The Dynamic Self in Psychoanalysis

Neuroscientific Foundations and Clinical Cases

Rosa Spagnolo, Georg Northoff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367428969
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000466362
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuropsychology
• Index: Psychology

The Dynamic Self in Psychoanalysis builds a bridge between two different but intertwined disciplines—psychoanalysis and neuroscience—by examining the Self and its dynamics at the psychological and neuronal level.

Rosa Spagnolo and Georg Northoff seek continuity in the relationship between psychoanalysis and neuroscience, emphasizing how both inform psychotherapy and psychoanalytic treatment and exploring the transformations of the Self that occur during this work. Each chapter presents clinical examples which demonstrate the evolution of the spatiotemporal and affective dimensions of the Self in a variety of psychopathologies. Spagnolo and Northoff analyze the possible use of new neuroscientific findings to improve clinical treatment in psychodynamic therapy and present a spatio-temporal approach that has significant implications for the practice of psychotherapy and for future research.

The Dynamic Self in Psychoanalysis will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, neuroscientists and neuropsychiatrists.

Chapter 1

Building up time and space

DOI: 10.4324/9781003221876-2

Self-embodiment

Our body is always with us. Even when we are not aware of its presence, it manifests itself through our gestures; it is noticeable when we speak, when our facial expressions follow the emotional dialogue, or when we are fulfilling a task and our postures change to find a new spatial arrangement, without discontinuing what we are doing. The body is present in the spatial concepts related to its displacement in space that express both the idea of movement and embodied metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) such as, for example, up/down, in front of/behind, metaphors of goal achievement, and mood changes.

Each body has different cognitive/affective abilities according to its physical characteristics. The way in which eyes, hands, legs, and other body parts, are shaped determines the type of knowledge we acquire of the world, which is different in human beings with respect to non-human beings.

The body is ‘situated’ in the world (Varela et al., 1991) and actively tries out different spatial, and also temporal, configurations and navigations in the world (Noë, 2004; Gallagher, 2005a; Gallagher, 2017), through its shape (body features). The body’s situatedness in the world is the basis of our experience of the world, including of our own body as part of that very same world:

By the term embodied, we emphasize two points: first, cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities; second, these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context.

(Varela et al., 1991, p. 172)

Our body supposedly accompanies us everywhere, it is always there where we are, and it is the origin of our being in the world. But in which way is the body linked to the Self thus creating knowledge?

The body knows, decides, chooses, and responds to internal and external stimuli; without taking all this into consideration, the mind is seen as ‘disembodied’, conjuring up the eternal dualism of Descartes’ pilot (thought-generating representational/symbolic systems) who steers the body-container. Therefore, in order to speak of embodiment, ‘mental representations need to be grounded in perception and action; they cannot be a free-floating system of symbols’.

(Dijkstra & Zwaan, 2014, p. 296)

Embodiment involves both the perceptual system, deemed as an integrated multisensory system, and, the Self, as a form of embodied memory, that goes beyond perceptions of peripheral events, and extensively maps them into the body inner states; we call this ‘Self-embodiment’.

We need to distinguish different concepts related to the body. According to Assoun (1987/2015), Körper is the body structure or anatomy that can be wounded or injured; Leib is the root of the living body and Leiche is the dead body, the corpse. However, Körper means the body’s physical, and biological attributes; it grounds us in the world through the lived body, namely the Leib.

These definitions can be traced to Husserl (1913/1989), who exhaustively discussed the phenomenology of Körper as the body-as-an-object and of Leib as the body-as-a-subject. Leib is the lived body that not only transcends the sense of our being in the world (Merleau-Ponty, 2012) but that goes beyond the boundaries of the body as Körper, thus opening up the biological dimension of the living to the dimension of existence of Self as distinct from others (Self–Other dimension, J. P. Sartre, 1956).

Thus, Körper and Leib are intertwined and they both own and share what is called the Self. In this connection, according to psychoanalysis, the Self is the unconscious link ‘glueing’ together these different concepts of the body, Körper and Leib.

It is extremely difficult to define the ‘body’ in psychoanalysis because there is always something which is neither limited to the body nor to the mind; in fact, in 1917, Freud wrote to Groddeck: ‘Certainly, the unconscious is the proper mediator between the somatic and the mental, perhaps the long-sought “missing link”. Yet, because we have seen this at last, should we no longer see anything else?’ (Groddeck, 1977, p. 38).

Accepting the possibility of being able ‘to see something else’ or at least to find ‘this missing link’, we now consider the unconscious processes as the ongoing work of the living body to integrate perceptions (both internal and external) in a broader context of meaning, which yields memories and subjectivation of the Self beyond its objective basis in the body, i.e. Körper. Hence, in the unconscious dimension, both memories and Self are embodied. If the unconscious subjectivation of Self and body is blocked or dysfunctional, we will encounter abnormal manifestations of the Self and the body in both the unconscious and consciousness, i.e. symptoms.

Is the minimum unit (Minimal Self) of the individual an irreducible mind–body, Körper–Leib, lump? If we introduce the emergence of the Self as bodily Self, the body marks the construction of the individual bodily Self with its proprioceptive, sensory, affective, characteristics. According to Mucci (2018), the individual develops as a complex body–mind–brain system; it is important to add to this construction a further degree of complexity since the body keeps a double inscription into the brain (Solms & Panksepp, 2012): a cortical inscription of the body like an object (external body), an object among other objects with different motor and perceptive parts; a sub-cortical inscription of the subjective body (internal body). This has nothing to do with the perception of the body-as-an-object, but with the experience of the body as a subject, that is with affects, with ‘being’ and subjectivation.

Thanks to this subjective, affective body, we perceive that we are our body, that we have a body:

Living my body means more than being aware of my body or having a body image […] This doesn’t mean that I experience myself exclusively as a body […] The natural engineering of the human body […] allows us to generate narratives and metaphors that lead us beyond the simple Self-body equation. I am this body and I am more than this body.

(Gallagher, 2005b, p. 8)

Self-continuity

Following Richardson and Chemero (2014), we are introducing a brain in a body, in an environment that can comprise a heterogeneous, complex dynamical system. This system exhibits emergent behaviour, which is Self-organized since it does not result from a controlling component agent. Further:

Dynamical systems that exhibit this kind of emergent, context-dependent behaviour are often referred to as softly assembled systems in that the behavioural system reflects a temporary coalition of coordinated entities, components, or factors […] For softly assembled, interaction-dominant dynamical systems, system behaviour is the result of interactions between system components, agents, and situational factors, with these inter-components or inter-agent interactions altering the dynamics of the component elements, situational factors and agents themselves.

(Richardson & Chemero, 2014, p. 40)

We know that in a non-linear complex dynamical system, the output is not the sum of its weighted inputs, i.e. it cannot be broken down by the predictable behaviour of its single components. Therefore, according to this analysis, it is impossible to separate and isolate the body (brain) from the Self; instead, their interaction suggests that: ‘Non-linear time-series analysis is essential for understanding how the ordered regularity of human behaviour and cognition can emerge and be maintained’ (Richardson & Chemero, 2014, p. 41).

The brain’s spontaneous activity and its link to experience and the living body (Northoff & Stanghellini, 2016) suggests that this cerebral activity is independent of specific externally directed processes and stimuli. In a resting state, the brain consistently and hence dynamically constructs spatiotemporal features, with an ongoing process of change that integrates the internal and proprioceptive inputs from the body within a larger spatiotemporal framework. The subjectivation of Self and body may then be traced to the dynamics of this continuous spatiotemporal construction:

This leads to postulate what can be described as the temporal hypothesis of the ‘lived body’. We tentatively postulate that the difference between objective vs. lived body in experience is closely related to the resting state’s spatiotemporal features during internally-directed processing: the better the body’s intero-and proprioceptive input is integrated into the resting state’s ongoing temporal structure during its internally-directed processing, the higher the degree of subjective experience of the body as ‘lived body’ as distinguished from the experience of a merely ‘objective body’.

(Northoff & Stanghellini, 2016, p. 9)

How can we support that idea on empirical grounds? We assume that one central feature of this spatiotemporal construction and embedding of the Self and the body is temporal continuity which results in Self-continuity. This is in line with recent empirical data. On the basis of a functional connectivity analysis of a large resting-state data set, Murray (Murray et al., 2012; Murray et al., 2015) showed that the anterior midline regions, as well as the anterior insula, form a ‘Self-network’ in the resting state. This neural overlap between the Self and the resting state implies that the spontaneous activity of the CMS (Cortical Midline Structures) plays a central role, thus making it well suitable for mediating the Self and its continuity. Self-continuity is central to human life and allows us to understand how the ordered regularity of human behaviour and cognition can emerge and be maintained. Temporal low-frequency fluctuations and spatial functional connectivity patterns characterize the resting-state activity of the brain. The temporal structure plays an important role in bridging the gaps between different discrete points in time. By linking together the neural activities at different discrete points in time, the brain’s intrinsic activity acquires a certain degree of temporal continuity (Northoff, 2012).¹

Moreover, a full neurobiological account of the body–Self dimension should include how the interoceptive and exteroceptive bodily information is combined to form the conscious experience of being a person (Aspell et al., 2013; Heydrich et al., 2018).

Due to the ongoing space–time construction of this spontaneous activity, it can continuously integrate interoceptive and exteroceptive bodily inputs, thus creating bodily continuity as one hallmark of the Leib as distinguished from the Körper.

Typical hallmarks of Self are Self-identification, Self-location, First-Person Perspective (Furlanetto et al., 2013).

We now add Self-continuity to that list.

Out-of-body experiences

To illustrate the relevance of Self-continuity, we introduce the clinical case of disembodied experience. Such disorder is defined as Autoscopic Phenomena (AP) or illusory own-body perceptions mainly in three forms: autoscopic hallucinations (AH), out-of-body experiences (OBE), and heautoscopy (HAS) (Blanke & Mohr, 2005).

These disorders share the experience of being/seeing the body in an extra personal space.

During autoscopic hallucinations, a second own body is seen without any changes in bodily Self-consciousness. During out-of-body experiences, the second own body is seen from an elevated perspective and location associated with disembodiment. During heautoscopy, subjects report strong Self-identification with the second own body, often associated with the experience of existing at and perceiving the world from two places at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introducing the Dynamic Self
• 1. Building up time and space
• 2. The Self and the Other
• 3. The Self and the world
• 4. The Self between art and madness
• 5. The Self into the dreams
• 6. Dream experience of the Self
• 7. Philosophical outlook: World, Time, and Self
• Index