Dreams, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis

Mind, Body, and the Question of Time

Keramat Movallali

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138858251
• eBook ISBN: 9781317512134
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Dreams, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis sets out to give a scientific consistency to the question of time and find out how time determines brain functioning. Neurological investigations into dreams and sleep since the mid-20th century have challenged our scientific conception of living beings. On this basis, Kéramat Movallali reviews the foundations of modern neurophysiology in the light of other trends in this field that have been neglected by the cognitive sciences, trends that seem to be increasingly confirmed by recent research.

The author begins by giving a historical view of fundamental questions such as the nature of the living being according to discoveries in ethology as well as in other research, especially that which is based on the theory of the reflex. It becomes clear in the process that these findings are consistent with the question of time as it has been considered in some major contemporary philosophies. This is then extended to the domain of dreams and sleep, as phenomena that are said to be elucidated by the question of time.

The question is then raised: can dreaming be considered as a drive? Based on the Freudian discovery of the unconscious and Lacan's teachings, Movallali seeks to provide a better understanding of the drives in general and dreams in particular. He explores neuroscience in terms of its development as well as its discoveries in the function of dreaming as an altered mode of consciousness. The challenge of confronting psychoanalysis with neuroscience forces us to go beyond their division and opposition. Psychoanalysis cannot overlook what has now become a worldwide scientific approach. Neuroscience, just like the cognitive sciences, will be further advanced by acknowledging the desiring dimension of humanity, which is at the very heart of its being as essentially related to the question of time. It is precisely this dimension that is at the core of psychoanalytic practice.

Dreams, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as neuroscientists, psychologists, ethologists, philosophers and advanced students studying across these fields.

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PART I

Body/mind

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1

WHAT IS THE LIVING?

The sciences say little about what distinguishes man from animals. Is this a historical error or a unique aptitude in the evolution of science to assimilate or identify the functioning of the human brain, albeit assigning a greater complexity to it, with that of animals? Such questions oblige us to turn towards the conception that we have of man today.

It is as a living being that man is apprehended by neuroscience. We owe this conception to the modern age which discarded the idea of man constituted by metaphysical thought. The question concerning the essence of life has nonetheless been left in the shadows. This is neither a matter of negligence nor of forgetting. Science sets out to study the mechanisms and the modes of functioning of living matter; it cannot answer a question that remains outside its purview. But this does not mean that science does not possess its own conception of it. Is life, insofar as it constitutes the entity called living, a modern conception that has come into the world since the advent of biology? Let us retrace briefly what may have paved the way for such an event.

“By life”, Aristotle (1952) writes in De Anima (On the Soul, II, 1), “we mean self-nutrition and growth (with its correlative decay).” In Aristotle, life tends to be identified with the soul. This gives rise to the etymological redundancy that is the animal soul, which separates the animated body from inanimate matter.

Aristotle establishes a difference between animal life (ζôέ), enjoyed by both the gods and men, (as well as animals) and the mode of human life (βιος), which encompasses the manner in which we accomplish our lives as common mortals. With the advent of science, the βιος was assimilated with life in the inclusive sense of the entity that refers to the ensemble of living beings. And so it acquired surreptitiously an eminently political meaning as an entity that could henceforth be treated en masse (see Foucault, 2004; and also Agamben, 1997).

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The doctrine of the “animal-machine” (Descartes) marked the beginning of a radical change in the seventeenth century. Around the same time, illness and health became the principal criteria concerning life, which then constituted an almost exclusively medical issue. It was Georg Ernst Stahl (1708), a Prussian doctor, who would argue that there was an intrinsic relationship between life and medicine (see Canguilhem, 2002, pp. 15–31). According to him the soul is the vital principle that resists corruption, decomposition, and death. Leaving the idea of the soul out of account, Bichat (1994), in his Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort, defined the conflict that opposes life and death.

We are still a long way from Freudian thought according to which the life drive tends intrinsically towards the death drive. Lamarck was the first to use the term biology, around the year 1800, in his book on hydrogeology (see Corsi, 2001). According to him, studies concerning living bodies should turn their attention to the simplest of organisms. This announced the immense progress that the biosciences would accomplish in the twentieth century in the domain of microscopic beings. This cellular conception would henceforth govern research contributions in the biological domain. Lamarck held that heat, the first act of life, determined the material soul of living bodies. With Cuvier we witnessed the birth of the constancy principle to which Freud was to refer in his drive theory. Life and death stand in a complementary relationship in the service of the principle of constancy. The latter guarantees, according to Cuvier, the incessant metamorphosis to which living bodies are subjected. Cuvier’s vitalism introduced in a decisive manner the notion of vital forces. His conception of life was defended still more rigorously by Claude Bernard (1865) in his Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine.

The mechanistic theory is at the opposite pole to vitalism. It begins with the Cartesian idea that conceives of the animal as an automat. In the sciences it would prevail over vitalism. The latter made a radical distinction between vital processes and physico-chemical phenomena. Claiming allegiance to Aristotle, and above all to Hippocrates, the vitalist adepts of the Montpellier school in the eighteenth century, with Josef Barthez and Théophile de Bordeu as leading figures, resisted seeing their investigations being simply annexed by the sciences of inanimate matter. Vitalism was founded on the idea of an indeterminate force radically different from physico-chemical processes. For Xavier Bichat, vital properties, in respect of their variability and their intensity, were fundamentally opposed to inanimate nature which possessed invariable and fixed properties. Admittedly, Bichat rejected the principle of a single force directing all the functions of life; nonetheless, he thought that at the heart of nature, governed by physico-chemical laws, life represented a permanent exception (see Huneman, 1998). To this specificity of the living, the mechanistic theory would oppose the law of inertia, which determines the inanimate world and living beings alike. Vitalism was the last breath of a thousand-year-old way of thinking that was still resistant to the scientificity of the modern age. It attempted in vain to maintain the belief in the mysterious forces of living nature, even if it was ready to assign them verifiable scientific properties.

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Underlying the law of inertia, which is so essential to the mechanistic conception, is the Cartesian cogito (the “I think, therefore I am”) announcing the birth of the subject of science. This is why Lacan (1966a) traces the discovery of the Freudian unconscious back to Descartes’ thought. In effect, the cogito is the historical moment when the gap between knowledge and truth was established. Science was henceforth founded on the quest for certainty without a concern for truth, relegating the latter to the register of faith. By introducing the law of inertia at the heart of his conception of the drives, Freud distanced himself from the outset from any possible vitalist implications concerning his nascent theory. The dualism of the life and death drives was also intended to counter the vitalists’ belief in a single and unique vital force determining the living world. According to Robert McCarley, an American neurophysiologist, it was probably in reaction to such a belief that Freud immediately avoided endowing the psychical apparatus with endogenous properties. “Perhaps it was to avoid ‘vitalistic’ notions that Freud, in the Project, conceptualized neurons as passive transmitters and reservoirs of energy derived from outside the brain” (McCarley, 1998, p. 118). We know, more generally, that at the time of the Project (before 1900), Freud relied on existing neurological research. The latter claimed allegiance to the theory of conditional reflexes which had become the corner stone of the studies undertaken by Pavlov (in Russia) and Sherrington (in England). This theory, excluding any form of endogenous property in the brain, was demolished by the new neurology from the 1950s onwards. I will come back to this later when studying anticipative neurophysiology.

Cybernetics is the most accomplished outcome of the mechanistic theory. During the course of the twentieth century, cognitivism, and especially cybernetics, both claiming to have invented artificial intelligence (the computer) on the model of the human brain, would provide the conceptual tools necessary for neuroscience which, in turn, would inspire the connexionists to conceive of the “formal neurons” of computers. We will also return to this later.

As I have said, it was partly against vitalist ideas that Freud conceived of the death drive as being intrinsically linked to the life drive. The phenomenon of repetition, which is inherent to it, constitutes the very foundations of clinical psychoanalysis. The latter is based on the transference, that is, the repetition of the patient’s past on to the analyst’s person.

However, the death drive has not as yet found a consequent echo in scientific research. Going beyond the biological framework, it would be more likely to contribute to the understanding of the civilizing dimension of man. As evidence of this one may cite the late works of Freud such as Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). And yet every clinician knows from experience the extent to which the notion of the death drive is capable of explaining extremely serious phenomena that could scarcely be apprehended otherwise. Rupture, conflicts inherent to the system, unforeseen events, disunion or fragmentation, disaster and irruption are all manifestations governed by this deadly drive.

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Cybernetics or information theory has tried to impose another conception of living beings. I am speaking of a science of systems control equipped with entries/exits and governed by the principle of maintaining a constant balance between the incoming and outgoing elements. It was created in 1948 by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener on the model of thermodynamic apparatuses. His concepts of reciprocal action and feedback rest on a system that detects gaps with a view to regulating and integrating them within an organization whose functioning depends on the principle of homeostasis. The system is thus dependent on a signal that refers to an ensemble of pre-established connections and communications in order to conserve the organization in its totality. The signal in question tries to remedy the disorder and the imbalance that has occurred in the system so as to reestablish the organizational order of the living, conceived of as a cybernetic machine. Cybernetics announced the beginning of a conception treating both living beings and machines as self-organizational systems. It contributed eventually to the construction of artificial intelligence (computers).

Freud, too, drew inspiration in more ways than one from such models. Concepts such as signal anxiety or entropy as an effect of repetition served as models to explain a certain number of phenomena at the heart of psychoanalytic theory.

Birth of a planetary science

Cognitivism is linked to a major signifier: an intelligent machine or programmable computer. It grew out of mathematical formal logic, which was in vogue in the years 1920–1940. But the origin of this formal logic goes back to the work of the philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) who, with the invention of his ideogram (Begriffsschrift) hoped to dispel what he saw as the confusion of natural languages. It was with the help of this ideogram that he tried, in the wake of Leibniz, to promote a universal language capable of determining, by means of radical logic, the falseness of propositions (see Frege, 1971). His logicist system was aimed at formalizing thought. It was in this respect that he influenced the entire computationist current of the cognitive sciences in the twentieth century, based on the model of his ideogram which has become the artificial intelligence of computers. Frege’s logicism was integrated within the logical empiricism of a certain number of positivist philosophers such as Moritz Schlick, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, George Edward Moore, Henri Poincaré, and Kurt Gödel, who all belonged to the famous Vienna Circle. Hence their essential idea consisted in only attributing the status of scientific truth to that which is either formal or logical (see Ouelbani, 2006).

Enriched by the immense research studies carried out during these years in the domain of formal logic, cybernetics began to attract all those who thought that by simulating the intellectual aptitudes of the human being it might finally be possible to build Descartes’ animal-machine. But before this could be achieved it was necessary for researchers to distance themselves from the mechanistic aims of the philosopher and, while remaining in the materialist domain, make use of the high degree of generality that computer science procured for the machine.

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It was in the 1940s that Alan Turing (1912–1954), an English logician and engineer, laid out the conceptual basis of the cognitive sciences. According to him, the latter should not only be able to describe and explain the aptitudes of the human mind, but also to simulate them through the agency of automata created for this purpose. After playing a pivotal role in discovering the codes governing the military communications of the Nazi army in favour of his country, Alan Turing was deprived of his civil rights on account of his homosexuality. The apple filled with cyanide, with which he committed suicide, represented this unforgivable sin in the eyes of the British authorities. It was to become the emblem of one of the most prestigious computer companies.

Cybernetic theory was no longer restricted to its essential elements, namely, homeostasis, feedback, and the “dementalized” contents of psychic phenomena. It now made use of mathematical and computing logic, which allowed it to establish the equation between the machine and the mind. The death knell of behaviourism, which had conceived of the brain as the “black box” that was of no concern to the scientist, was sounded. The stimulus/response system proved insufficient, for it was now possible to focus on the “black box” with a view to studying its formal functioning. Cognitive science was thus born, equipped with a major tool, the computer, which was supposed to be able to simulate mental processes in the formalist sense of the term.

Linguistics, neurophysiology, and experimental psychology played their part in promoting an interdisciplinary theoretical corpus during the “Macy” Conferences, held between 1945 and 1953, with the presence of eminent researchers such as Wiener, John von Neumann, Rosenblueth and Walter Pitts. To this we may add the undeniable contribution of McCulloch of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). From the 1960s onwards cognitivist theory went from strength to strength. The majority of the behavioural psychologists converted to it gradually, but we know that behaviourism is far from having been defeated. Its spirit continues to determine cognitive psychology, as can be seen from cognitive-behavioural therapies (CBT), which sometimes leave clinicians powerless in the face of the havoc they can cause as a therapeutic tool.

Cognitive-behavioural therapies

As they are techniques that are essentially focused on the symptom, CBT do not consider the psychic organization of the individual as a whole. It is for this reason that we often witness the displacement of the symptom treated, giving rise to other psychic problems that may manifest themselves surreptitiously in the medium or long term. Given that the displacement of the symptom may occur without the patient’s knowledge and in an unrecognized form, studies carried out to verify the reliability of these techniques do not always constitute irrefutable proof. These studies of verification are to be treated with all the more caution in that they set out to compare different types of therapy, even though each of them pursues different objectives. By focusing on symptoms to make such comparisons, the studies in question cannot be justified in psychic matters where each symptom possesses its own subjectivity and its different underlying causes. Equating psychic symptoms with nosographical entities is clearly an ideological error. The report by INSERM (2004) concerning the reliability of the different psychotherapeutic methods may be said to be based, precisely, on such an error, for it relies on criteria on the basis of which the DSM-IV reduces the symptom to a disorder, an eminently controversial nosographic (and not nosographical) concept.

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Cognitive-behavioural techniques pay little attention either to the psychic structure of patients or to their history. For cognitivists, their suffering is only a symptom involving t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dreams, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Part I Body/Mind
• Part II Dreaming and Sleep
• Index of dreams
• Bibliography
• General index