as a family doctor, and he got rid of me by writing a prescription for Zoloft. Around the same time, I discovered the work of Albert Camus, which embraces the bittersweet grandeur of life, and felt as if the right hand of God was on my shoulder. I didn’t take Zoloft and found that there were enough new ways of perceiving the world, more than enough. The most significant discoveries of my inner world - Fyodor Dostoevsky, George Orwell, Buddhism, the Tool group - penetrated into my consciousness in the form of what I felt as a pure thought, thought,which I absorbed and projected onto reality as an actor, a being, a witness. I don’t know how this side of life can be put into a neurobiological framework, but I still feel that it’s worth trying.
M. Owen is a freelance journalist writing her PhD at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is also the managing editor of Misfit Press.