Psychodynamic Neurology

Dreams, Consciousness, and Virtual Reality

Allan Hobson

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780429585876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médecine
• Subtopic: Théorie, pratique et référence de la médecine

Psychodynamic Neurology: Dreams, Consciousness, and Virtual Realty presents a novel way of thinking about the value of dreaming, based in solid comprehension of scientific research on sleep and dreams, but with deep understanding of psychoanalytic and other interpretations of dreams.This book: Surveys the remarkable history of sleep research over th

chapter one

Historical background

The mind-brain schism of 1900

It is important to realize that psychiatry as we know it is really quite young. Its birthday can be reasonably dated to the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Sigmund Freud was frustrated by his attempts to create a dynamic psychology based upon what he knew of brain science and wisely abandoned his efforts to do so. That means that the integrative synthesis of psychiatry and neurology has been unresolved since 1900 or thereabouts and as yet no serious attempt has been made to bridge the gap between these two branches of medicine.

This book is a sketch of how an integration might proceed. By focusing on sleep and dreaming, psychodynamic neurology takes up where Freud left off but offers quite a different perspective from his. While I take 1900 to be an epochal point in effecting the split, I reach back to about 1850 and to Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) for more substantive support of the integrative effort. And my philosophical reach extends back further than that, to John Locke (1632–1704), to David Hume (1711–1776), and to Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).

The exponential growth of neuroscience, especially that which has occurred since 1950, has created an enormous increase in detailed knowledge of the brain but little of this vast compendium of information really helps us to understand the mind. No wonder that so little has been done to reunite the field of psychiatry with neurology. Why, then, should I be so excited about a reunion of these two fields? The answer is plain and simple: separation is achieved at the expense of the mutual enrichment, shared opportunity, and ultimate truth about one of the most important areas of human knowledge.

Following is an example of one of my own dreams that encapsulates many of the themes of this book.

Virtual reality dream—12/6/2011

I awakened at about 4 a.m. this morning with vivid recall of a most unusual dream. I think that my awareness actually preceded my awakening and yet I was not lucid. I did not say to myself “this is a dream.” Rather I was thoughtful and reflective which is not true of most of my dreams.

The dream took place in a vast amphitheatrical setting that I thought might be my farm in Vermont. There were lots of people present whom I did not know and many cars parked outside of the theater-like building which I assumed must be my barn. There must be a show going on inside, I reasoned. In fact, there were a large number of shows going on and it seemed to me that most of them were light shows of only faint interest and full of technical flaws. I looked in vain for my own exhibit (Dreamstage) but it was not there.

“These people will get the wrong idea,” I said to myself and carefully considered putting them straight. But I quickly realized that the audience was so distracted and so entertained that I had no chance of getting them to pay attention to me. “I will only be a nuisance,” I decided, and I will not be heard in this vast interior. So instead of trying to give a talk under these very unfavorable conditions, I decided that I would simply explore the locale.

The space was volumetric, cavernous, with 50-foot-high ceilings. The architecture was biomorphic if it was solid at all, rather more cloudlike, with projection screens here and there at the backs and apices of the spaces which seemed endlessly extensive. There was a low hum of chatter but no music (as in a proper light show) and no narrative voice associated with the flimsy displays.

“What these people need,” I thought, “is a good exposure to the science of virtual reality.” I imagined a sexy update of my Activation Input and Modulation (AIM) model showing that dreaming was an internally generated imaginative state that guaranteed virtual reality. I did not say “just like this dream.” But I did formally diagram how an infinitely varying virtual reality could be scientifically accounted for. Each of the displays in the show could be generated by the brain for its own private enjoyment as well as for the public.

My experience of this dream was rather demoralizing. How will I ever explain myself to anyone? Most people don’t really care and they will settle for very inferior entertainment. They don’t want to think. They just want to be left alone, to smoke, to drink, and to engage in endless chatter.

After I awakened I resolved to write the dream experience down in detail in order to gain further scientific insight.

Philosophical issues

A large part of the reason for the continued schismatic split between neurology and psychiatry is philosophical. Many brain scientists and rationalist philosophers are convinced that neurobiology will never be psychology and many psychologists share that philosophical conviction, albeit in reciprocal form: the mind will never be understood in terms of the brain. I have responded to this problem by fashioning a dual aspect monism that is comfortable while looking at dreams like the ones I report in this book. The main theme of my dream is the challenge of making my ideas clear to you.

Both groups of scientific critics are correct, the mind and the brain are two different levels of discourse. They are not interchangeable and neither level of discourse can stand alone because each is really only a different way of looking at a single reality, the unified brain-mind. The two domains should not be ranked, with either mind or brain placed above the other, but this often happens when any two groups of professionals compete with each other. Humility must replace hubris if we are to progress in an effort at integration.

The brain and the mind share an important unifying feature: virtual reality. By virtual reality I mean that both the brain and the mind are guided by predictive models of the world. The world is not in the head but a detailed blueprint of it is instantiated there. The sample dream just given illustrates this point. My farm, my interest in theatrical events, and my way of thinking about both are in my head.

The two levels of discourse should be studied together because mind and brain depend upon each other in such a close way as to guarantee mutual benefit from combined scrutiny. The mind knows what the brain is doing; in fact the mind is what the brain is doing. More direct and economical than any technical intervention, the mind is an easily obtained brain sign. I will shortly show that a science of subjectivity is not only possible but essential, and that it is our most direct and informative window on the brain.

From the philosophical point of view, the position that I consider most attractive is called dual aspect monism. I will define dual aspect monism in detail shortly and refer to it repeatedly throughout this book. In brief summary, dual aspect monism says that mind and brain form a unified system (which I call the brain-mind); hence, this view is monistic in its emphasis on unity. This unity has dual aspects, the psychological and the physical, the subjective and the objective; these dual aspects are mirrored in the difference between the first person (I, me) and the third person (he, she, or it). These dual aspects are what make the system so interesting and so powerful. No account of the system can be considered adequate unless it explains both aspects and accounts for the connection between them. The schism between psychiatry and neurology is the result of failure to recognize the opportunities of integration.

Dual aspect monism is not reductionistic. In enhancing this philosophical position, I am not attempting to replace psychological data with physiological data. On the contrary, I make a strong case for psychological data and only question the best way to collect and analyze such data. In my view, we must today focus on formal aspects of subjective experience, and expect to find an isomorphism, or similarity of form between psychology and physiology. The methodological strategy of bijective mapping accords validity to both levels of analysis and assumes that each will validate the other. In the case of the fantasy report that opened this book, I would predict that measureable aspects of my dreamlike conscious experience would correlate well with measureable aspects of my brain activity. I will make such correlations explicit throughout this book, beginning in Chapter 2. Beyond this methodological ploy is the philosophical conviction that mind and brain are not just correlated but linked by mutual causality: brain causes mind and mind causes brain.

The Freudian split

It is no accident that the neurology-psychiatry split was occasioned by the elaboration of a theory of dreams which its author, Sigmund Freud, claimed was purely psychological and in no way neurological. Besides being impossible, this claim is also untrue. I will make clear below why it is untrue. Its impossibility derives from the unity of the system. The split is unwise because we can learn a lot about the brain by studying the mind. Freud apparently did not appreciate that any scientifically proper study of the mind was simultaneously a study of the brain.

The failure to take advantage of this scientific fact is due to the lack of recognition of the scientifically appropriate ways of studying the mind. At our present state of sophistication about brain function, mental status formalism is the best that we can do. This will disappoint many psychologists and clinicians because they are understandably more interested in biographical descriptions. History taking is important, but histories can be misleading in the formulation of scientific approaches to the brain-mind. History taking is not a science, and it never will be a science because many of the details of past dynamics cannot ever be recovered. Psychoanalysis shows just how dangerous speculation about history can be. It is dangerous because, absent third-party evidence, the imaginative power of the mind allows speculation to run amok. This unfortunate propensity prompted Helmholtz and his confrères to enunciate their famous pact against vitalism.

For philosophical reasons, too, the brain-mind cannot really be split into two parts if those parts are separate aspects of a single entity. Even Descartes’ unfortunate philosophical theory of dualism recognized that mind and brain had to be perfectly synchronized watches, hence essentially nondissociable. Dual aspect monism allows you to believe in God if you want to, but you do not have to do so in order to investigate the brain-mind system, and what you learn about the brain-mind will not help you with your theological quest.

This book takes up the Project for a Scientific Psychology exactly where Freud left off in 1895 when he turned his attention to the genesis, nature, and meaning of dreaming as if it had no necessary relationship to the brain. Of course Freud knew that dreaming must, somehow, be a brain function but he denied, disingenuously, that his disguise-censorship dream theory owed anything to neurology. Even psychoanalysts recognize that Freud had actually translated his antique and erroneous neurology into a psychological appearing dream theory. (Hobson & McCarley, 1977; McCarley & Hobson, 1977)

Modern sleep science

The modern science of sleep and dreams will be discussed in detail throughout this book. For now, it is important to recognize that we possess extensive information about the brain side of the story (precisely the part that Freud needed to avoid the errors of speculation, which he so brilliantly evinced). Some of that science is basic neurobiology, but the cellular and molecular details can only make sense in the context of our interest in psychology. Because modern psychology has so little resonance with Freud’s speculations, we are forced to admit that more than a century of psychoanalysis has yielded almost nothing that deserves to be scientifically preserved. I will try to be fair in distinguishing between the baby and the bath water when substantiating this very harsh critical judgment. In what follows, I will credit ego psychology, especially its conflict-free contentions, and I will credit the creative borrowings from ethology.

Psychoanalysis may have its satisfied customers and it certainly has held the interest of its very literate practitioners, most of whom, like Freud himself, were refugees from science. Freud was avowedly more interested in science than in therapy. But the science he practiced was not empirical-experimental. It was theoretical. I call his exclusive focus on theory “speculative philosophy.” The literature on Freudian theory is vast, and I do not pretend to have done it justice nor do I intend to do so. Instead, I try to distill the essence of the theory of dreams and criticize it in the light of subsequent science.

In essence, I find no support whatsoever for Freud’s disguise-censorship postulate that I consider to be the heart of his dream theory. I review the extensive evidence for the activation-synthesis model, which I put forward with Robert McCarley in 1977. Although activation-synthesis has since provoked vigorous debate, no psychoanalyst has either defended disguise-censorship or, more importantly, admitted its defects and concluded, as I do, that Freudian dream theory is essentially wrong.

In this book, I repeat this conclusion and go on to apply an equally radical critique to other aspects of Freud’s theory (e.g., the Freudian theories of neurosis, defense, and the tripartite model of the mind). In answering my skepticism, it is hardly relevant that I am not a sophisticated scholar of Freud’s philosophy. If I am wrong about Freud’s basic claims, I am open to correction.

A case in point concerns the position of Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull. While admitting, somewhat grudgingly and sotto voce, that Freud was wrong about disguise-censorship, these two self-styled neurobiological revisionists go on to attempt to save the theory by defending, for example, the guardian of sleep function that Freud advanced. I ask, what is to guard if the essence of dreaming is not disguise-censorship? I regret that psychoanalytic scholars, who ascribe to science, rarely admit that the master often got it wrong. One reason for this obsessional defense of Freud is that his theory was so tightly integrated and rationalized that if one part goes, the rest is also in danger. The fact that psychoanalysis was so commercially successful shored it up for almost a century.

Psychodynamics

A problem related to the philosophical difficulties that now beset this field is the deeply institutionalized isolation of what is legitimately called psychodynamic. It has come to refer to psychological processes that have no known neurological basis. It may be true that some psychological processes, like having trouble with one’s boss, or one’s lover, or one’s parent, are legitimately explored and understood at the historical level only. But when this entirely legitimate and valuable approach is tied to an obsolete dream theory and a flawed theory of development, it is weakened by the recourse to pseudoscience in relation to its wish for scientific status. This was Freud’s greatest error. He thought he was doing science when he was clearly not. Did he do experiments? No. Did he use the control concept? No. Did he ever consider falsifiability? No. Did he consider alternative hypotheses? No. No amount of academic scholarship can mitigate these fatal flaws in his self-description. He was a very clever man, but he was only speculating. He was an amateur philosopher, and not a very good one, as professional philosophers such as Adolf Grunbaum have so trenchantly pointed out.

Let me begin my own psychodynamic story by assuring the reader that I do not think that dreams are meaningless or that physiology alone is adequate to understand dreaming. Rather I declare that any meaning attributed to dreams must not be incompatible, inconsistent, or incommensurate with physiology. In my book, 13 Dreams Freud Never Had, I have celebrated the patent meaningfulness of my own dreams and shown how most of that meaning can now be explained without loss of real psychodynamic import. For me, physiology serves only to emphasize the importance of dreaming and to underline its role in the understanding of emotion.

Freud’s work unquestionably overthrew the rationalistic denial of feeling. I applaud this advance as much as I regret what I consider to be an essentially wrong-headed view of dream meaning in relation to emotion. For me, and contrary to Freud, dream form, dream emotion, and dream content reveal rather than conceal the meanings of subjective experience.

Beyond that, I feel strongly that brain physiology will help us not only to explain dream meaning, as we now construe it, but also suggest heretofore unimaginable meanings of dreams and dreaming including how the brain develops its perceptual and motor skills. I will try to show how dreaming helps illustrate not just the unconscious but also consciousness. A good example is the creative function of physiology and the psychology linked to it. Dreaming can tell us a lot about how the brain-mind prepares for tomorrow as well as how it reacts to what has happened yesterday and in the more distant past. In both temporal directions, the brain elaborates and invents novel configurations of innate and experiential data. The brain-mind creates a virtual reality model of the...