Between Mind and Brain

Models of the Mind and Models in the Mind

Ronald Britton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429911378
• Subtopic: Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology
• Index: Psychology

This book begins with an exploration of the relationship between mind and brain. It then examines various psychoanalytic models of the mind and moves to the task of the analyst to discover the unconscious models that shape his or her patients' picture of him/herself and others. The familiar models are mainly drawn from psychoanalytic practice but are supplemented from myths, religion, and literature. Developments in adjacent scientific fields such as quantum biology and new ideas about evolution are discussed that suggest cellular genetic modification can take place as a consequence of interaction with the outside world. This gives hope perhaps to the idea that not only the mind can learn from experience but also the brain.

CHAPTER ONE
Between mind and brain

To discuss the relationship between neuroscientific studies and psychoanalytic theories we need to understand what we mean by the three words of the title: mind, brain, and between. By “brain” I do not limit it to that part of the nervous system inside the skull but all its ramifications through the central nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, and its associated hormonal activities. I do however limit the term brain to the individual’s body; this boundary, however, does not apply to the mind, which I hope to show in this and the next chapter. We are so interactive we live subjectively in our relations with others both communicatively and imaginatively, attributing aspects of ourselves to others and introjecting aspects of them, and with our tribal affiliation ever present. With the aid of modern technology we can communicate at great distances, such now is the reach of our minds we can practise psychoanalysis by telephone or Skype continents apart from each other.

As a practising psychoanalyst my contribution to theories of the mind derives from exploring psychopathology, just as the contribution to neuroscience a neurologist makes is from clinical experience with neurological disorders and as physicians contribute to knowledge of physiology from its failings. So in order to show that I am not indulging in a semantic game or trying to give a philosophical account of the mind-body problem, but speaking of distinctions between clinical entities, let me refer to three cases from my own experience.

The symptomatic problem they had in common was not being able to turn left. The first Mr. A was a patient I met when I worked in neurology. He had a brain tumour in his parietal lobe and he suffered from “anosognosia”, which in his case meant he could not recognise the left side of his body as his own even though it was not paralysed or insensitive, nor could he register anything to his left, nor could he complete a map that included the left side of the country. So when he left his bed he could not turn to the left. The second case, Mr. B, was a psychotic patient I had as a psychiatrist. He could not turn left because it was wrong as opposed to right: left meant bad, right meant good. The third case was a psychoanalytic patient of mine, Ms. C, whom I would describe as neurotic. She took a long circuitous way to my consulting room in order to avoid turning left en route because it would put her “on the wrong foot” for her oncoming session.

The first case is of anosognosia, a well-recognised symptom resulting from brain damage in the parietal region; the disorder is at the level of perceptual integration of the body image. It similarly affected his visual field and all kinds of awareness on that side of his body. His reasoning, however, was intact, his relationship to himself and his life history was normal, and one could say that although he could not relate fully to the world perceptually and operationally he was psychologically sound. My second case, Mr. B, was very much otherwise. His avoidance of turning left was aversive: the left side of the world was a dangerous, bad place whereas the right side was good. His world was divided arbitrarily in this way between good and bad. This arbitrary splitting is characteristic when the ordinary primal split between good and bad based on good and bad experience has failed to be realised. The term “splitting” as used in psychoanalysis describes the division of attributes, values, and qualities into segregated parts that are treated as wholes, whether this is applied to objects or the self. There are neurological reports of traumatic or surgical severance of the connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain resulting in opposing behaviours. One such instance was described of someone getting dressed with one hand and undressed with the other. In this psychotic case, however, the division was not at the level of perception but of value and belief. Unlike Mr. A, the neurological case, Mr. B’s relationship to the world as a whole and to himself was disturbed. Non-professional observers would have no difficulty in describing him accurately as suffering from a mental disorder; they would only be speculating if they suggested he had a brain disorder.

The last of my three patients, Ms. C, was neither deprived of normal perception as was not Mr. A, nor did she have conscious delusional beliefs, as did Mr. B. She was avoidant in her behavior and she said she was just “superstitious”. The belief underlying her superstition was that leftness was wrong and that she should not approach her analyst from the wrong side but this belief was unconscious. So the gap in this case was between conscious and unconscious. In the first case we would talk of a brain disorder, in the second of a mental illness a psychosis, in the third of a neurosis.

This demonstrates that not only is there conscious mental life with physical brain processes underlying it, of which, like the physiological processes underlying our breathing, we are necessarily unaware, there are also “mental” processes of which we are also unconscious. By “mental” in this context I mean things which by their nature could be thought, felt, or imagined if given access to consciousness: there is, in other words, an “unconscious mind”. What we regard as mental life continues to exist when we are asleep, in the form of dreams, the analysis of which can give access to already existing unconscious thoughts. Such is the familiarity with dream thinking that an experienced analyst can develop that this “royal road” to the unconscious can become idealised, as if both our patients and we ourselves are more truthful as dreamers than our waking selves. Some psychoanalytic thinkers seem to believe this as if the waking conscious mind, with its connections to the perceived world through the external senses, is inferior. This sounds to me like William Blake when preaching his solipsistic, subjectivist religion rather than when as a poet he gives expression to his relationship to life, a distinction that is explored in Chapter Eleven.

Neuroscientific theories arise from study of the nervous system and psychoanalytic theories from study of the mind: if one accepts William James “neutral monistic” view, that “there is a common substance of which matter and mind are phenomenal modifications” (Ayer & O’Grady, 1992, p. 491), the two can form a theoretical axis with concepts of brain function at one end and those of mental function at the other. They could meet in the middle in some explicable way but as yet they do not. I think we can only hope to join them up by working in detail at one end or the other. Both need to take cognisance of what is happening at the other end but not to mix them up. It is not unusual for scientific studies to be divided like this: chemistry and subatomic physics would be an example, the one studying how molecules behave, the other studying the complex subatomic particles and forces described in quantum mechanics. Similarly, mechanical engineers in order to go about their business accept as absolutes exact measurements and properties of physical materials that we know from modern physics are not what they seem but are the resultant of subatomic, very different phenomena. The same can be applied to optics for example. We know that light, in the peculiar subatomic world revealed by quantum mechanics, consists of streams of particles moving in all directions, and functioning like waves, but at the level of the optics laboratory for all practical purposes it moves as if it consists of calculable wave frequencies in straight lines. Mechanisms may be seen by the use of an electron microscope that remain undisclosed at the practical level of the ordinary optical microscope, yet this latter may be all that is needed for many scientific uses. But further understanding of how things really work at the atomic level in the brain are likely to be subjected to nanotechnology and the mathematical principles of quantum mechanics applied to its findings in the future of neuroscience. A nanometre is one billionth of a metre in length and the technology that enables exploration at submolecular levels is part of the growing field of quantum biology.

It seems likely that the future understanding of fundamental neural processes will lie in this direction and in parallel with this biological enquiry will be the development of quantum computers. These are yet to be developed though conceived in principle, and will be based on direct quantum phenomena unlike the digital computers, which are based on encoding data into digital sequences. However, the quantum computing though based on natural phenomena will not seem natural as it is based on concepts such as super-positions and electron entanglement which are mathematically sound and attested in practice but run counter to common sense and are counter-intuitive.

So if the physical processes of the brain are better understood by quantum biology they will not seem natural and will differ more than now from the models we develop of the e-mind. They will be much closer to the mode of operation of living cells than the current digital computer systems, which only simulate brain function by transformation into digital codes; however, this will not bring our everyday, commonsense models of thinking into line with their neural counterparts described in quantum terms. This discrepancy between our natural belief systems and the mathematical models of quantum mechanics is further discussed in later chapters.

We may need, even in the fullness of time, to apply FPP (“for all practical purposes”) to our psychological approximations as compared with the nano-molecular findings of neuroscience. If, as seems likely, quantum biology reveals that the subatomic activities of the brain are governed by quantum coherence, these would be only understandable mathematically. We might have to say, FPP, the brain produces a mind but that our mainly mathematical understanding of how it does it may not mesh with our ways of thinking.

Like the linguists exploring the universal components of language, who say all language is based on physics but it’s the wrong physics, we might have to say that our models of the mind are based on physics but it’s the wrong physics.

Heisenberg, one of the great founders of quantum physics said:

“Physics in the twentieth century undermined not only Classical Newtonian Physics but also common sense.” He commented that, “The structure of space and time which had been defined by Newton as the basis of his mathematical description of nature … corresponded very closely to the use of the concepts space and time in daily life … Newton’s definitions could be considered as the precise mathematical formulations of these common concepts. We know now”, he said, “that this impression is created in daily life by the fact that the velocity of light is so very much higher than any other velocity occurring in our practical experience”.

(Heisenberg, 1962)

In this sense the “between” of my title may not simply be a time gap between our knowledge of mental activity and our knowledge of its counterpart in neural activity. The study of the “mind” might be a “between state” where FPP will always prevail, based on the one hand on subjective, conscious, and unconscious experience and on the other of the calculus of neural functions.

What do we mean by mind?

When we turn to the other word in my title, “mind”, we move into the language of personal and social life as it has evolved as our species has evolved. The words mind and mental, in Strachey’s English Standard Edition of Freud’s work, are a translation of his use of Psyche and psychisch—or Seele and seelisch—pretty well interchangeably. The word Geist, the usual German dictionary word for mind is not used. Psyche is Freud’s use of the Greek word, a choice he also celebrates in psychoanalysis which he abbreviates as ψα, and when he speaks of psychic reality. Seele could have been translated literally as soul, which has less religious overtones in German, but it has a history in metaphysics. Strachey maintains that Freud used Psyche and Seele interchangeably so he uses mind for both words in his English translation. It is never the less a reminder that Freud’s use of mind has soul as a precursor. The term soul did not drop out of English when it ceased to have a particular religious meaning. In the verse of the romantic writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century such as Wordsworth, “the soul” persists and is used by him interchangeably with “mind”, rather as Freud uses Psyche and Seele. For example in the ode on immortality:

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul’s immensity

(Wordsworth, 1807, p. 300)

These lines were addressed to Coleridge, whereas in a sonnet of the same period, it is “mind” that is the essential self:

The immortal Mind craves objects that endure:
These cleave to it; from these it cannot roam.

(1807, p. 287)

In another context, where he describes exactly what Melanie Klein would later describe as “memories in feelings” (1957, p. 180) Wordsworth says,

… when the soul
Remembering how she felt but what she felt
Remembering not—retains an obscure sense
Of possible sublimity.

(1850, p. 23)

Wordsworth like Klein and Winnicott sought the explanation of the numinous in early infantile experience “beyond the twilight of rememberable time” as he put it (ibid.). The thread that runs through all this is that mind is successor to the soul in our language and is regarded as transcending the machine-like body because it brings aesthetic value, emotion, and imagination to the table. Equating mind simply with brain would be regarded by aesthetic enthusiasts as soulless or souldestroying, reducing man’s highest artistic achievements to products of machines such as those to be found in Blake’s “dark, satanic mills”. There was a time when there was a ferment of disputation between those who espoused mechanism, who sought the explanation of everything in machine analogies, and those who espoused organism as derived from nature. The latter regarded themselves as saving humanist values from the machine, and like Coleridge warned against confusing mechanical regularity with organic form (McFarland, 1985). The heart could be regarded as a pump or as a metaphor for the source of love.

Freud began at the brain end of my imputed mind-brain axis, with mechanism in mind. His neuroscientific work led him into clinical neurology and as late as 1895 he wrote a sketch of a “Psychology for Neurologists” (1897) in neural terms. This he declared in the opening sentence was “to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical process as quantitatively determined state of specifically material particles” (ibid., p. 285). This is wholeheartedly of the Helmholtz school of physiology that espoused mechanism, that is, sought explanation by analogy with machines, in opposition to those who favoured the use of the term organism who sought explanation of human functioning by natural comparisons. Freud was a considerable neuroscientist and in his project of a “Psychology for Neurologists” he intended to give an account of psychology in terms of the nervous system as consisting of the newly discovered neurons. He had, independently of Waldyer, found them from his own researches about 1891. In the project he also proposed that a great deal of their function was controlled at what he called contact barriers by facilitation and resistance to the passage of nerve impulses from neuron to neuron. These we now call synapses and a great deal of research and pharmacy has focused on transmission at these synapses; and much psychiatric pharmacy is based on chemical neurotransmitters. It is interesting that Freud had put his finger on this as crucial. He specified two different types of neuron, ϕ and ψ, the former freely permeable, the latter impermeable and therefore continuously charged. This distinction runs through much of his later thinking in mental rather than neuroscientific terms as in primary process and secondary process thinking. Freud also tried to give a neuronic explanation for the ego (das Ich), literally “the I”, a term derived from Fichte, who was a post-Kantian philosopher certainly not of the mechanistic school. The problem Freud tried to solve in his neuronic scheme of charge, flow, and discharge was how to account for the constancy of the ego. He did so ingeniously with his theory of resistance at the contact barriers of ψ neurons. While still thinking and writing as a neurologist, writing on aphasia Freud used Hughlings Jackson’s description of the relation between the mental and the physiological as parallel, that the mental was a “dependent concomitant” (1891b, p. 207).

Somewhere between 1895 and 1900 Freud abandoned this neurological project and changed ends on the brain-mind axis. At his new starting point it was not neurons but ideas that were the atoms of his inquiry and information about them came from dreams, the psychopathology of everyday life, self-analysis, literature, mythology,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Between mind and brain
• CHAPTER TWO Does the mind matter?
• CHAPTER THREE Is there a system in the system Ucs.?
• CHAPTER FOUR Natural history of the mind
• CHAPTER FIVE Natural, unnatural, and supernatural beliefs
• CHAPTER SIX Models of the mind and models in the mind
• CHAPTER SEVEN Myths as models
• CHAPTER EIGHT The triangular model
• CHAPTER NINE Religious fanaticism and ideological genocide
• CHAPTER TEN The severance of links
• CHAPTER ELEVEN What made Frankenstein's creature into a monster?
• CHAPTER TWELVE The preacher, the poet, and the psychoanalyst
• CONCLUSION
• REFERENCES
• INDEX