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Chapter 5
Psychoanalysis in Theory
and Practice
111
2 FREUD’S CONCEPT OF PERSONALITY TYPES
Psychoanalytic theory holds that as children progress through the five stages of psychosexual development, their libidinal energy continually reattaches itself—or cathects—to other objects. In Freud’s terminology, an object is an unconscious mental representation of the target or focus of sexual or aggressive desires. In the early stages of development, the child’s libidinal energy is focused on infantile objects. If all goes well in the child’s development, however, cathexes are redirected toward more mature objects. On the other hand, the individual can become fix- ated or regressed if any of the earlier developmental stages is marked by either overindulgence or trauma. In other words, such a person’s libidinal energy remains locked within a less mature stage. The personality typology that Freud proposed was founded on this notion. In his opin- ion, people who have a disproportionate amount of libidinal energy invested in one of the developmental stages will exhibit personality characteristics associated with that stage. Freud’s explanation of both normal and pathological personalities is based on the many ways a person can move through the stages of development. The healthiest passage is afforded to the person who completes the stages without having any of his or her libido fixated on earlier stages. He used the analogy of an advancing army. If an army tends to leave
Chapter Goals
- Reveal some of the complexities of Freud’s theories
- Present some of the controversies regarding Freud and psychoanalysis
- Contrast the Freudian view of the unconscious with those of recent neuroscientists
- Detail the theory behind psychoanalysis as a treatment
- Explain the process of psychoanalytic treatment
behind groups of soldiers at various bases along the line of march, it will have less strength for the real battle—in this case, the battle against cruel reality and the ordinary miseries of life. Sadly, Freud considered some amount of fixation inevitable; all of us, as he saw it, will develop fixations to some degree. In his system, people are constitutionally predestined to be always somewhat immature and attached to childish things. Freud’s account of this process begs the question as to exactly how fixation takes place. He answered this question by first proposing that the general tendency toward fixation is constitutional or hereditary. In other words, whatever the cause of a specific fixation, some people are by their essential nature more susceptible to develop it than others. The specific triggers of fixation are quite problematic, irrespective of a person’s susceptibility. A fixation can take place in a given psychosexual stage if the child feels too comfortable in that stage, so that moving on to the next phase results in distress and frustration. Conversely, if a child is traumatized or even displeased during a specific stage, he or she can also become fixated in that stage. Freud compared the process of fixation to the flow of fluid under pressure. Water or some other fluid will naturally flow from higher to lower pressure; however, if openings occur along the path of flow, the fluid will collect in or leak through those openings. The fluid in this metaphor is the libido, which Freud viewed as a finite form of psychological energy. Should some of a person’s life energy be diverted into an opening (fixation) associated with a particular stage, it will collect there until it is released through the process of psychoanalysis. An obvious problem with this metaphorical explanation is that libido itself is a metaphor. There is no objective or measurable process in psychology or physiology that corresponds to this metaphorical concept. The exact concept of a fixation must therefore remain vague in Freud’s system.
Oral Personalities
Freud viewed people as existing in a state of perpetual internal conflict. The human psyche is a set of irreconcilable forces drawing on a limited amount of mental energy. His view of personality types is similarly negative in that he regards them as the result of aberrations in the developmental process. The unsatisfactory completion of a psychosexual stage will lead to a personality type that confines the individual within that stage. For example, if one’s libidinal energy becomes fixated on oral pleasure, the individual will manifest a personality style that distinctly reflects this focus. It follows that because infants in the oral stage are pas- sive and dependent, adults who are fixated in this stage will tend to be dependent, ingratiat- ing, and compliant. Just as the child tends toward optimism, equanimity, and delight, so, too, is the orally fixated adult. Such a person will tend to be a Pollyanna, gullible, and easily led. The oral personality regards the mouth as the greatest source of pleasure, so that eating and drinking will often be taken to excess. Obesity, alcoholism, smoking, and even drug abuse are blamed by Freudian theorists on oral fixations. Because people with substance addictions or eating disorders are dependent and prone to excessive intakes of food or their drugs of choice, Freud’s theory of fixation as the root of their personality type seems to have face validity — that is, it looks like it offers a satisfactory explanation of what it is intended to explain. Some of Freud’s followers divided the oral personality type into two subcategories, the more common of which is referred to as the oral dependent, oral passive, or oral receptive personality The other subtype is the oral aggressive personality, which is negativistic and
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during the period of most intense castration anxiety, he may well turn out to be attracted to countercultural movements, to be supportive of radical causes, or to be an advocate of social change. Freud thought that assertiveness or strength in a woman was evidence of a phallic stage fixation and failure to resolve the Oedipal crisis in a satisfactory fashion. This failure led to what Freud called a masculinity complex:
It points to a complication in the case of girls. When they turn away from their inces- tuous love for their father, with its genital significance, they easily abandon their femi- nine role. They spur their masculinity complex into activity, and from that time forward only want to be boys. (Freud, 1959, p. 186)
The girl’s failure to accept her lack of a penis means that she will become a woman fixated on acting like a man. Consequently, all professional women would be regarded by traditional Freudian theorists as exhibiting a pathological fixation. The concept of the mas- culinity complex is clearly bound to the Central European culture of Freud’s time. So, too, is his notion that competitive women are castrating females, as he believed that they competed with men with the unconscious goal of stealing the male penis. The unwillingness to accept the absence of a penis can also lead to a focus on the clitoris as the central sex organ rather than the vagina, Freud thought. Lesbianism is also viewed as a variant of these kinds of phal- lic fixations. According to Freud, a lesbian has taken this masculine fixation to its extreme and seeks to play the male role with another female. Homosexuality in men is also considered a type of phallic fixation. Freud thought that the typical homosexual male was pampered by an overly protective mother during his phallic stage. An unusual degree of closeness and comfort with his mother leads to his identifying with her rather than making her an object of sexual interest. By identifying with his mother, the gay man develops a feminine type of sexuality. His fixation on this highly satisfying period of his life leads to his seeking a way to preserve the bond between mother and son. To accomplish this goal, he will take on the role of a mother with other boys, making them the focus of his libidinal drives. The boys, however, are only proxies for him in that they play the role of the loved son. Hence, homosexual love is considered by traditional Freudians to be an immature and narcissistic form of self-love. Given Freud’s theory of psychosexual fixations, one can readily understand one potential source of criticism of Freudian theory. Specifically, Freud’s system of thought tends to view all human behavior as symptomatic of some kind of pathology.
Genital Personalities
If Freud believed there were any people free of neurosis, they would be adults with a fully developed genital personality. Freud only implied the existence of a genital personality and never actually proposed a distinct personality type associated with this stage of development. However, an early follower of Freud named Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) described the geni- tal personality in this way:
Since [the genital character] is capable of gratification, he is capable of monogamy without compulsion or repression; but he is also capable, if a reasonable motive is
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given, of changing the object without suffering any injury. He does not adhere to his sexual object out of guilt feelings or out of moral considerations, but is faithful out of a healthy desire for pleasure: because it gratifies him. He can master polygamous desires if they are in conflict with his relations to the loved object without repression; but he is able also to yield to them if they overly disturb him. The resulting actual conflict he will solve in a realistic manner. There are hardly any neurotic feelings of guilt. (Reich, 1929/ 1948, p. 161)
The genital personality can be said to be exemplified by those people who pass through all prior stages of psychosexual development with a sufficient supply of libido to perform pro- ductive work, love others in a mature fashion, and reproduce. In contrast to these healthy specimens of humankind, people with fixations in earlier stages will tend towards narcissism , fetishism , and other barriers to mature heterosexual gratification. Thus, men with paraphilia and women with frigidity or other arousal disorders would be examples of people who fail to achieve the level of maturity required for genital personalities.
2 PSYCHOANALYTIC NOSOLOGY
Psychoanalytic treatment sought to resolve conflicts that were typically centered on mal- adaptive sexual functioning. The reader should recall that libido, which refers to both the sex- ual energy within a person and the person’s general life force, can lose its direction. It can become detached from appropriate targets, attached to inappropriate objects, and thereby cause emotional and personality malfunctions. Neurosis is the term Freud used to describe the state of libidinal dysfunction.
Actual neurosis. Actual neurosis was a term first used by Freud in 1898. He used it to describe an inversion of libido resulting in acute impairments of sexual functioning and phys- iological consequences of present disturbances in sexual functioning. He distinguished actual neuroses from psychoneuroses, which he regarded as due to psychological conflicts and past events. He further distinguished two types of actual neurosis— neurasthenia , which he attrib- uted to sexual excess, and anxiety neurosis , which he saw as the result of unrelieved sexual stimulation. Freud later also included hypochondria, or excessive concern with one’s health, among the actual neuroses.
Psychoneurosis. This term appears in Freud’s early writings and is used to define a series of transference neuroses, including hysteria, phobias, and obsessional neurosis. The symptoms of the psychoneuroses are symbolic expressions of infantile conflicts in which the ego defends itself from disagreeable representations from the sexual sphere.
Transference neurosis. Transference neuroses, according to Freud, are childhood neurotic pat- terns played out by patients during psychoanalytic sessions. He defined transference itself as the process in which the analysand transfers to the analyst emotions experienced in childhood toward parents or other important figures. The transference neuroses include: (a) conversion hysteria, in which the symptoms are physical complaints; (b) anxiety hysteria, in which the patient experiences excessive anxiety in the presence of an external object (phobia); and
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essential difference between neurosis and psychosis as follows: “Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and its environment (outer world)” (Freud, 1959, pp. 250–251). Psychoanalytic theory would therefore view a psychotic individual as one whose ego is too weak to handle the vicissitudes of life. Or the psychotic might be a person with an adequate ego who faces such severe adversity as to cause a complete collapse of ego functioning.
2 PSYCHOANALYTIC PSYCHOTHERAPY
Despite any criticisms of his theories, Freud deserves credit for a comprehensive model of what it means to be human. In addition to his attempts to explain the nature of human per- sonality and the course of its development, he provided accounts of group behavior and the role and origin of spirituality, regarding that what we consider the highest and most noble aspects of human thought and behavior arise from our lower instincts. Although Freud was pessimistic about the possibility of curing neuroses or effecting lasting changes in personal- ity, he developed the first form of psychotherapy: psychoanalysis. This method of psy- chotherapy involves a therapist who plays the role of a blank screen on which the patient can project his unconscious impulses or conflicts. The psychoanalyst encourages the client to free-associate, or speak freely, about whatever comes to mind. In doing so, the client is expected to reveal portions of his or her unconscious conflicts from time to time. This method was also applied to dream analysis, in which the client would relate recent dreams and the analyst would seek to uncover the impulses and wishes that the dream disguised. The analyst also would interpret all behaviors directed toward him, whether positive or negative, as rep- resentations of conflicted emotions toward parental figures. If clients displayed affection or sexual attraction to the analyst, the analyst would regard them as transferring repressed feelings for their parent to the analyst. The reader should recall Anna O’s phantom pregnancy in this context. Conversely, if clients were angered or displeased with the analyst, the analyst would consider their negativity as repressed hostile impulses toward a parental figure rather than directed at the analyst. These specific psychoanalytic techniques are largely explorative even though they seek to reduce patients’ suffering and improve their ability to function. Although Freud believed that personality change is possible, he was pessimistic about the practical merits of psychoanalysis in effecting such a change. The long and grueling nature of analysis, the verbal and intellectual skills required of the analysand, the anxiety and distress provoked by the exploration of one’s past, and the limited effectiveness of psychoanalysis in treating the more severe mental disorders were some of the reasons for Freud’s pessimism. He expressed himself on this and related issues as follows:
Allowing “repetition” during analytic treatment, which is the latest form of technique, constitutes a conjuring into existence of a piece of real life, and can therefore not always be harmless and indifferent in its effects on all cases. The whole question of “exacerba- tion of symptoms during treatment,” so often unavoidable, is linked up with this. The very beginning of the treatment above all brings about a change in the patient’s conscious attitude towards his illness. He has contented himself usually with complaining of it,
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with regarding it as nonsense, and with underestimating its importance; for the rest, he has extended the ostrich-like conduct of repression which he adopted towards the sources of his illness on to its manifestations. Thus it happens that he does not rightly know what are the conditions under which his phobia breaks out, has not properly heard the actual words of his obsessive idea or not really grasped exactly what it is his obses- sive impulse is impelling him to do. The treatment of course cannot allow this. He must find the courage to pay attention to the details of his illness. His illness itself must no longer seem to him contemptible, but must become an enemy worthy of his mettle, a part of his personality, kept up by good motives, out of which things of value for his future life have to be derived. The way to reconciliation with the repressed part of himself which is coming to expression in his symptoms is thus prepared from the beginning; yet a certain tolerance towards the illness itself is induced. Now if this new attitude towards the illness intensifies the conflicts and brings to the fore symptoms which till then had been indistinct, one can easily console the patient for this by pointing out that these are only necessary and temporary aggravations, and that one cannot overcome an enemy who is absent or not within range. The resistance, however, may try to exploit the situa- tion to its own ends, and abuse the permission to be ill. It seems to say: “See what hap- pens when I really let myself go in these things! Haven’t I been right to relegate them all to repression?” Young and childish persons in particular are inclined to make the neces- sity for paying attention to their illness a welcome excuse for luxuriating in their symp- toms. There is another danger, that in the course of the analysis, other, deeper-lying instinctual trends which had not yet become part of the personality may come to be “reproduced.” Finally, it is possible that the patient’s behavior outside the transference may involve him in temporary disasters in life, or even be so designed as permanently to rob the health he is seeking of all its value. (Freud, 1959, pp. 371–373)
Despite Freud’s pessimism, however, psychoanalytic treatment has attempted to bring about both symptom relief and long-term personality change by liberating unconsciously invested psychic energy by bringing it to consciousness. This task is accomplished through several phases of treatment.
First Phase: Establishing the Therapeutic Alliance
The first phase involves developing a therapeutic alliance between the analyst and the analysand through a process in which the analyst elicits trust and faith from the analysand. The establishment of a therapeutic alliance is inherently more difficult in psychoanalysis than in other forms of psychotherapy, however, because the analyst must scrupulously avoid revealing any aspects of his or her own personality. Self-disclosure, whether biographical or attitudinal, would negate the therapist’s usefulness as a blank screen. For example, the analyst could not be certain that behavior related to the transference was indeed issuing from the patient’s unconscious instead of being a response to the therapist’s behavior. Trust and confidence in psychoanalysis must, therefore, be earned by the therapist’s steadfast consistency to the correct method. Once this takes place, the client is encouraged to relate anything that comes to mind, no matter how trivial or irrelevant it may seem on the surface. Over time, the patient’s free associations will result in a cathartic release of libidinal energy along with the strong emotions
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had happened therefore was this. The content of the wish had appeared first of all in the patient’s consciousness without any memories of the surrounding circumstances which would have assigned it to a past time. The wish which was present was then, owing to the compulsion to associate which was dominant in her consciousness, linked to my person, with which the patient was legitimately concerned; and as the result of this mésalliance —which I describe as a “false connection”—the same affect was pro- voked which had forced the patient long before to repudiate this forbidden wish. Since I have discovered this, I have been able, whenever I have been similarly involved per- sonally, to presume that a transference and a false connection have once more taken place. Strangely enough, the patient is deceived afresh every time this is repeated. (Freud, 1957, p. 303)
Seventeen years later, Freud elaborated on the concept of transference and linked it to his notion of the object or love-object.
Let us bear clearly in mind that every human being has acquired, by the combined oper- ation of inherent disposition and of external influences in childhood, a special individ- uality in the exercise of his capacity to love—that is, in the conditions which he sets up for loving, in the impulses he gratifies by it, and in the aims he sets out to achieve in it. This forms a cliché or stereotype in him, so to speak (or even several), which perpetu- ally repeats and reproduces itself as life goes on, in so far as external circumstances and the nature of the accessible love-objects permit, and is indeed itself to some extent mod- ifiable by later impressions. Now our experience has shown that of these feelings which determine the capacity to love only a part has undergone full psychical development; this part is directed towards reality, and can be made use of by the conscious personal- ity, of which it forms part. The other part of these libidinal impulses has been held up in development, withheld from the conscious personality and from reality, and may either expend itself only in fantasy, or may remain completely buried in the unconscious so that the conscious personality is unaware of its existence. Expectant libidinal impulses will inevitably be roused, in anyone whose need for love is not being satis- factorily gratified in reality, by each new person coming upon the scene, and it is more than probable that both parts of the libido, the conscious and the unconscious, will par- ticipate in this attitude. It is therefore entirely normal and comprehensible that the libido-cathexes, expectant and in readiness as they are in those who have not adequate gratification, should be turned also towards the person of the physician. As we should expect, this accumulation of libido will be attached to prototypes, bound up with one of the clichés already established in the mind of the person concerned, or, to put it in another way, the patient will weave the figure of the physician into one of the “series” already constructed in his mind. If the physician should be specially connected in this way with the father-imago (as Jung has happily named it) it is quite in accordance with his actual relationship to the patient; but the transference is not bound to this prototype; it can also proceed from the mother- or brother-imago and so on. The peculiarity of the transference to the physician lies in its excess, in both character and degree, over what is rational and justifiable—a peculiarity which becomes comprehensible when we consider that in this situation the transference is effected not merely by the conscious ideas and expectations of the patient, but also by those that are under suppression, or unconscious. (Freud, 1959, pp. 312–314)
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Late Stages of Psychoanalysis
The later stages of psychoanalytic therapy are lengthier than either the early or middle stages, for the later phases are those in which interpretation assumes cardinal significance. Interpretation, or the analyst’s explanations of the patient’s emotions and behavior, can occur at any stage of psychoanalysis, but regular interpretation must wait until a solid therapeutic alliance has been formed and the therapist has become familiar with the patient’s personality and major unconscious conflicts. The meanings of dreams, parapraxes, resistance, and transference reactions are among the topics that psychoanalytic therapists discuss with their patients. The goal of interpretation is to provide the client with insight, defined as an intellectual and emotional understanding of the unconscious determinants of one’s behavior; and then to work through these unconscious issues to strengthen the ego, loosen the restrictions imposed by the superego, and gain better control over the id. In Freudian terms, the libidinal energy consumed by the neurosis itself and the defenses that keep it out of awareness can be freed to strengthen the ego. According to Freud, the goal of psychoanalysis was “Where id was, there ego shall be... where superego was, there ego shall be” ( Wo Es war, soll Ich werden , a literal translation being “Where ‘it’ was, ‘I’ shall come to be” (Freud, 1933, p. 80). While simply talking about unconscious conflicts can lead to catharsis and an intensification of the therapeutic alliance, Freud soon discovered that it is necessary to supply the patient with emotional insight into and an opportunity to work through his or her problems by addressing the transference reactions occurring in the therapy sessions. Freud viewed offering interpretations too early in the therapeutic process as equivalent to reading a cookbook to a starving person.
Risks of Psychoanalysis
Such critics of psychoanalysis as Hans Eysenck and Jeffrey Masson, who worked for a time in the Freud archives, have argued that in addition to the theoretical problems with Freud’s theories, its clinical applications have violated the Hippocratic maxim: first, do no harm. One example of the potential of psychoanalysis to damage patients, however, is the term “schizophrenogenic mother,” coined by Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (1889–1957) in 1948 in an attempt to explain the origins of schizophrenia (Fromm-Reichmann, 1948). For nearly a generation, psychoanalysts made use of this term, which implied that schizophrenia is caused by a mother who placed her child repeatedly in a double bind (Bateson, Jackson, Haley, & Weakland, 1956), which gives the child conflicting messages from a single source. A double bind in essence forces children into a psychological dilemma in which any response they make will be considered inappropriate. For example, a mother who scolds a child for not being affectionate enough but later punishes the child for being too dependent when the child tries to kiss her would be placing the child in a double bind. Despite the complete lack of evidence that double binding causes schizophrenia, many mothers were hurt by psychiatrists who falsely fixed the blame on them. Similarly, psychoanalysts once said childhood autism was caused by parents. Parental indifference, a cold rejecting mother, or a failure to bond between parents and children were seen as the cause of this disorder, which is now almost universally considered to result from brain dysfunction. Moreover, autistic children were treated with psychoanalysis, which is now regarded to be an ineffective form of therapy for this disorder. Others criticize psychoanalysis as being an excessively long and costly, thus causing indirect financial harm, as more direct and less expensive therapeutic approaches are available.
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(Grünbaum 2002, 2006, 2007): (a) its “cornerstone” that unsuccessful repression is the cause of neurosis; (b) the wish- fulfillment theory of dream-production; (c) its explanation of seemingly unmotivated bungled actions (“slips”) as induced by repressed motives; (d) Freud’s claim that his innovative method of clinical investigation by free association can identify the causes of neuroses, dreams, and slips; and (e) the contention that the psychoanalytic dissection of the adult patient’s infantile behavior toward the analyst during treatment is the key to fathoming the pathogenesis of his/her disorder. Moreover, Grünbaum maintains that none of the evidential defects of Freud’s edifice have been remedied by the post-Freudian modifi- cations of psychoanalysis. In Freud’s view, neurotic symptoms, the manifest contents of dreams, and our various “slips” are each constructed as “compromises between the demands of a repressed [instinctual] impulse and the resistances of a censoring force in the ego” (Grünbaum, 2001, p. 106). He assumes axiomatically that distressing mental states, such as forbidden wishes, trauma, disgust, anxiety, anger, shame, hate, and guilt—all of which are unpleasurable—almost always actuate, and then fuel, forgetting to the point of repression. Thus, repression wards off negative affect by banishing it from consciousness. Grünbaum does not deny the existence of this mechanism of repression, but he objects that Freud was disingenuously evasive in handling a genuine challenge to this scenario. Thus, Grünbaum writes:
As Freud put it dogmatically: “The tendency to forget what is disagreeable seems to me to be a quite universal one” and “distressing memories succumb especially easily to motivated forgetting.” Yet he was driven to concede that “one often finds it impossible, on the contrary, to get rid of distressing memories that pursue one, and to banish dis- tressing affective impulses like remorse and the pangs of conscience.” Furthermore, he acknowledged that “distressing things are particularly hard to forget.” Thus, some painful mental states are vividly remembered while others are forgotten or even repressed. Yet Freud’s account is vitiated by the fact that factors other than the degree of their painfulness determine whether they are remembered or forgotten. (Grünbaum, 2001, p. 107)
Furthermore, Grünbaum points out that Freud explicitly failed to come to grips with this very damaging fact, when he tried to parry it, declaring: “Mental life is the arena and battle- ground for mutually opposing purposes [of forgetting and remembering].... there is room for both.” Finally, Grünbaum contests in depth the popular notion that psychoanalytic insight is curative.
Challenging Freud’s Model
It has been close to a century since Freud proposed the three-layered model of the human mind, and in that time, research has not supplied evidence to support that the psyche works in the way that Freud proposed. The same is true for Freud’s structures, the id, ego, and
Photo 5.1 Adolph Grünbaum (1923–)
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superego. With the advent of cognitive psychology, however, has come a large body of work providing a more complex view of nonconscious processes. The term nonconscious is used here to describe mental activities that operate outside awareness, in contrast to the term unconscious, which implies a dynamic Freudian process. Over the course of the last few decades, the trend in psychology has largely shifted from a behavioral paradigm to one of cognitive information-processing. Within this paradigm, researchers have moved toward both an acceptance and a new understanding of nonconscious thinking. Nonconscious processing has been shown to play a role in such aspects of our being as emotions, perception, attribution of meaning (Marcel, 1983a, 1983b), and learning (Reber, 1967). Exploring the development of this work will facilitate understanding of how recent research and thinking stand in contrast to Freud’s models. Ulric Neisser (1928–), a professor who published the first text on cognitive psychology in 1976, coined the term preattentive processes to describe those mental functions that occur without the subject’s conscious attention. The Stroop effect , a color-word task, is a classic example of this phenomenon. John R. Stroop (1897–1973), a psychologist in Tennessee, described the effect that bears his name in his doctoral dissertation, completed in 1935. Stroop noted that when individuals are asked to name the colors of the words in a chart similar to the one in Figure 5.1, they would often read the word itself rather than naming the color of its letters. Psychologists generally believe that the processing of lexical (word-related) information becomes automatic and preattentive in the sense that it has ceased to require conscious attention. In contrast, the naming of the colors of words is unusual, making it effortful and demanding conscious mental processing on the subject’s part. More recently, the term preattentive has largely been dropped in favor of terms like nonconscious or automatic to describe mental activities that require little or no conscious awareness to complete. For example, people are quite capable of accumulating information about the frequency of events without conscious effort or attention; that is, they learn it nonconsciously. If people are asked a question like “Have you seen more German shepherds or cocker spaniels in your neighborhood?” they will usually deny any conscious knowledge about what dogs they may have seen recently but tend to be accurate when asked to guess. Hasher and Zacks performed extensive research into this phenomenon (Hasher & Zacks, 1979; Zacks, Hasher, & Sanft, 1982), and have provided evidence that people acquire information about the frequency of events without conscious effort and without being conscious that they have even done so. In fact, this automatic ability to acquire information about the frequency of events is largely independent of age, education, emotional state, and effort. In one early study, Hasher and colleagues (Hasher, Goldstein, & Toppino, 1977) presented a list of 48 words to elementary students in Grades 2, 4, and 6. They then presented the same
Figure 5.1 Example of Stroop Effect
Blue
Red
White
Black
across many years with very poor outcomes may not have any conscious awareness of his actual gambling performance. According to Damásio, the man’s emotional centers will store the negative affect associated with gambling so that thinking about doing it again will result in an uncomfortable or uneasy feeling. This hypothesis makes a great deal of sense from an evolutionary perspective, as our precognitive progenitors would benefit from a mechanism guiding them to avoid situations that had caused fear or pain. Damásio (1995) demonstrated the way in which emotional guidance works nonconsciously in a study using a card game. In this study the participants were asked to sit in front of four decks of cards labeled A, B, C, and D. The players were each given a loan of $2,000 in play money that looked genuine and instructed to try to lose as little of their stake as possible while trying to win as much money as they could. The game involved turning over cards one at a time from any of the four decks until the experimenter told the participants to stop. The subjects were not informed how many card turns they would be allowed. They were also told that most card turns would result in winning some money but that certain others would result in paying a fine to the experimenter. The subjects were given no other information about the amounts to be won or lost. The participants were encouraged to learn the best strategy to win the most money. An important feature of the experiment was that the four decks differed markedly in their payouts. Some of the decks contained cards with bigger payouts but also held cards with very large fines. The participants in the study consisted of two groups of people; the first group were healthy subjects, while the second included people who had suffered prior damage to the ventromedial prefrontal lobes of the brain. Despite the complexity of the card payout system, the intact participants generally discovered the correct strategy to maximize their rewards. The participants with damage to the frontal lobes of their brains, however, would almost always persist in a strategy that would be profitable in the short run but cause losses in the
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Figure 5.2 Example of Artificial Grammar in Implicit Learning
OUT
S
V
P
X
X
V
T
P
T
S
IN
S
S
S
S
S 1
S
NOTE: In this schematic, grammar strings are produced by following any path of arrows leading from the initial State 1 to the terminal State 6. The following are the five basic strings in this grammar with the loops or recursions in brackets: 1. T[S]XS;
- T[S]XX[[T]VPX]VV; 3. T[S]XX[[T]VPX]VPS; 4. P[[T]VPX]VV; 5. P[[T]VPX]VPS.
long run. Interestingly, the brain-damaged individuals had IQs comparable to those of the intact participants but lacked the ability to express emotions. Damásio proposes that it is emotional feedback that helps people intuit optimal choices nonconsciously in tasks like the card game. To help the investigators examine the subjects’ underlying responses, the subjects had electrodes placed on their skin to measure their galvanic response (resistance of the skin to a mild electrical current). Remarkably, the participants with intact brains began to exhibit subtle levels of emotional arousal when confronted with the decks that contained a disproportionate number of bad choices before they were able to explain their choices in words. In contrast, the participants with damaged prefrontal lobes were never able to master the card game despite normal intelligence; moreover, they never showed any significant level of emotional arousal when facing bad choices.
Nonconscious Processes
The notion of nonconscious automatic processes has grown with the development of cognitive psychology (e.g., Anderson, 1985; Erdelyi, 1985; Lachman, Lachman, & Butterfield, 1979). We can see the beginnings of this distinction from researchers like Broadbent (1958), who represented the conscious mind as a system with limited capacity. He suggested that the role of consciousness is to filter out the less relevant stimuli from the sensory barrage that we encounter at all times. An example of such filtering would be a parent’s ability to detect his or her child’s face in a crowd of other children on a large playground. Broadbent’s original model, however, did not allow for any processing of the ignored or filtered stimuli. A classic experiment by Moray (1959) then established that the role of attention is not merely to filter out less relevant sensations or stimuli. He employed a task known as shadow- ing, in which subjects wearing headphones had to monitor a message that entered one ear and repeat the message back to the experimenter. While the subjects were monitoring, their names
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Table 5.1 Damásio’s Gambling Experiment
Variables Deck 1 Deck 2 Deck 3 Deck 4
Reward $100 $100 $50 $
Probability of the reward 1 1 1 1
Fines $150–350 $1,250 $25–75 $
Average fine $250 $1,250 $50 $
Probability of a fine 0.5 0.1 0.5 0.
First punishment appears at Card 3 Card 9 Card 3 Card 10
Expected value of a card −$25 −$25 +$25 +$
SOURCE: Damasio, A. R. (1995). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. New York: Quill.
the process will become fully conscious. Automaticity exemplifies the notion that the uncon- scious is acquired through learning. This point of view contrasts with Freud’s idea that the unconscious contains fundamental processes unique to itself. Posner in a review (1982) of the research on automatic processes agreed that automaticity is a function of reduced demands on attentional resources. He suggested that people can monitor two channels of sensory information simultaneously because no interference occurs over the sensory channels employed, but that conscious awareness of any of the information coming across the channels imposes a drastic limit. An example might be a piano student who is playing a difficult piece from memory. The student can be aware of the feel of the keys beneath his fingers and the sound of the notes at the same time without interference, but if one of the notes sounds out of tune, it will intrude on the pianist’s conscious awareness. Cognitive psychology’s support for the concept of a nondynamic unconscious has led some Freudians to use it as a basis for supporting Freud’s conjectures. Other researchers (O’Brien & Jureidini, 2002) suggest that this effort is inherently ordained to fail, as they maintain that the human brain is inherently structured for nonconscious mentation in a way incompatible with Freud’s models. Indeed, studies of cognition, cognitive neuroscience, and related fields have revealed that a large portion of our brains do function without conscious intermediation. Similarly, functions that are sometimes conscious, like the example of driving with a manual transmission, can operate at other times without the subject’s conscious awareness. These observations differ from Freud’s premises in that his dynamic unconscious had its own volition arising from developmental pressures, societal mores, and biological predispositions—premises that are essentially at odds with more recent findings. Cognitive models of nonconscious mentation depict the processes of attention, sensation, perception, memory, and related functions all interacting in a logical fashion. This picture stands in direct contrast to the Freudian notion of an irrational unconscious driven by an id. Freud originally attempted to link hysteria and other manifestations of the unconscious to the workings of the brain in his reductionistic Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950; published in German in 1895 as Entwurf einer Psychologie ). He gave up, conceding that his knowledge was insufficient to explain the brain in terms of the internal connections between two different types of neurons or nerve cells. More recent neuroscientists have provided evidence that the unconscious is an essential aspect of the structure of the human brain. This concept was cogently set forth through the work of Paul D. MacLean, who researched this issue for several decades (MacLean, 1954, 1972).
The Triune Brain
MacLean concluded that the human brain is a triune brain in that it can be anatomically and functionally divided into three distinct subbrains (see Figure 5.3), which he named the reptilian, paleomammalian, and neomammalian brains (MacLean 1977a, 1977b). MacLean observed that each of these regions has internal connections among its various structures that are more efficient than its connections to the other subbrains. The reptilian brain contains the brain stem, the midbrain, the basal ganglia , the hypothalamus , and the reticular activating system. These structures resemble the complete brains of the reptiles, our distant ancestors. In reptiles, these structures are sufficient for the tasks of learning, aggressive and defensive behaviors, and intake and reproduction (MacLean, 1985).
Chapter 5 Psychoanalysis in Theory and Practice — 129
The paleomammalian brain, according to MacLean, comprises the brain’s limbic system, whose name comes from the Latin word for “edge.” The paleomammalian brain is a complex of brain centers that serve the role of mediating survival behaviors and the associated drives, rewards, and punishments. In other words, the paleomammalian brain is the set of structures in which we feel the delight of pleasure as well as the unpleasant sensations of hunger and the torment of pain. The paleomammalian brain regulates all of our behaviors through its ability to impose the rewards and punishments that guide our decisions. These two older subbrains, according to MacLean, contain the legacy of our distant ancestors passed down through evolution and genetic transmission. Territoriality, group aggression, courtship, mating, and socialization are all behaviors that these less conscious systems regulate. It follows that the essential qualities of human personality arise there. This hypothesis is supported by studies of people with damage to the limbic structures of their brains, who almost invariably undergo marked personality changes. There is the famous case of Phineas Gage, a 28-year-old railroad worker in Vermont, who was injured in an accident in 1848 in which an explosion blew a 30-inch-long tamping iron through his skull; it entered through his lower left cheekbone and exited the top center of his head. Remarkably, Gage survived the accident, living for 12 years after the event. However, all who knew him reported a marked change in his personality. Originally polite and diligent, he became an impulsive ne’er-do-well who could not sustain work, was foul-mouthed and aggressive. Gage’s case is usually cited as one of the earliest pieces of evidence in neurology that damage to various parts of the brain can affect personality as well as vision, hearing, and other forms of sense perception (Haas, 2001).
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Figure 5.3 McLain concluded that the brain is a triune brain: divided into three subsections
Neo-Cortex
Limbic System
Reptilian Brain
