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

[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!