Remembering to Forget; or, Take a Pill, Lose a Memory, Gain Bliss

Psychoanalysis irks because it insists on the independence mind from brain but not from the rest of the body.  Hunger?  Important.  Pain?  Important.  Humping?  Important.    The consolidation of short term memory and reconsolidation of long term memories by synapse-strengthening proteins?  Not so much. 

Following Freud, psychoanalysis amounts to folk wisdom about the mind's bodily perceptions.  Declarations about protean Desire and its pernicious and/or salutary influence on the mind abound.  When I read a psychoanalytically-inflected argument I constantly ask myself "What?"  I know what the words mean but they lack reference.  "Desire"?  What is "Desire"?  I sense endless elaborations of an invisible entity and unfalsifiable logic and think about Gertrude Stein.  No there there indeed.

When I think about the possibility that psychoanalysis may be dangerous blood rushes to my face and I spit in indignation.  I will "for example" that statement in a moment.  First I present the shortest primer about how the brain stores memories ever written:

1. an electric pulse causes an axon to release neurotransmitters
2. neurotransmitters bind to receptors on adjacent dendrite [thanks Jonathan E.] causing the synapse to "fire"
3. if those axons fire a lot over a short period of time a short-term memory is created
4. the more often they fire the easier it is for them to fire
5. synapse-strengthening proteins arrive to make it easier still and a long-term memory is created

The transition from short-term to long-term memory is called consolidation.  Many things can mess it up.  In the 1960s Bernard Agranoff trained goldfish to swim to one side of the tank when a light switched on.  When he tested the control group three days later they all remembered what to do.  When he tested a group he had injected with a drug that blocked protein synthesis three days later they behaved like any fish would when a light switched on: like a fish.  The protein synthesis inhibitor prevented the consolidation of short-term into long-term memory. 

A psychoanalyst would claim the fish were repressing the memory of Dr. Agranoff's training.  He would investigate the reasons for the repression.  ("My parents?  Sorry.  'Parents.'  Milt and run.  Says it all.  The fuckers.  Figuratively speaking.")  He would not consider that Dr. Agranoff had introduced a protein synthesis inhibitor into their systems and that said inhibitor prevented the memories from consolidating in the first place. 

In 1994 researchers at UCI demonstrated that the same thing could be done to humans.  They administered medication which hinders the brain's ability to convert short- into long-term memory to victims of car accidents.  Three months later, the patients given the placebo still had the recurring nightmares and existential horror associated with post-traumatic stress disorder.  The patients given the medication still remembered the accident, but only foggily and without the emotional immediacy that terrorized the control group.  Are the patients in the test group repressing the event?  The psychoanalyst would say . . . well you know what he would say and what he would say it about: the mind.  The real culprit is the brain. 

Now think about reconsolidation.  Reconsolidation occurs when long-term memories are further strengthened by repeated rememberings.  (Hence the vicious circle of PTSD: every time their memories terrorize them again they become better able to terrorize them in the future.)  Researchers are trying to determine whether inhibitors like those discussed above work long after the event, that is, whether a pill taken before you remember something will help you forget it as you remember it.  Unconsolidation instead of reconsolidation.  Instead of altering the associative quality of certain memories, as psychoanalysis does, this treatment would strip the memories of their emotional valences and terrifying immediacy.  Put a former tunnel rat in 'Nam on this medication and his tortured flashbacks may dissipate in strength every time they recur.  Perhaps a few years will restore some normalcy to his life.

I'm not a doctor.  I don't know.  Part of what infuriates me about academic psychoanalysts is that they also aren't doctors.  They claim understanding of powers of mind which clearly lie in brain but they don't know from brain. 

Thus endeth the rant. 

Abruptly.

Comments

[Jonathan]

I've mentioned this to you several times now, but psychoanalysis and neuroscience are not mutually exclusive.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I'm pretty sure I indicate as much in the post. The entire section about how the talking cure could work with a little neuroscientific juicing. Of course, that would pretty much empty psychoanalysis of all but "the talking cure" aspect of it, since under normal circumstances reconsolidation invigorates the synaptic connection . . . but the course of previous conversations has followed a far different path from this one, in that before we were discussing whether such a thing as "the unconscious" exists and what-not. This is more focused on how theoretical psychoanalysis, i.e. what pops up in literary and critical theory, focuses on the mind to the exclusion of the brain.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Also, as I've replied you the several times you've now linked to that site, it strikes me as a rear-guard defense of a dying analytic. Each issue contains a couple of boilerplate "Revival of X Psychoanalytic Concept" articles, and I find it difficult to take such work seriously. To wit:

Revival of the Death Instinct: A View from Contemporary Biology

Affect, thought and consciousness: The Freudian theory of psychic structuring from an evolutionary perspective

Inhibition and Phineas Gage: Repression and Sigmund Freud

Freud’s Theory of Mind and Functional Imaging Experiments

A Psychoanalytic View of Memory in the Light of Recent Cognitive and Neuroscience Research

I see the same impulse here that I see when people try to force the Book of Genesis to jive with evolutionary theory. "We have these fixed ideas which have been thoroughly discredited, but we don't want to lose all our respectability, so we'll compromise by grafting our bullshit onto your science." In short, you can link to that journal as much as you like, but I have a hard time taking it seriously. (I'd have quoted the articles, but I can't get to them from Houston without setting up a proxy and I don't feel like doing that right now.)

[Jonathan Ehrich]

You should really change the word "axon" in #2 to "dendrite." Not be, say, incredibly nitpicky or anything, but what you're describing is clearly an axo-dendritic synapse rather than an axo-axonic synapse.

[Jonathan]

I admire dismissing things you haven't read and don't know anything about because they might upset your received notions. It's a good intellectual habit, and I'd wish there were more of it in the field. (I mean this.) Even so, there is more to psychoanalysis as a research program than is encompassed in Crews and Lacanian literary theory. I remember being incovenienced by this fact as well when I first learned of it, but there it is.

[Richard]

I guess having been a "victim" of psychoanalysis over 40 years ago, I shouldn't be someone who'd defend it, but of course back then, damn few people knew from brain. And so I went to a psychoanalyst to be treated for what we would now call panic disorder. It was no help in that, but it was an interesting process, more of an art form than anything else. There is a reason why the Nobel folks considered giving Freud the prize for literature in 1936.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jonathan: "I admire dismissing things you haven't read and don't know anything about [...] Even so, there is more to psychoanalysis as a research program [...]"

To justify such a statement, Jonathan must have far greater qualifications than Scott for judging the state of psychoanalysis as a research program. Let's see, education ... well, maybe no qualifications there. Published papers? Nope. Casual reading? Who knows? I've seen both quote snippets of little bits of papers. Hmm, I guess maybe the differences aren't so great after all. Perhaps they're nonexistent.

[Jonathan]

Your logic would be bad if you didn't ignore the "things you haven't read" part, Rich, but I'm not surprised to see you use it, as you once wrote over two thousand words (I'm guessing--maybe it was more like two hundred) of blog-comments about an Eagleton book you hadn't read--the majority of those words detailing in pedantic and irrational fury why it wasn't necessary for you to read something before judging it. A bravura performance--and one, as I mentioned, I wish to see more of.

I do have a point here. I don't have a strong opinion about psychoanalysis because I know enough about it to know that there are many unanswered questions. There are researchers with undisputed scientific credentials (Mark Solms, for instance, who I've heard lecture about this) who think that there are some areas of convergence between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. There are many others who don't or, more precisely, who aren't interested in the question. But assuming those who do have to be motivated by a religious-like impulse or perhaps malignity or otherwise unexplainable ignorance rather than intellectual curiosity is unwarranted and not the sort of judgment you'd be likely to pass otherwise.

[MT]

I don't see how synapses lend any insight into literature or our life narrative. There's a huge gap between Freud and cellular neurobio, not to mention between language and cellular neurobio. Heck, neuroscientists can't even explain vision yet.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jonathan, you claimed that Scott was dismissing things he hadn't read and didn't know anything about. Do you really know how much he has read? Perhaps you could accurately summarize Scott's reading and level of knowledge.

Assuming that what you mean is that no one with Scott's expertise should make such strong dismissive statements no matter how much he has read, I'll say that your intervention in such cases is highly selective. Oddly enough, you only seem to appear when people make these dismissive statements about certain subjects. It's a highly one-way strategy. For instance, you say that Scott is "assuming those who do have to be motivated by a religious-like impulse or perhaps malignity or otherwise unexplainable ignorance", but he wrote nothing of the sort. He wrote that he was infuriated because "They claim understanding of powers of mind which clearly lie in brain but they don't know from brain" -- in other words, that they really should know that they don't have the knowledge to make these claims, but they do anyway. The same exact thing that you bring up with respect to Scott, expect that Scott is a grad student writing on a blog, and the people he's criticizing are -- well, you get the idea.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I admire dismissing things you haven't read and don't know anything about because they might upset your received notions. It's a good intellectual habit, and I'd wish there were more of it in the field. (I mean this.) Even so, there is more to psychoanalysis as a research program than is encompassed in Crews and Lacanian literary theory. I remember being incovenienced by this fact as well when I first learned of it, but there it is.

Because I didn't link to the articles this time you assume I haven't read them? I've read a number of articles in the very journal you linked to the last fifteen times you've condescended to link to it . . . because why? I characterized my problem with the content of those articles. Rear-guard action. Appending pre-scientific theorizing to scientific data in order to reauthorize the pre-scientific arcana that psychoanalysts have invested so much time and money to learn. Grafting psychoanalytic models to data which, as MT noted, are too complex for current neuroscientists to understand. You do see how backwards that is, don't you? To attempt to make scientific data fit the contours of the pre-scientific theory?

That bothers me not only because it's unscientific but because it's intellectually dishonest. If I read scientific literature already knowing the conclusions I want to draw from it I will cherry-pick the data. What flatters my assumptions will be included, what doesn't will be refuted or, more likely, ignored; refutation, after all, requires acknowledging inconvenient facts and that can be troublesome.

But assuming those who do have to be motivated by a religious-like impulse or perhaps malignity or otherwise unexplainable ignorance rather than intellectual curiosity is unwarranted and not the sort of judgment you'd be likely to pass otherwise.

Ah yes, it's mere "intellectual curiosity" when prominent psychoanalytic thinkers try to bolster the reputation of their profession by seeing whether it unintentionally and accidentally corresponds to data streaming from the cognitive sciences . . . which, of course, is based on scientific principles and methods, unlike psychoanalysis, and which has a culture cachet, also unlike psychoanalysis. You don't think that a wee intellectually dishonest? You can call that "intellectual curiousity," but if you do, I have some ID proponents in desperate need of academics like you to validate their "intellectual curiousity."

MT, I don't think cognitive science can tell us much about literature; my point is that I don't think psychoanalysis as currently practiced by academics can either. Don't misunderstand me: Freud was a masterful thinker and often a brilliant reader of literature. But what he intuited his contemporary disciples rigorously apply.

Jonathan E., you've succesfully identified Reason #18 not to post after spending all days in airline terminals. Thanks for catching that.

Richard, the idea of psychoanalysis as an artform, or criticism for that matter, is largely its appeal. I believe many scholars think that were there a Nobel Prize for Smart, Zizek would be the first winner.

[Jonathan]

It's difficult for me to keep track of your major and minor interventions, Scott--the extent and significance of which you're very careful not to exaggerate--and I'm also getting older and starting to repeat myself.

The second paragraph of your comment, however, makes some characterizations about the motives of a diverse group of researchers ("rear-guard action") which reflect near-maximal cynicism on their part and invokes a "pre-scientific" model of progress, one which you earlier compared to creationism. Your evidence for this is, as far as I can tell, vague gestures in the direction of an apparently decisive argument or analysis that I unfortunately don't remember.

Many of the folks involved in neuropsychoanalysis are not "prominent psychoanalysts" but ordinary psychologists and neuroscientists who have some interest in the aforementioned convergences and intersections. Your suggestion that they already know what results would only make sense if the field were an exercise in Freudian apologetics rather than an area of normal inquiry. You have presented no reason to think that this was the case that I can see, outside of some fashionable, B&W-style attitudinizing.

Rich, again, I had read Crews's polemics when they appeared and was quite convinced by them and his sources. I then studied psychoanalytic psychology and literary criticism with Norm Holland, read more deeply in the literature and secondary sources, and became convinced that the situation was more complex than I thought earlier. I don't think that someone who had read the literature I pointed to earlier would then make the same claims that Scott does, or at least I don't think his stated reasons would be why. I would love for Scott to point me to where he makes his careful reasoned case about the entire body of neuropsychoanalytic thought and why it's just a vulgar exercise in Freudian apologetics, or at least reiterate it here, in lieu of the blanket condemnations offered so far.

Also, Rich, are you suggesting that Mark Solms doesn't know anything about the brain? It's, again, quite exciting how you're able to construct arguments completely independent of any existing fact about the world, apparently know that you're doing so, and not care. I find this of considerable theoretical interest. Everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth, etc.

[Adam Roberts]

I hesitate to poke my nose in here, but it seems to me that the comments thread is getting off the point. Attacking Scott's 'expertise' is surely irrelevant. One of the beauties of science as a discourse is that its theories don't depend upon expertise as such: you can spend as much time as you like accumulating knowledge, reading scientific papers, filing facts away in mental rolodexes, that's all all well and good. But you don't necessarily need to know everything there is to know in order to present data that falsifies a theory. And falsification is what's at issue here, isn't it? A scientist has a duty to to present falsifiable theses. That's all. In other words it's not a question of what Scott hasn't read; it's about whether what he has read falsifies Freud.

Now I'd call myself, by and large, sympathetc to much of Freud; mostly on the ground that Richard mentions, his almost Shakesperian literary imagination. But many aspects of his big theory have been, effectively, falsified by subsquent work in the field. He worked largely intuitively, after all (I know he gathered data from many patients, but in a very compromised way). It's not surprising that many of his insights don't stand up to more rigorous investigation.

But having said that, I'm less convinced by the argument presented here, Scott. I very much take the force of the brain chemistry model. The brain, yes, is biological chemistry and electronics. But pointing out that inhibiting the chemical processes that help create long term memories will tend to, er, prevent long term memories being created: that isn't a pop at the theory of repression in and of itself. You might as well argue that somebody who had had a chunk of brain surgically excised, thereby losing that function, is not 'repressing' that function ... of course they're not. But Freud isn't concerned with those sorts physical interventions. He's interested in otherwise healthy brain organs that malfunction (as manifested by neuroses); he's concerned with ... to use a very precarious analogy indeed ... software rather than hardware problems.

Is the argument that repression, in a Freudian sense, just doesn't happen in the brain? I've certainly had the experience of forgetting something, 'not thinking about' something for perhaps a long time, and that thing later asserting itself in a dream, or under some stress, in ways that is very psychologically significant, affecting, upsetting. 'Repression' seems to me a Freudian shorthand for 'memory goes away somewhere but isn't destroyed,, because, look, it comes back.' What are the inner protocols that govern that sort of psychic process? What propels those sorts of upheavals? Why do neurotic symptoms tend to have the relationship they have to certain trauma? And so on.

The specific question: to what extent do the undoubted features of brain chemistry to which you advert falsify Freud's various writings on this subject? What about dreams? physical neuroses? slips of the tongue? Laughter? How, exactly, does the brain chemistry falsify Freud's statements about those things?

(I'm also a trifle wary of caricaturing him as saying 'all neuroses stem from that special cuddle that mom and dad like doing so much.' There really is more to the chap than that.)

[Adam Roberts]

[Adam's not insane. I fixed those open italics. - The Management]

You, see, evidence right there! the way my comments goes into italics two thirds of the way through ... clearly my subconscious was influencing my typing. Those itaclics, they remind of the posture my parents adopted during a primal scene trauma ...

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I'm also getting older and starting to repeat myself.

You're not required to respond, Jonathan. You feel compelled to, I understand, but you could save your youth for what you think more worthwhile pursuits. I admire that kind of intellectual isolationism. It's a good intellectual habit, and I'd wish there were more of it in the field. (I mean this.)

Your evidence for this is, as far as I can tell, vague gestures in the direction of an apparently decisive argument or analysis that I unfortunately don't remember.

That and the titles of articles I read (but can't link to from here) in the journal you obviously consider important. Very vague of me.

I then studied psychoanalytic psychology and literary criticism with Norm Holland, read more deeply in the literature and secondary sources, and became convinced that the situation was more complex than I thought earlier. I don't think that someone who had read the literature I pointed to earlier would then make the same claims that Scott does, or at least I don't think his stated reasons would be why.

We've discussed the Holland before, and I'm not inclined to take his argument about "psychoanalysis as science" any more seriously now than I did then. I still think it unconvincing. I find the correspondences with which he attempts to bolster psychoanalytic claims strained and marginal. Now, I can't link to the articles I read in Your Favorite Link, but I remember Loftus' rebuttal (in that issue or elsewhere) being damning.* Loftus' work on the dynamics of memory have been altogether damning of psychoanalytic models of mind; the examples I presented above also indicate that some of the basic tenets of psychoanalysis do not correspond to recent research in the cognitive science. What is psychoanalysis without repression? How else to account for the creation of the unconscious? What is psychoanalysis without the unconscious? I find these criticisms fairly damning. The alternative theory, one which I've acknowledged time and again as having some truth, is that psychoanalysis creates the conditions it describes. If one believes the brain works as a psychoanalytic model indicates it would, one's made a self-fulfilling prophecy. But self-fulfilling prophecies aren't generally predictive; they're only valuable in a very limited number of cases.

Now, this may all stem from the fact that I'm reluctant to keep up with the "cutting-edge" work in psychoanalysis (at least not since 2000 or 2001). If that's the case, so be it. I don't keep up with with cutting-edge creationism or ID work either, but I'm more than happy to condemn it too. Why do I insist on that comparison? Because I share as many assumptions with psychoanalytic critics as I do fundamentalist christians; the arguments they make, even about legitimate scientific inquiry, are fruit of a poison tree . . . and my life's not likely to be much longer than yours is, but I'm not inclined to shorten it by eating poison fruit.

*I could mention here that were this renaissance as prominent as you claim, you'd have more links to throw at me.

[N. Pepperell]

On the original point about current research into memory formation vs. psychoanalytic concepts of repression: I've also been concerned, as the research begins to suggest that, at least in some contexts, people fare better when they can forget, that we may be inappropriately promoting talk therapies to people who have been through traumatic events, when the therapy itself may contribute to consolidating traumatic memories and, in effect, rendering an experience traumatic...

It's a complex issue, as I do understand that many people experience psychoanalysis and similar therapies as liberating. The question is whether this sense of liberation derives from the mechanisms posited in the therapeutic tradition, or whether other mechanisms account for any successful outcomes: it may, for example, be liberating simply to organise one's experiences into a coherent narrative - regardless of whether the narrative is completely accurate, in scientific terms; it may ease suffering to communicate over an extended period with an attentive therapist, regardless of whether the therapist's theoretical understanding of the situation is accurate, etc.

Freud, from memory, regarded psychoanalytic technique as a stop-gap measure, until the science caught up and more conventional medical techniques were available - and continuously testing the validity of any techniques against the best available research is important for any intellectual tradition.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

RE: verifiability

Exactly what I wanted to say, only cogent.

But pointing out that inhibiting the chemical processes that help create long term memories will tend to, er, prevent long term memories being created: that isn't a pop at the theory of repression in and of itself.

Not to the theory of repression, no, but to the mechanism. If ingesting certain proteins decreases the impact of certain traumatic events, then there's less memory to be repressed; the less memory there is to be repressed, the less impactive the repressed memory will be when it inevitably returns. (Yes, I played fast and loose with count in that sentence. But for a reason. Once I start to think of memories as biochemical and bioelectrical networks, the thought that they are something one "possesses" strikes me as unutterably odd. How can I possess a network which only exists in the moment I activate and/or take possession of it? I can possess brain but not, as Damasio would have it, the illusion of mind . . . but common speech assumes we do possess the illusion of mind, i.e. our memories.)

I also think it debatable whether Freud thought he was dealing with healthy brains, or if he even thought such a thing existed. Late Freud certainly didn't. And I share your respect for Freud as a reader. I've written extensively on Totem and Taboo, Civilization and Its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism, and Ego and Id; and I'll write more about him as my dissertation drifts forward from the 1900s to the '10s and '20s. But my respect for him as a reader of literature and as a thinker doesn't extend to him as a scientist. One of the reasons I find Ego and Id so interesting is his flirtation with scientific models turns into a waltz with science as pure metaphor.

(I'm also a trifle wary of caricaturing him as saying 'all neuroses stem from that special cuddle that mom and dad like doing so much.' There really is more to the chap than that.)

As do I. That's why I put it in the mouth of an ichthyo-analysand complaining that his species milts-and-runs. As I said above, I think Freud himself interesting and necessary to any serious study of 20th century American literature after 1914 . . . but I don't think that interest and/or necessity extends to the veracity of his theories so much as the brilliance of his readings and their importance to American literary culture.

[Adam Roberts]

Adam's not insane. It's kind of you to say so, Herr Doktor. I'll pick up my bill on the way out, shall I?

I don't think that interest and/or necessity extends to the veracity of his theories so much as the brilliance of his readings and their importance to American literary culture. And European literary culture too of course. But maybe the impact depends on the fact that a large number of people saw veracity in the readings as well as brilliance. Not that a large number of people are necessarily right, of course. (ID attracts hundreds of thousands of followers, for instance. Of course, Scientology represents many hundreds of thousands of people too, and they think all Freud is poisonous junk).

A comparison: seems to me that Newton on gravity, Newton on optics, is right, and brilliant; but Newton on alchemy, Newton on theism and Newton on social justice is wrong and indeed Wrong. But it would be hard to pick on wrong Newton and thereby accuse him of not being a scientist. Or of lacking scientific veracity in the round.

Freud ... yes, penis envy (eg) clearly wrong. But there is veracity in the observation that people do many things for reasons which (whatever post-facto explanations they come up with themselves) are actually hidden from them. There would be something more than just literary criticism involved in [a notional and alas rather obvious case here] getting a violent homophobe to understand that the reason he hates gay men with such ferocity is connected with a desire for men that he himself has ... if you'll forgive me, Scott ... repressed. How does Freud's ignorance of, or indifference to, the actual mechanisms of brain chemistry invalidate the veracity of that sort of analysis?

That Newton, you know, he was gay. But would he admit it to himself? Oo no.

[Adam Roberts]

PS:
I also think it debatable whether Freud thought he was dealing with healthy brains, or if he even thought such a thing existed. Late Freud certainly didn't. I mean physically healthy brains; not stroke victims or people who have had metal spikes blasted through their crania in quarry accidents; just ordinary middle-class Viennese. Of course, Freud and esp. late Freud doubted the idea that there were any healthy psyches. Civilisation and its discontents and all that.

[Jonathan]

Adam, there is a difference between attacking someone's "expertise," particularly arguments that rely on credentials, and suggesting that there is relevant literature that someone doesn't seem to have been exposed to. The latter was my point.

Now, Scott claims that he has in fact read all of this and found it wanting and that his citation of article titles verifies this fact to the satisfaction of all but the most mulish. He finds the Holland article unconvincing because its claims are strained and marginal. Why? Because of Loftus' work on recovered memory, work which features prominently in Crews's polemics?

Drew Westen's article, which is cited by Holland in the article Scott links to above, is, though seven years out of date, a remarkably detailed overview of what has been confirmed, disconfirmed, and is still open in Freudian psychoanalytic thought by neurology and cognitive science.

This is the URL, which will only work if you subscribe, I think:

http://content.apa.org/journals/bul/124/3/333.html

As an overview, here are the first two paragraphs for the "Neurological evidence for unconscious emotional responses":

Some of the best documented early examples of unconscious affective processes came from the study of Milner's famous patient, H. M. (Milner, Corkin, & Teuber, 1968). Because of hippocampal damage, H. M. lost the capacity to consolidate new explicit declarative memories. However, he continued to demonstrate the capacity for affective learning despite his deficits in explicit memory. For example, following a visit to his mother in the hospital, H. M. could remember nothing of the visit but “expressed a vague idea that something might have happened to his mother” (Milner et al., 1968 , p. 216). Johnson, Kim, and Risse (1985) reported similar findings with patients suffering from Korsakoff's disorder, who showed a preference for melodies they had heard five minutes earlier (reflecting the mere exposure effect, the tendency to prefer familiar stimuli; Zajonc, 1968) despite their impaired recognition memory for the melodies. Patients with Korsakoff's also had difficulty recalling information presented to them about two fictional characters but preferred the one who had been associated a week earlier with positive attributes. This suggests that the neural circuitry for affective associative learning is distinct from that for conscious declarative memory.

Other research with neurologically impaired patients points in the same direction. Patients with bilateral hippocampal lesions, who have difficulty with explicit memory, can develop conditioned emotional responses to aversive stimuli even though they cannot consciously learn the connection between the conditioned stimulus and an aversive unconditioned stimulus. In contrast, patients with an intact hippocampus but bilateral lesions to the amygdala show deficits in emotional conditioning even though they are conscious of the link between the conditioned and unconditioned stimulus (Bechara et al., 1995). In other words, explicit memory in these patients is intact, but implicit affective learning is impaired. These data are consistent with LeDoux's (1989, 1995) finding of two neural pathways for emotion: one, implicated in conditioned emotional responses, in which primitive perceptual information is relayed via the thalamus to the amygdala (which attaches an affective valence to the information) without any involvement of consciousness, and the other, in which the thalamus relays information to the cortex, which processes the information more deeply before activating the amygdala.

The mechanisms of repression and memory in human cognition are subject to more complex processes than those of goldfish. Their umwelten differ in a few ways.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jonathan: "I don't think that someone who had read the literature I pointed to earlier would then make the same claims that Scott does"

There you have it: you are the model of all reasonable thought. If Scott disagrees with you, it must be because he hasn't read the material.

"Also, Rich, are you suggesting that Mark Solms doesn't know anything about the brain?"

I would think that reading comprehension would be one of those things that English professors don't have much trouble with. Oh well.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

And European literary culture too of course.

My knowledge of European literary culture after 1940 isn't what it should be. (What I have is limited largely to what we Americans call "hoity-toity foreign films" and thus not entirely applicable to literary culture.) Better safe than admit egregious ignorance, is my motto.

A comparison: seems to me that Newton on gravity, Newton on optics, is right, and brilliant; but Newton on alchemy, Newton on theism and Newton on social justice is wrong and indeed Wrong. But it would be hard to pick on wrong Newton and thereby accuse him of not being a scientist. Or of lacking scientific veracity in the round.

My problem with much contemporary academic psychoanalysis is that they use Newton on gravity and optics to bolster his claims about alchemy, theism and social justice. "See how he brilliant he was on gravity and optics!" they proclaim. "If we apply research in chemistry, theology and philosophical ethics, we'll see that his work on alchemy, theism and social justice is also sound!" The scholar Jonathan worked with, Norman Holland, seems to be the of the sounder sort:

In the future, I hope psychoanalytic literary critics will draw on the rich insights of cognitive science. But in that future, I hope even more that psychoanalytic literary critics will offer their readers both instruction and delight. No more pathography, no more id-analysis, no more symbol-mongering, no more jargon. I hope instead that psychoanalytic critics will keep open a royal road into the human possibilities offered by great literature.

But for Jonathan to pretend this is the mainstream response to psychoanalytic criticism is dishonest. He repeatedly links to the same journal as if doing so will make me ignore the rise of heavily psychoanalytically-inflected fields like trauma theory, postcolonial feminism, &c.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Now, Scott claims that he has in fact read all of this and found it wanting and that his citation of article titles verifies this fact to the satisfaction of all but the most mulish.

In what world have I claimed to have read everything written on psychoanalysis. I remember quite recently saying something to the effect that I haven't kept up with it since 2001 . . . and that in 2001 I had read enough to make an informed decision about psychoanalysis. I need not read everything ever written about it to make an informed decision, now do I? What more do I need to read?

. . . there is relevant literature that someone doesn't seem to have been exposed to.at

By which you mean: material like the material you've linked to, I've read and in which I found little of substance and nothing that would overturn the informed decision I once made. Is that the literature you think exposure to would fundamentally alter the informed decision I came to after wrestling with psychoanalytic theory for three years?

Because of Loftus' work on recovered memory, work which features prominently in Crews's polemics?

Guilt by association much? I've seen Loftus speak once or twice time a quarter when she's around since I've been at UCI. She doesn't discuss psychoanalysis per se but contemporary analytic situations. But I suppose since Crews cites her, she must be a polemicist and a terrible person to boot.

The mechanisms of repression and memory in human cognition are subject to more complex processes than those of goldfish.

Because clearly I'm equating experiments on goldfish in the '60s with contemporary cognitive science. Clearly.

These data are consistent with LeDoux's (1989, 1995) finding of two neural pathways for emotion: one, implicated in conditioned emotional responses, in which primitive perceptual information is relayed via the thalamus to the amygdala (which attaches an affective valence to the information) without any involvement of consciousness, and the other, in which the thalamus relays information to the cortex, which processes the information more deeply before activating the amygdala.

Multiple processes at work in the brain at the same time? They must conform to a psychoanalytic model. What else is there?

Then you excerpt an article which (from what I can tell) attempts to bootstrap psychoanalytic concepts into legitimacy via and still you wonder why I can't take such work seriously? Jonathan, how does the existence of cortical and subcortical pathways bolster psychoanalytic claims to truth? Yes, the thalmus transmits information to the amygdala in about 12 milliseconds, LeDoux's "low road," whereas it takes between 30 and 40 milliseconds to for the thalmus to relay information to the cortex, or "high road." These two systems coexist in the brain and demonstrate that some processes are indeed subconscious. But how that make them "unconscious" in the manner psychoanalysts would have it? You may as well say that since the brain stem controls our heart beat and breathing that it is an "unconscious" process and that psychoanalytic theory has thus been vindicated. I don't buy it any more than my caricature of it. (And it's not much of a caricature.) At best it's a weak correspondence between a sophisticated psychoanalytic model and a simple brain function, one in which the simplicity of the latter bolsters a series of unrelated but articulated claims in the former.

Plus, if that example bolsters claims to the existence of the unconscious, then the umwelten of goldfish doesn't differ in any substantial way from ours.

[Jonathan]

One source of disagreement that Scott and I have about psychoanalysis is that I've been exposed to literature that goes beyond what Crews's well-known polemics (which are very rhetorically effective and aim to extirpate all facets of psychoanalysis completely from contemporary intellectual life as far as I can tell) cover. A good deal of the cutting edge of it is published in Neuro-psychoanalysis, but there are other sources, Westen's article being prominent among them. As far as I can tell, Scott's objections differ not at all from Crews's. He also claims to have read the aforementioned literature and found it wanting. Why, I don't understand. I certainly don't think that a reasonable person could review it and not remain skeptical, but I think that claims about their motivations being wholly derived from the Freudian apolgetic impulse are difficult to maintain. Westen's article begins by decrying the psychoanalytic industry's religious-like impulses. The fact that these exist, however, is independent of the current empirical status of Freud's theoretical ideas.

Rich's second point might be addressed to his "they don't know from brain" quotation.

Lacanian-inflected psychoanalytic literary and cultural criticism and its intellectual rigorousness was never what was at issue here, remember. Rather, it was, ahem, eliminative rhetoric about psychoanalysis as a whole, which has persisted.

"All of this" refers to the literature published and cited in NPSA, Holland's article, inter alia, only that and nothing more. I know that you've found it all of little substance, but I don't think you have reasonable grounds for making that claim. At least not that I've read here. I mention Loftus's prominence in Crews to highlight how indistinguishable your position about this is from his.

Westen's article is worth reading if you have an interest in the actual issues at stake, which are complicated and not well understood, one reason why I think that maintaining an open mind about them and thus recognizing the limitations of your present knowledge is important. He assesses the evidence for unconscious mental processes (overwhelming) and then discusses the more contested idea of affective responses to them. The literature about motivational and affective forces and unconscious processing is extensive. How these processes are consistent and inconsistent with evolving psychoanalytic formulations is not a settled question. If you think so, you are unaware of relevant information. I think that your distaste for the aforementioned trauma theory/Lacanian psychoanalytic criticism leads you to make overly broad claims about the utter corruption of all vestiges of (vile, filthy) psychoanalytic thought.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Jonathan: "Rich's second point might be addressed to his "they don't know from brain" quotation."

My quotation of Scott.

Which is what you responded to with:
"Also, Rich, are you suggesting that Mark Solms doesn't know anything about the brain? It's, again, quite exciting how you're able to construct arguments completely independent of any existing fact about the world, apparently know that you're doing so, and not care. I find this of considerable theoretical interest."

Perhaps you find it of interest because of some kind of reading disability? Because I wrote nothing about Mark Solms, and expressed no opinion about psychoanalysis. I merely pointed out that you are reading all sorts of statements of motivation into Scott's posts that he did not in fact write. This in addition to your presumption of his relative ignorance in comparison to you, which as I suspected proved to be ill-founded.

[Jonathan]

Hi, Rich,

"They" originally stood for "academic psychoanalysts." That class is different than Scott imagined, in several respects. Your confusion on this part is the only explanation I can see for why your comment makes sense within your distinctive frame of reference.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I repeat: because you think that "that class is different than Scott imagined", you saw fit to write a paragraph scolding me for putative, unsupported opinions about Mark Solms which I never held. I brought up his closing statement as an example of one of the actual motives for his attack that Scott listed, as opposed to your tendentious mischaracterizations of his reasons.

[Jonathan]

It's not so much that I think that, Rich, as is that it's true. The class of people who publish in NPSA include people who are interested in psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts; and they all "know brain" in the sense here meant.

I wasn't scolding you. I just want you to redirect your formidable blog-commenting to something more productive than futile, context-less tu-quoque hunting. For the children.

[Rich Puchalsky]

I don't think that you understand what a tu quoque is, Jonathan -- you can't do a tu quoque by agreeing that a certain form of argument is valid while pointing out how badly it is being used in one case. But let's pass on. I suggest that you write up your usual points on these matters as a couple of paragraphs on a Web site somewhere; then whenever Scott posts on this again, you could merely post the link as a comment. That would save a lot of time, wouldn't it?

[Adam Roberts]

Your desire to 'save time' is clearly symptomatic Rich. Were you subject to 'time abuse' as a child, perhaps? Or perhaps you're repressing your taboo urge to waste time, repressing it so fiercely that it returns in this fashion ...

On an entirely unrelated topic, and as a relative newcomer to these electronic and virtual shores, I'm trying to work out why some of Scott's posts go more-or-less unremarked and some generate vast quantities of comment-thread logorrhoea, often of a distinctly tetchy sort. There doesn't seem to be a common factor. (To the posts, I mean. The comment-thread stuff is usually much easier to pigeonhole)

[Jonathan]

Hyperbole's to blame, probably. It's a disease of the medium.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

I'll answer these comments backwards:

Jonathan and Adam, I don't think hyperbole's to blame so much as the fact that I'm presenting arguments with claims and premises with which one can disagree. Most academics eschew fundamental disagreement in both real and virtual spaces unless they have attained status enough to not need to worry about it. No one will take issue with the posts I consider more "performance" than argument because they can 1) see what I'm up to and 2) they either like it or they don't. If they don't but have enjoyed previous performances, they're reluctant to inform me out of civility. But when I present an argument, say, about the relative value of psychoanalytic insight or the consistency of voice in Gene Wolfe's prose, I've made a statement which they feel free to agree and/or disagree with because they know I'm not offended by argument. (Condescending or cryptic-cute arguments, maybe, but not not argument itself.) One of the reasons I find Walter Benn Michaels so refreshing is that he presents strong arguments, invites dissent and contention, whereas most people in academia have a "you do what you do so long as I can do the same" attitude. That's necessary in a humanistic field, but when those contradictions exist in the same scholars' and/or scholarly tradition's body of work, that's a different story.

He also claims to have read the aforementioned literature and found it wanting. Why, I don't understand. I certainly don't think that a reasonable person could review it and not remain skeptical, but I think that claims about their motivations being wholly derived from the Freudian apolgetic impulse are difficult to maintain. Westen's article begins by decrying the psychoanalytic industry's religious-like impulses. The fact that these exist, however, is independent of the current empirical status of Freud's theoretical ideas.

I explained why I found the specific examplar you cited lacking. When I sifted through NA, I found many similar examples of over-generalization, of psychoanalytic scholars mapping relatively straight-forward neural processes onto elaborate, sophisticated psychoanalytic paradigms . . . or perhaps the alternative is the case, perhaps they were saying that these simple brain functions pointed to the accuracy of some psychoanalytic entities, like the unconscious, in which case they've stripped articulate psychoanalytic concepts of all but their most colloquial senses. If the psychoanalysis has reached the point where any subcortical process belongs to the unconscious, then it doesn't deserve the name "psychoanalysis" because it is wholly divorced from its roots. The fact that many issues of NA contain articles in which Freudian concepts are tested against recent research in the cognitive sciences leads me to doubt that.

And I consider that a highly reasonable position to take.

Westen's article is worth reading if you have an interest in the actual issues at stake, which are complicated and not well understood, one reason why I think that maintaining an open mind about them and thus recognizing the limitations of your present knowledge is important.

This, on the same hand, is also a highly reasonable position to take. If presented with compelling evidence that some psychoanalytic concepts have currency, then I'm more than happy to alter my opinion. What you've presented to this point--the Holland article on "Psychoanalysis as Science" and NA--haven't convinced me to do so. I see too many logical leaps, self-interested justifications, metaphorical applications of cognitive processes to psychoanalytic metaphors and/or processes, &c. I haven't been presented with such evidence to date. The evidence you've been convinced by fails to convince me (for the reasons listed here and above).

The literature about motivational and affective forces and unconscious processing is extensive. How these processes are consistent and inconsistent with evolving psychoanalytic formulations is not a settled question.

This, however, strikes me as an unscientific position to begin with. Why should theories about mental processes formulated before the advent of technology capable of verifying it correspond to the biochemical and -electrical date accumulated since? (On this note: We've glossed over N. Pepperell's excellent point about Freud's opinion of the status of his own work.) Inference, yes, I understand; and mind vs. brain, yes. But I've already accepted the latter as a possibility on numerous occasions; as for the former, well, I'm not sure how that correspondence would work even if it turned out correct. If affective response X works as psychoanalysis predicted, the question should be "Why?" Is it cultural? Is it universal? (I, for one, doubt the universality of most affective responses, this despite my otherwise perhaps overly sympathetic position on evolutionary psychology . . . which, while often wildly unsound, at least strives for scientific verification.) How did a body of thought sparked by upper-middle class white women of a crumbling empire become universal (in the scientific sense of globally describing local phenomenon)?

[Rich Puchalsky]

Adam: "I'm trying to work out why some of Scott's posts go more-or-less unremarked and some generate vast quantities of comment-thread logorrhoea"

Surely one common factor has to be how Jonathan and I tend to irritate each other. It's clearly a matter of style more than content; it's not like there are that many American union-supporting, Stanislaw-Lem-ouevre-reading, ID-opposing etc. people out there. But in more general terms, I'm not really surprised when Scott posts about something as contentious as a rejection of psychoanalysis and gets a long comment thread.

[Adam Roberts]

Most academics eschew fundamental disagreement in both real and virtual spaces unless they have attained status enough to not need to worry about it. This is v. interesting and, I think, right. Might even go further: when I was a young bug in academia, a decade and half ago, I probably was cautious about disagreeing too vehemently or in too braying a voice with my more senior colleagues, out of a sense of the precariousness of my position. Now I'm a full-fledged Professor (which as you know means something different in the UK to what it means in the States) I'm cautious about disagreeing in too braying a voice for fear of in effect bullying younger colleagues, browbeating them, being rude when they're in too insecure a position to be rude back. So it's a general paralysis of the argumentative capacity, which we call 'politeness'.

My first week at Cambridge, starting my PhD, having been educated at a State school and taken a first degree in anglophobe Scotland, a posh fellow was showing us about and paused in the dining hall. 'College servants,' he said sagely, for the benefit of those who weren't U enough to know. 'Don't be rude to 'em. They're not allowed to be rude back, you know.'

I've slipped into reminiscence mode, ach. I'll pull myself out of it by considering the mixed metaphor in my first paragraph: a braying donkey who becomes fully fledged. Some kind of pegasus donkey. Perhaps Herr Doktor F. can help explain my strange dream here?

[Jonathan]

Here's one thing: the paragraph with the link to your previous comment (and that previous comment) lacks particulars. You mention a series of flaws in reasoning and argument of those articles, but there are no supporting examples. I know that you probably don't have ready access to it now, but I don't remember you ever providing any of the aforementioned evidence showing why and how the articles in NPSA have those deficiencies. Same thing with "logical leaps," etc. (Though I do remember more specific claims in the Valve thread where the Holland article was discussed.) It seems to me then to be mostly performance, and I think that the caricatures of Freud and pscyhoanalysis are too widespread among those with intellectual interests and want to those interested and susceptible parties who read your blog here to know that there's more to it than you're letting on or necessarily aware of.

The question about technology required for verification recalls an example I think you're pretty familiar with involving Darwin and the Modern Synthesis.

Also, on the "falsifiability" question, it's worth noting that Grünbaum, one of the fiercest and most sophisticated philsophical critics of psychoanalysis, has argued that the Popperian critique is "anachronistic" in an article in Philosophy of Science.

[old]

I haven't read through all the responses, but I don't think your description of psychoanalysis is at all fair. Freud, for one, thought that eventually the 'the talking cure' would go hand in hand or even be almost totally replaced by meds (I for one have problems with both). Perhaps there are some b level academic psychoanalytic types who would respond almost exactly as you suggest, but Freud certainly wouldn't, and I don't think folks like Zizek would either. But, hey, you really kicked the shit out of that scarecrow!