The Poet's Voice in the Making of Mind

Russell Meares

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317367697
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

How did the human mind evolve and how does it emerge, again and again, in individual lives?

In The Poet's Voice in the Making of Mind, Russell Meares presents a fascinating inquiry into the origin of mind. He proposes that the way in which mind, or self, evolved, may resemble the way it emerges in childhood play and that a poetic, analogical style of thought is a biological necessity, essential to bringing to fruition the achievement of the human mind. Taking a fresh look at the language used in psychotherapy, he shows how language, and conversation in particular, is central to the development and maintenance of self. His theory incorporates the ideas from William James, Hughlings, Jackson, Janet, Hobson, Gerald Edelman, Wolf Singer, Vygotsky and others. It is illuminated by extracts from literary artists such as Wallace Stevens, W.S. Merwin, Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad and Shakespeare.

Encompassing psychotherapy; psychoanalysis; evolution; child development; literary criticism; philosophy; studies of mind and consciousness, The Poet's Voice in the Making of Mind is an engaging, ground-breaking and thought-provoking work that will appeal to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, as well as anyone interested in the emergence of mind and self.

1
Introduction

Conversational play and the evolution of self

One January morning in 1798, the 19-year-old William Hazlitt rose ‘before daylight, to walk 10 miles in the mud’ ¹ to hear the sermon of the new minister of Shrewsbury, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Hazlitt was a contemplative young man, full of ideas taken from readings in philosophy, but as yet, he had no clear idea of the direction that his life might take. The beginning of such an idea was formed by his experience that morning. The voice of the poet, not only his words but also their sound, helped shape what Hazlitt was to become. His experience is touched upon further in Chapter 5.

The shaping effect of the sound of another’s voice begins very early in life, when the mother² sets up a game with her baby in which she plays at having a conversation with her. The main theme of this book is that this game is necessary not only to the development of mind but also to its evolution. Within this game can be seen the origin of the symbol, the basis of the peculiarly human mind and of culture.

Mind is a word that is used in various ways. I am using it in a particular way, which is suggested by common usage. People say such things as, ‘he must have been out of his mind’ and refer to certain activities as ‘mindless’. They imply that mind is a state which we do not always occupy. It can come and go, disappearing when personal existing is troubled or disrupted, and put on hold in the performance of automatic behaviour. In this book, ‘mind’ refers not to all forms of consciousness but to a specific consciousness, which is believed to be peculiar to the human primate. It is a relatively fragile state that is lately evolved and not achieved by all human beings. William James called it self. How it develops and evolves is the subject of the book. This opening chapter gives a sketch of the main proposal, together with an outline of the argument as it will unfold in the following chapters. The focus of the early chapters is upon the emergence of self and symbol in childhood, and how early generative patterns of relating are carried into adult life. The main theme in later chapters is the emergence of culture from these early beginnings and the relation of this story to that of the evolution of humanity.

The mystery of our origins is a subject of universal fascination. In recent years a more particular evolutionary focus has developed, upon the way in which human consciousness has evolved. The proposals come from widely differing disciplines – comparative anatomy, neurophysiology, computer science, mathematics, biology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, information theory, ethology and so forth. Each writer’s viewpoint is determined, in part, by a particular background, both professional and personal. Some of these proposals are unsatisfactory in that they treat consciousness as a global issue, without addressing the idea that consciousness has a number of forms, most of which we share with other creatures. A suitable theory of the human mind must offer an explanation for the appearance of the special form of consciousness, which is unique to Homo sapiens. Its nature is discussed in Chapter 2. Its outstanding characteristic is doubleness. William James called it the ‘duplex self’.³ Its bipolarity is not to be confused with Cartesian dualism which posits a distinction between material and immaterial aspects of mental life, between res extensa and res cogitans.

The duality of human consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, which develops from birth and grows through several larval stages before it can be clearly demonstrated between the ages of 3½ and 5½. Indices of this achievement are, at the same time, markers of the appearance of self.

One index of the experience of doubleness is the child’s awareness of the concept of secrecy.⁴ When children understand this idea, they realize that they exist simultaneously in two worlds, one public and the other private, the latter known only to oneself. Along with this realization comes another; that other minds may harbour feelings, ideas, motivations and imaginings, which differ from one’s own. The capacity for empathy now emerges.

A second index tests for ‘false belief’. A number of versions exist but all resemble the original version of Wimmer and Perner.⁵ An example might be as follows. The subject is asked to watch a scene in which a little girl enters a room carrying a box of chocolates. She puts it in the top drawer of a chest of drawers and then leaves. A wicked witch enters. She finds the chocolates and puts them in the bottom drawer. She then exits. The little girl re-enters and pauses. The subject is then asked where the girl will look for her chocolates. A child of 5 will say the top drawer but a 3-year-old will choose the bottom. She acts as if what is known to her is known to everybody. Her world is not made up of two co-ordinated zones, inner and outer. Rather, it is one world, which is ‘personal’.⁶ The 5-year-old, on the other hand, can hold in mind two versions of reality, one’s own and someone else’s.

James discerned a basic doubleness in the ordinary and unified feeling of personal existing. An abstract distinction can be made between an ‘I’ who is observing or knowing inner events – a ‘stream’ of images, ideas, memories, imaginings and so forth – and those events themselves. This state describes the process of introspection, which to many authorities is the identifying feature of ‘self’, although not self itself.

These authorities include the legendary English neurologist, Hughlings Jackson, who believed himself to be the first to use the word ‘self’ in the medical literature.⁷ He was certainly the first to build a plausible model of its neural origins. Considered by his close colleagues as a near genius, Jackson’s ideas were ahead of their time and not fully comprehended. The relevance of his ideas to modern neuroscience and to the understanding of traumatically induced mental illness is increasingly acknowledged.⁸ Jackson’s evolutionary approach to the emergence of self forms an essential background to the book.

The book is written from a viewpoint of a psychiatrist who, for many years, has striven to understand and to develop a mode of treatment for a group of people suffering a seemingly intractable condition that is protean in its manifestations, some of which are life-threating, including suicidal ideation and behaviour.⁹ The condition is currently given the name ‘borderline’, which means in essence, puzzling. The original observers could not fit this illness into a known category. At times it verges on the severity of psychosis but at others, resembles normality. A body of evidence now suggests that the so-called ‘borderline’ state is an outcome of an early life marked by repetitive interpersonal, or ‘relational’, traumata. The symptoms form two categories, one related to the disruption of the development of self and the other to the recurrent intrusion of conscious and unconscious traumatic memories.¹⁰ Most treatments approach the latter system. There is, however, no generally accepted theory or method for the regeneration of self, which, it can be argued, is the primary deficit.

My search for such a theory and method began with the idea that the experience of self will emerge in therapy in the same way that it emerges in child development. The assumption depends upon a resemblance of principles governing two different though analogous situations. Resemblance is not a replication, in the same way that an analogue is not a copy, a topic discussed in Chapter 3. Therapy is not re-mothering.

The fundamental assumption that the same developmental principles underlie both the emergence of self in childhood and its appearance in therapy lead to the question: what brings into being the doubleness of consciousness, identified by both Jackson and James as central to the structure of self. The answer given here is play.

Play

There are many different forms of play.¹¹ Some are mere frolic; others are rule-based; still others seem designed as a rehearsal for adult roles.¹² None of these is the play that leads to the duplex self. It is ‘make-believe’ play that has the generative potential. The ‘make-believe’ is autotelic. It has no purpose beyond the enjoyment of the activity itself. It has no apparently ‘adaptive’ function, for example, of rehearsal.

‘Make-believe’ is double in that it makes an object, person, or situation both real and unreal. The thing is what it is and also something else that it is not. This is the essence of the symbol (Chapter 3). The capacity to use symbols, rather than merely signals, has given the human primate its enormous evolutionary advantage through the creation of culture, a view put forward for example by Ernst Cassirer, who conceived myth as the core of culture¹³ (Chapter 15). The thesis, then, is that a particular kind of ‘make-believe’ leads to the use of symbols, which is the enabling factor in the formation of culture.

Culture is understood here as a system of symbolically mediated behaviours shared by a particular society and transmitted intergenerationally by symbolic means. Cultural transmission is distinguished from behaviours learnt by simple mimesis, which chimpanzees can achieve.¹⁴ Societies are seen as a ‘total network of relations’ between the members of a group.¹⁵ Chimpanzees live in culture-less societies.

The ‘make-believe’ begins at birth, with the game of conversational play. A mother seeing her new-born for the first time speaks to her baby, as if her infant could understand. Her voice is particular. It is a sound that is rather high and melodious, made with a rising inflection. She compounds her fiction by replying on behalf of the baby in an answer to herself.¹⁶ Nobody has told her to act like this. It comes to her naturally, as if part of her phylogenetically given make-up.

By the age of 2–3 months, the baby has become a participant in the conversational game. The mother and baby jointly engage in a reciprocal interplay, the patternings of which resemble mature conversation. Colwyn Trevarthen,¹⁷ borrowing the term from Mary Bateson,¹⁸ has called it a ‘proto-conversation’. The mother’s contributions are determined by the baby’s state rather than some agenda of her own. Her responses are finely attuned to what the baby presents in facial expression, vocalization and body movement. Characteristically, these response...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: conversational play and the evolution of self
• 2 James: what we mean by personal selves
• 3 Analogy and truth
• 4 Brain bases of self
• 5 The poet’s voice
• 6 Little emotions
• 7 Empathy and utterance
• 8 Pointing and depicting
• 9 Myth and proto-myth
• 10 Action patterns and the evolution of language
• 11 The doubleness of Shakespeare
• 12 Impediments to proto-conversation through blindness and deafness
• 13 The shape of culture and self
• 14 An evolutionary hypothesis
• 15 Automorphosis: the dreams of Wolfgang Pauli
• 16 Personal myth
• References
• Author index
• Subject index