forgottenboy's version of my feelings about Gladwell's Blink sounds overly sanguine to these ears. Wilson's Strangers to Ourselves may lack the narrative drive of Gladwell's books, but it is a far better introduction to the field. His narrative may stutter through the disciplinary history case-study-by-case-study, but even a shot transmission can push the needle above 55 on occasion. But I want to talk argument, not ornament. Wilson cites the articles being summarized or criticized, and his assessments are responsible and generous. Perhaps too generous. So far, I've found Wilson to be a serial under-exaggerator (even in reference to his own work) who steps delicately to avoid tripping any bullshit detectors. Still, he compels readers to connect the dots he lines up. (In Blink, those debates are obscured by the litany of experts he interviews, none of whom think it's a bad idea to present radical positions as if they were the disciplinary norm.)
The most salient and alluring undotted line suggests, forcefully if not persuasively, that a person can acquire a Freudian or Lacanian unconscious by sheer force of belief. Not an actual one, mind you, since it would still reside "above" the adaptive unconscious; and not a truly "unconscious" unconscious, since it would be the product of conscious deliberation; but it could be there.
In chapter four, he delves into the research into constitution of "personality," and presents the consensus opinion that people's conscious beliefs and unconscious behavior are at odds. He cites numerous studies which demonstrate, for example, that when a person and all her friends are asked to rate her on character traits like "conscientiousness" and "temper," there is almost no correlation between the person's self-evaluation and her friends' evaluations; however, there's a significant correlation, damn near a consensus, among her friends. What this speaks to, Wilson argues, is the fact that the adaptive unconscious manifests its "personality" more forcefully in social situations, in moments when reactions are instant, or almost so, and thus rely not on conscious deliberation but on the unconscious modules. Their contours are clearly visible to everyone except the person who must infer the disposition of implicit processes they can only access indirectly. We can't control those processes despite the fact that they constitute the bulk of our personality. We are what we do, not how we rationalize it. (On its face, this is a familiar model. Keep in mind, however, that the processes involved work in no way like their psychoanalytic counterparts. No family romance and all it entails.)
How does Wilson know this? Like anyone interested in human cognition, he studies people with unique and/or extensive brain damage. He cites the Gazzaniga and LeDoux's famous study of the lobotomized patient whose right hemisphere (controlling the left side of his body) is flashed a picture of a snow scene on it and asked to pick the card which corresponds to it: a shovel, a can opener, a screwdriver and a saw. With his left hand he picks the shovel every time; with his left-hemisphere controlled right hand, he did no better than chance. Then they flashed different pictures at the same time:
[I]n one trial they flashed the snow scene to [the patient's] right hemisphere and a picture of a chicken claw to his left hemisphere. Hepicked the card with a shovel with his left hand (because that was the one most related to the snow scene seen by his right hemisphere) and a card with a chicken with his right hand (because that was most related to the chicken claw seen by his left hemisphere.
The researchers then asked [the patient] why had picked the cards he did. Like most people, [the patient's] speech center was in his left hemisphere, which knew why he had picked the chicken with his right hand (because he had seen the chicken claw) but had no idea why he had picked the shovel with his left hand (because the snow scene was viewed only by the right hemisphere). No problem; the left hemipshere quickly made up an answer: "I saw a claw and picked a chicken, and you have to clean out the chicken shed with a shovel. (96)
A basic example of "mind-blindness," I know, but a powerful indication of what the deliberative consciousness constantly does; namely, it confabulates rational—typically narrative—explanations when confronted with any situation. It acts as if it possesses all the facts, understands all the motives, and produces an plausible explanation. The superficial resemblance to psychoanalytic theory reappears, but in this case, the distinction is definitive: there is no repression involved, no psychic defense mechanism at work here; the conscious mind is merely as ignorant of these unconscious modules as the distribution of liver enzymes. Our tiny, perhaps even epiphenomenal, conscious mind lies because that is all it knows how to do.
I prefer the modified "executive model" of consciousness. In the unmodified version, the legislative and judicial branches and the executive staffers work for—albeit not at the behest of—the President. He issues directives, sets "the course" which everyone else follows. Wilson, himself following Owen Flanagan, thinks the consciousness-as-President model grants it too much power; he prefers what Flanagan calls the consciousness-as-Reagan model, because
Reagan was the entertaining and eloquent spokesperson for a cadre of smart and hardworking powers (actually layers of power), some known to outsiders, and some unknown. This is not to deny that Reagan felt as if he were in charge in his role as "The Great Communicator" ... The point is that one can feel presidential, and indeed be presidential, but still be less in control than it seems from either the inside or outside. (7)
Obviously, the narratives we use to rationalize our behavior are interdependent with the processes they obscure. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves can alter our disposition to our environment and our reactions to it. Short of a neurological event, we are more plastic than the interminable cure would have us believe; we are so plastic, in fact, that we can create a working model a Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian, Zizekian &c. "unconscious" where none previously existed. We can alter our social situation such that we relate to people as our preferred psychoanalytic model predicts, which forces the adaptive unconscious to behave in accordance with the altered social environment. We can slip a conscious psychoanalytic "unconscious" between our Inner Reagan and actual unconscious.
What this means for the study of literature is that the already strong argument in favor of teasing psychoanalytic models from works authored by writers of the psychoanalytic persuasion contains more explanatory power than I initially apportioned it. Even better—or worse, if you've taken a hardline anti-psychoanalytic stance like some people I am—to the extent that psychoanalysis is literary theory, the superstructural relations it identifies are, if they appear with the frequency with which scholars claim, of extreme, perhaps central, importance. There's a catch:
Advocacy criticism is fundamentally, perhaps fatally, flawed. Any theory which considers fundamental a psychoanalytic account of human cognition finds itself with a literary trope in the place their theory of mind resided. They have unwittingly confused a highly sophisticated, literary manifestation of deliberate thought for the basic workings of the human mind. The mind is not a work of art, and cannot be treated as such. I will track this line of thought further tomorrow, but I think you can see the general direction I'm headed.
[Off Topic] I was thinking about that study you linked to about a week ago on the approximation of learning and narcotics. Is the comparison underdetermined? That is -- we could say that we seek knowledge because it gives us a fix -- but could we equally say that we want our "fix" because it approximates the state of knowing (a Platonic spin)? That is, that inebriation aims at truth? I'm thinking of Seneca, sure, but also of the beginning of Aristotle's Metaphysics (on why we value sight).
Posted by: Alex Leibowitz | Sunday, 16 July 2006 at 10:37 AM
Also -- if one can acquire a "Freudian" unconscious through an act of belief, can one also acquire such an "unconscious" through social conditioning?
Posted by: Alex Leibowitz | Sunday, 16 July 2006 at 10:41 AM
Indeed (now that I've fully read your post) I once had a dream during which I for some reason managed to realize that, as I experienced each individual part, the "pieces" of the narrative in fact were random and had no relation to each other at all, but when I arrived at the end of the dream, I had manufactured a narrative that "fit" them all together and made it seem that one was seamlessly related to the next, even though characters and often situations were completely changed (right down to my own identity in the dream).
Posted by: Alex Leibowitz | Sunday, 16 July 2006 at 12:33 PM
This seems to me both beautifully put and (you should pardon the expression) true. Thank you (and f.b., notably) for tracking this line from a not-so-promising departure point into such genuinely involving territory.
I'm still too scattered around the landscape to contribute much more than readerly gratitude, but you or someone else might enjoy this bit by Joel Isaac in the newest Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society:
Posted by: Ray Davis | Sunday, 16 July 2006 at 05:03 PM
This is a fascinating and convincing post, Scott, and I don't want to be the dog in your manger. But ... reading what you say about Gazzaniga and LeDoux's famous study, the shovel/claw thing, chimed Freudian bells in my mind. Which is to say, there is a real reason why he picks up the picture of the shovel, it's just that he's not aware of what that reason is, and tells himself a story to cover his inner ignorance. Isn't that the point of the model of the subconscious? I'm happy to agree with you that Freud was wrong in lots of ways, and the notion that the subconscious is some unitary concrete bunker at the bottom of the mind is clealy wrong (Daniel Dannet's model of a gappy, threaded-together mind made up of lots of bits of mental process is surely closer to the truth). But Gazzaniga and LeDoux's extreme case seems to me to work according to the same logic as, I don't know: patient A who hates gays, and when questioned explains that this is because what gay men get up to revolts him and is unnatural; when in fact his homophobia is actually a manifestation of a strong desire on his part to have sex with other men, a desire he cannot acknowledge, and his fascination and disgust are facets of the same drive. Apologies for the clunking obviousness of this made-up example, but you see what I mean.
Freudianism, in a nutshell, seems to me to consist of saying: Ok, here's your narrative ('I picked up the picture of the shovel because you need a shovel to clear out the chicken coop'); this is interesting, but not as interesting as the real reason you picked up the picture of the shovel.
Posted by: Adam Roberts | Monday, 17 July 2006 at 11:46 AM
[I added this commenter's initials because I couldn't tell whether he wanted to comment anonymously or merely filled in the wrong blank.]
Re: "I'm happy to agree with you that Freud was wrong in lots of ways, and the notion that the subconscious is some unitary concrete bunker at the bottom of the mind is clealy wrong (Daniel Dannet's model of a gappy, threaded-together mind made up of lots of bits of mental process is surely closer to the truth)."
For my money there's no more truth to be found in either a Dannetian or Freudian model.
Both are shaped by what Foucault's calls the episteme and Kuhm the paradigm.
These days we're inclined to view everything as fragmented, whereas back then perceiving objects as unitary was more normal.
But both theory's are more like metaphors rather than actual descriptions of any "reality" (I'm really sorry for sullying this blog with a 'reality' thingy btw).
Posted by: B.C. | Monday, 17 July 2006 at 12:24 PM
Adam, you find a similarity between an element of Freudianism and the shovel/claw experiment. Well, that's to be expected. Remember my example of the four elements theory? Physicists describe four states of matter that people are likely to run in to: solid, liquid, gaseous, and plasma. Someone could say, aha, those sound like fancy names for earth, water, air, and fire. Maybe those alchemists were on to something. Well, they were, in the sense that there is a body of observation that does not change when theories change. That doesn't mean that the four elements theory is correct, however.
A gifted observer could detect that people sometimes seem to make up reasons for doing things without knowing that they're doing it. A psychologist could design tests that detect this. Assuming that these tests detect an actual effect, not an observer effect, the effect will still be there when theories change. So it doesn't validate Freudian theory that we still see this. It does mean that some parts of Freudian theory might survive as a handy shorthand, much as people use Newton's laws in cases where relativistic effects aren't important.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Monday, 17 July 2006 at 12:58 PM
I do take your point, Rich. I suppose it depends on what we want to invoke when we talk about 'Freudian theory'. Not the old fashioned belt-and-braces, cigars-and-purses, That-Which-Is-Enunciated-in-the-Collected-Works totality of Freud, sure; but something that might be salvagable ...?
Take another example. It's legitimate to ask a literary question like: 'why does Hamlet gets so very angry with his mother during the closet scene (the one where he stabs Polonius)?' We have the reasons he gives us, which have to do with his outraged sense of universal virtue and the betrayal of his father's memory. Maybe they seem sufficient to you to explain his anger, but they don't really to me. So what else is going on? Say he wants, but can't admit to himself that he wants, to shag his mother. It's a plausible reading of the scene, and explains a great deal about the imagery and discursive structure of it, and of the play as a whole. Now my question is: how do we theorise a reading like that? 'Freud' is a shorthand for one way of doing that; what other ways are there? It's a genuine question.
Posted by: Adam Roberts | Monday, 17 July 2006 at 02:18 PM
It's hard to use Shakespeare as an example, because the work is such a model that it might have created the effect that we're trying to observe. But there are really a number of questions you're asking here at once.
To shorten their number, let's assume that the scene feels right to us not because it's Shakespeare, and not because of some other reading, but because something like an Oedipus complex really does exist in human psychology, and therefore we have all to some extent observed it. Well, I can think of any number of evolutionary or biological just-so stories that would explain something like it without involving any of Freud's reasons for it. If actual scientific evidence for one of them were found, there would be an interpretive theory that says nearly the same thing, but with a different supporting structure. In that case people would stop using the shorthand word "Freud" and start using the name of whoever came up with the more advanced theory. That's what I mean by bringing up the four elements theory -- no one would now say that everything is made of fire, air, earth, and water, but you still expect to encounter solids, liquids, and gases, and see fire.
On the other hand, Freud could have been wrong. Perhaps the reason why Hamlet's reasons seemed OK to someone of Shakespeare's time and don't seem sufficent to you is that the betrayal of a father's memory was taken more seriously in Shakespeare's time, and the scene still survives for a contemporary audience because it's Shakespeare, so people have a motive for finding a contemporary reason (i.e. Freud) that motivates it. In that case, the interpretation will drop out.
Or perhaps "Freud" will simply become a term of art for literary interpretation even as it falls out of use everywhere else. I don't know enough about the history of how methods of literary interpretation have changed to guess at how likely that is.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Monday, 17 July 2006 at 03:56 PM
Ray, that quotation? Exactly.
Adam, Rich answers as I would, but I want to add:
Psychoanalytic criticism assumes 1) the text has a functioning unconscious or 2) the characters in the text do or 3) that the text afford access to the author's unconscious. Now, if we can dismiss psychoanalysis as a theory of cognition, as a way of explaining human behavior, we can't have #2 and #3 running around. The question I'm drawn to is whether we can still have #1. That is, does psychoanalysis belong to a tradition of literary criticism such that it has explanatory power outside its scientific pretensions? The answer, I think, is "yes."
I think we can have a model of how literature works that doesn't rely on an homology with how the human mind works. Too often we conflate the two. What we see on the page is the product of the human mind, therefore it must acquire and produce meaning just as the mind does. I don't think that's true anymore. When we talk about what it means, we're talking about a sequence of textual events which our minds must process; but the events are in the text, independent of mind (even if they need one to activate them). We can talk about the features of the text and the way they relate to each other in terms we can't use to talk about the brain. The obverse of what I said above applies:
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Monday, 17 July 2006 at 05:44 PM
Oh, and B.C., I'm not sure what you mean up there, or even if you mean to mean it.
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Monday, 17 July 2006 at 05:45 PM
Every once in a while someone pops out a Nietszche from somewhere, so perhaps the analogy can help (should I be surprised or not that Holbo didn't weigh in on this one?). Let's say we've agreed that Freud presents a shaky foundation, scientifically speaking. Obviously, claiming that all is Will to Power is not provable scientifically either. And anyone using this as a basis for his/her ideas in a literary paper will (I hope) get laughed out. So what is the positive side of Freud (and/or Nietszche) in literary criticism?
Well, as far as I can see, literary studies, as opposed to actual science, have this characteristic: we judge the veracity of (most) claims by appeals to common sense. That is, while science can afford to distance itself from common-sense views about reality, literary studies cannot. The 'empirical testing' pertaining to lit. crit. is very different (in spite of all attempts to conflate the two, and in spite of similiarities) from that of science. And psychoanalysis is not an exact science (I don't think anyone will disagree here). So the only thing it can provide is intuitions - the same sort of intuitions to be got from any non-scientific source (literary, theoretical or otherwise) regarding human behaviour. For example, someone who has read in Nietszche probably has some suspicions, ideas, etc. regarding the motives behind certain ways of human conduct. These suspicions may sometimes aid him/her in describing what goes on in, say, Hamlet. But whatever analysis will result from that is dependent, at the bottom line, on common sense to say "sounds reasonable" or "bosh". And overly-technical language, when used by something which isn't an exact science (that is- something from which I only expect intuitions), will incline me to say "bosh". Not that it will always be that way- but I think that's the general tendency, unless I've involved myself emotionally with the fate of that same technical language.
Sorry if this is garbled, unclear or badly formulated. (This is my first attempt at blog-commenting)
Posted by: Uri Segal | Tuesday, 18 July 2006 at 05:27 AM
Oh, I meant it alright.
Again, I’m responding to this quote btw: “Freud was wrong in lots of ways, and the notion that the subconscious is some unitary concrete bunker at the bottom of the mind is clearly wrong (Daniel Dannet's model of a gappy, threaded-together mind made up of lots of bits of mental process is surely closer to the truth).”
What I’m suggesting is that theories of the subconscious (Dennet's, Lacan's, Freud's) are expressed in terms of the background radiation of the era in which they are formulated. Because of this it’s impossible for them to be right or wrong in the usual sense.
I suspect this is why theories of the subconscious are unusually susceptible to turning into transparently nonsensical mush once they are observed at a remove of, say, 20 years.
In the early 21st century I think we are inclined to perceive objects as fragmented (or “gappy and threaded together”). In the late 19th/early 20th century I suspect people were more inclined to perceive objects as being something more like the way Marx described – i.e. in terms of base/superstructure.
Now do you know what I mean!?
Posted by: B.C. | Tuesday, 18 July 2006 at 08:02 AM
B.C. -- From where do we attain the perspective that the 20th century sees fragments and the 19th century wholes? Doesn't this too belong to our perspective?
[Insert something here about the "hermeneutic circle"]
Posted by: Alex Leibowitz | Tuesday, 18 July 2006 at 06:08 PM
Oh, Herman and his Neutic circle can go and take a running jump!
Posted by: Anonymous | Tuesday, 25 July 2006 at 05:38 AM
By which I mean, we attain the perspective by being at a certain remove from the gappy and unified theories.
Historical-objective paradigm.....
Ridiculous, I know.
Posted by: BC | Friday, 28 July 2006 at 09:16 AM