Emotional Communication and Therapeutic Change

Understanding Psychotherapy Through Multiple Code Theory

Wilma Bucci, William F. Cornell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367645601
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000326246
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

In this book, Wilma Bucci applies her skills as a cognitive psychologist and researcher to the fields of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, opening up new avenues for understanding the underlying processes that facilitate therapeutic communication and change. Grounded in research geared to understanding and demonstrating the clinical process (rather than "outcome") of analytic inquiry and therapeutic dialogue, Bucci's multiple code theory offers clinicians, researchers, trainers, and students new perspectives on the essential, often unlanguaged, foundations of the psychotherapeutic endeavour.

Part I

Evolution of the basic theory

Concepts and contexts of multiple code theory

Chapter 1

Symptoms and symbols

A multiple code theory of somatization

The interaction of psychic and somatic processes has been a central concern of psychoanalysis from its initial formulations (Freud, 1895, 1900) to the present day. In contrast to Freud’s time, the interaction of emotion and somatic illness is now also recognized in the medical field. It is not only the special disorders identified as hysterias, nor even the medical entities traditionally classified as psychosomatic, that are affected by such interaction; the field of psychoneuroimmunology supports the view that

All disease is multifactoral and biopsychosocial in onset and course—the result of interrelationships among specific etiologic (e.g., bacteria, viruses, carcinogens), genetic, endocrine, nervous, immune, emotional, and behavioral factors.

(Solomon, 1987, P-l)

The potential scope of psychoanalytic treatment is enormously expanded by these developments, and the need for a coherent psychoanalytic theory is intensified as well, to bring psychological understanding of the interactions among cognition, emotion, and somatic functions in line with advances in the medical field.

Freud’s metapsychology has failed as a basis for a modern scientific theory. The postulates of the energy theory have been tested only minimally; where they have been tested, they have generally been disconfirmed (Eagle, 1984). The metapsychology has been renounced by the scholars who devoted much of their professional lives to its reconstruction and has also been rejected by many clinicians (Holt, 1985). Nevertheless, in the absence of an alternate model, energic metaphors remain in use, with the power to distort theory and practice in pervasive, often unrecognized ways (Bucci, 1993; Thomae & Kaechele, 1987).

Psychoanalysis is in need of a new explanatory theory that will account for the major concepts with which clinicians are concerned, including the interface of emotion and somatic functions, and that will provide a coherent framework for empirical research. This must be a psychological, not a neurological, model. Psychological theories constitute a distinct level of explanation that cannot be dispensed with, no matter how much we learn about the neurological level. The psychological and neurological levels have different constructs, different concepts, different mathematical functions, and different practical applications, and they need to be studied separately in their own terms. We need a psychological theory to define concepts such as depression, anxiety, feelings of abandonment and loss, and the interaction of action, somatization, and verbalization on the behavioral and representational level; we need a neurological or physiological model to define the corresponding concepts in the biological domain.

While psychological constructs cannot be reduced to neurophysiological ones, the two levels are nevertheless, ultimately, necessarily translatable to one another. This is obvious but may need to be stated. If our mental and neurophysiological models were sufficiently complete and accurate, and if we had enough observable indicators for each theoretical proposition, and if the mathematical correspondence rules within each system were all in place, the psychological and neurophysiological theories would be expected to correspond. In this and other senses, observations on the neurological or biological level exert a potential constraint on theory building in the psychological domain.

The psychological model that I will outline in this chapter is based on concepts that are derived from current work in cognitive science and that meet the constraints imposed by current knowledge in the neurosciences. The development of a systematic psychological model for psychoanalytic concepts was not possible in the scientific context of Freud’s time, nor in the context of the behaviorist position that dominated American psychology during much of the twentieth century, but is potentially within the purview of the cognitive psychology of today (Bucci, 1985, 1989, 1993). The new multiple code theory is derived from current cognitive models, but also expands them in emphasizing the role of emotion in human cognition and the complex issues involved in translating emotional experience to verbal form.

Freud’s “dual code” theory

Throughout his writings, Freud recognized unresolved questions and problems in his theoretical model of the psychical apparatus, as put forth in the first topography (1895, 1900) and later revised in the structural theory (1923), as well as in his attempts to reconcile the two models (1940). He also recognized the lack of supporting data for his fundamental energy theory, although he did not repudiate or question this in any basic sense. Through all this, as he sums up his life’s work, one piece of solid ground, one enduring “fact,” remains clear:

But behind all of these uncertainties there lies one new fact, the discovery of which we owe to psychoanalytic research. We have learned that processes in the unconscious or in the id obey different laws from those in the preconscious ego. We name these laws in their totality the primary process, in contrast to the secondary process which regulates events in the preconscious or ego. Thus the study of mental qualities has after all proved not unfruitful in the end.

(Freud, 1940, pp. 44–45)

The discovery that he saw as his first and major finding remains the fact that he holds to most firmly at the end: the discovery of a mode of thought, characterizing the unconscious or the id, which differs from the processes of normal, rational, waking life.

The “dual/multiple code” theory of emotional information processing builds on this fundamental psychoanalytic solid ground. What we need to understand—and what is really not so difficult to recognize —is that Freud’s fundamental observations of two distinct modes of thought, their dynamic interaction, and their interaction with somatic events do not entail the assumptions of the energy model or the special assumptions of either the first or second topographies and can be disembedded from these. The model and the evidence supporting it have been discussed in detail elsewhere (Bucci, 1985, 1989, 1993, 1997) and will be outlined briefly here, focusing on issues that are relevant to a new theory of somatization.

The multiple code theory and the referential process

According to the multiple code theory, as in the previous dual code formulation, information is represented in the mind both in verbal form and in the multiple channels of the nonverbal system. In addition to the basic verbal/nonverbal distinction, the multiple code theory also postulates an additional distinction between symbolic and subsymbolic processing forms. The notion of the symbol and the process of symbolizing are defined here in their general information processing sense (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988). Thus, symbols are defined as discrete entities that refer to or represent other entities and may be combined following systematic processing rules. Symbols in the psychoanalytic sense constitute a subset of these.

The verbal system

Language is primarily a symbolic format. From a limited set of phonemes in each language, a virtually unlimited array of words can be generated and meanings expressed. Language is the code of communication and reflection, in which private, subjective experience, including emotional experience, may be shared and through which the knowledge of the culture and the constraints of logic may be brought to bear on the contents of individual thought. It is also the code that we call upon to direct and regulate ourselves, to activate imagery and emotion, to stimulate action, and to control it. The verbal code is primarily a single-channel, sequential processor; we generate or understand only one verbal message at a time. Language is dominant primarily, although not uniquely, in the conscious state.

The nonverbal system

The multiple channels of the nonverbal system incorporate representations and processes in all sensory modalities as well as motoric and somatic forms. Nonverbal processing is modality-specific; representations and processes in each modality occupy the same processing channels as perceptual experience itself. This activation is primarily in trace form.

The nonverbal system includes both symbolic and subsymbolic forms. Models of information processing based on symbolic formats, applied to imagery as well as to language, have been dominant in cognitive science for the last several decades (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988; Simon & Kaplan, 1989). What is new in the cognitive science field, and of great importance for a model of the psychoanalytic process, is the increasing recognition of subsymbolic forms of information processing and the development of systematic models to account for these (Rumelhart, McClelland, & PDP Research Group, 1986).

In such subsymbolic processing, we perform rapid and complex computations on implicit continuous metrics without formation of discrete categories, following computational principles that may never have been explicitly identified or formulated and cannot be intentionally invoked or applied, but that are systematic nonetheless. This type of continuous, intuitive, modality-specific and content-sensitive processing is the focus of the Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) models, also referred to as “connectionist” or subsymbolic models (Smolensky, 1988). Subsymbolic “computations” of this nature underlie the capacity to anticipate the trajectory of a moving object, navigate a ship through a narrow channel, ski a slalom course, hit a tennis ball effectively, or distinguish the taste and aroma of burgundies from different hillsides or different years. Such computations also serve to distinguish subtle shifts in facial expression, to identify changes in body movement or vocal qualities, and to recognize changes in one’s own visceral state. The cat uses implicit computation of this nature to select a landing-place on a table crowded with objects, the football player to direct a ball to the position where they expect someone will be, or to be in the right place to receive the ball that is about to be thrown, and the analyst to recognize their patient’s subjective state and to decide when and how to intervene.

Obviously, I will not attempt to introduce the technical structures of either the symbolic or subsymbolic connectionist models here. The major purpose of introducing these two basic cognitive science approaches is to point out, in a general and conceptual way, that two distinct formats of information processing—both within the nonverbal system—are now being identified by cognitive scientists at a far more sophisticated model-building level than ever before, and that in the subsymbolic formats, complex constructs are being developed—really for the first time—which account systematically for the types of intuitive and implicit processing, involving visceral, somatic, and motoric, as well as sensory, modalities, which are central to a psychoanalytic model.

These subsymbolic processes also have their limitations. While such processing is systematic, it is also highly specialized for specific functions. The PDP models do not account for integration of subsystems in relation to the overall goals or values of the organism in which they are implemented. The symbolic processes of the nonverbal system fill this integrative and organizing function (Norman, 1986).

The new multiple code theory thus expands Freud’s fundamental solid ground to incorporate three—at least—rather than two basic systems of thought: verbal versus nonverbal, and within nonverbal, symbolic versus subsymbolic. By implication, the new model also emphasizes the crucial role of connections among all these disparate systems and the corresponding implications of failure of such connections.

Emotion schemas in the multiple code theory

Within the multiple code theory, emotions are characterized as image-action schemata, operating within or outside of consciousness, which differ from other, more “cognitive,” schemas in their relative domination by motoric and visceral processing systems, rather than by symbolic imagery and words. In the most general terms, the emotion schemas constitute the desires, expectations, and beliefs one has about other people, which develop through interactions with others from the beginning of life. These schemas include representations of objects, parts of objects, and relations between them in all sensory modalities, as well as patterns of activation associated with motoric actions, and visceral and somatic states. They thus include images of the object of the emotion, the person we desire or hate or fear; central nervous system representations of specific actions associated with emotional arousal—for example, approach, attack, or flight; and patterns of visceral or somatic experience associated with such arousal—what we feel, or expect to feel, viscerally when we are angry or afraid or in love. The emotion schemas begin to be formed within the nonverbal system prior to the acquisition of language; eventually, their contents may be connected to language as well.

This model of the emotions is based on minimal limiting assumptions, and is generally compatible with areas of consensus among emotion theorists today (Scherer, 1984), as well as with current views of the neurophysiological basis of emotion (LeDoux, 1989). The multiple code formulation is also compatible, in part, with the definition of affects by Kernberg (1990) as incorporating symbolic representational, motoric, and visceral components; however, it diverges from Kernberg’s inclusion of discharge phenomena within the definition of affects and his corollary conception of affects as the “b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Editor’s preface A cognitive scientist meets the couch
• Acknowledgments: Building an interactive field
• A personal note on theory and practice
• Prologue: The need for evolution of the psychoanalytic model
• Part I Evolution of the basic theory: Concepts and contexts of multiple code theory
• Part II Clinical perspectives on emotional communication
• Index