Freudian Unconscious and Cognitive Neuroscience: From Unconscious Fantasies to Neural Algorithms

225 Pages·2009·0.99 MB·English

by  Vesa Talvitie

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First published 2009 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road,
London NW3 5HT
Copyright © 2009 Vesa Talvitie
The right of Vesa Talvitie to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of
the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission
of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978 1 85575 503
Cover image: Ollie Samarja, Window with Red Stripe.www.
samarja.com
Edited, designed and produced by The Studio Publishing
Services Ltd,
www.publishingservicesuk.co.uk
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e-mail: [email protected]
www.karnacbooks.com
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to many people for intensive discussions around
the topics of this book during past years. First of all, I want to
mention my supervisors, Juhani Ihanus and Hannu Tiitinen,
and Olli Louhimo. Rauno Juntumaa presented valuable
comments on the manuscript. I would have felt intellectual
loneliness without conversations with the following brainy
gentlemen: Alan T. Lloyd, Harry Schlepperman, and Fred
Levin; Henrik Enckell, Jussi Kotkavirta, and Turo Reenkola;
Simo Korkee and Petri Meronen. I want also thank Olli
Sarmaja for the permission to use his painting as the cover
image.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vesa Talvitie is a Doctor of Psychology, licensed
psychotherapist, and organizational consultant (FINOD). He
works currently as an occupational psychologist for the City
of Helsinki. He has published, in both English and Finnish,
several scientific and popular articles on psychoanalytic and
cognitive views of unconscious processes,
neuropsychoanalysis, the nature of psychological
explanations, and organizational dynamics.
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Introduction
“What in man neither becomes reduced to (neuro)physical
matters, nor appears in the scope of consciousness?”
Vesa Talvitie
This puzzle leads us to the core of this book: the answer from
psychoanalysts would be “the (mental) unconscious”,
whereas cogni-tivists and evolutionary psychologists would
use the terms “computations”, or “computational level of
explanation”; “evolutionary and psychic functions”;
“design-level explanation” in their answers. In this book, the
aim is to show that the first answer can be seen in terms of the
latter answers—an approach is created through which
phenomena found by psychoanalysts can be studied in the
framework of cognitive science.
As a young student of psychology I had a strong dislike for
the term “artificial intelligence”. I had a vague idea of
becoming some kind of clinical psychologist, and later I
actually worked in a psychiatric hospital, a crisis unit, and a
prison. I was also in personal psychoanalysis, and became a
licensed psychotherapist. The dislike had something to do
with a feeling that in the core of man there is something that
is wholly different from machines of whatever kind. In my
mind “cognitive science” was—as actually is the case—
closely related to “artificial intelligence”. Thus, for me,
artificial intelligence cast a dark shadow on cognitive science,
too.
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In 1991, I had to read Howard Gardner’s Mind’s New Science
for one of the last tests for the Master of Psychology degree.
Gardner was able to show the origins and interests of
cognitive science in such a way that the student’s eyes
opened. I began to devour Jerry Fodor’s, Steven Stich’s, the
Churchlands’, and Daniel Dennett’s ideas on representations,
neural algorithms, computation, Turing’s machines, Mother
Nature’s intentions, and so on. In the same year, Göte Nyman,
Professor of Psychology in the university of Helsinki,
presented the following challenge in a debate that took place
in the Finnish psychological journal: psychoanalysts should
try to formulate their theoretical ideas by using the
terminology of cognitive science. In my mind, Göte’s
statement became a simple project of translation from the
psychoanalytic terminology to that of cognitive science: just
take a phenomena found by psychoanalysts, read some
cognitivists’ books, and pick the best explanation for the
“Freudian” phenomenon.
I still think that humans are not machines. After having read
Gardner’s book, however, that conviction has not prevented
me from becoming fascinated with the perspectives
introduced by a cognitive orientation. On this basis, I
welcome especially those readers who possess prejudices
towards either psychoanalysis or cognitive science: I have had
(and still have) them both. One might say that this book is
made as a result of them.
The “Freudian” thing I grasped in my project of translation
was the unconscious. The role of it in psychoanalytic thinking
cannot be overemphasized—it is the “cornerstone” without
which psychoanalysis would lack its characteristics. The idea
of repression, for instance, makes sense only through the term
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“unconscious”, and the term “transference” is also grounded
in it. The unconscious is not a theoretical concept existing just
in the theoretical realm, but has practical effects upon clinical
psychoanalysis: psychoanalysts’ work is directed by the
principle that the aim of the psychoanalytic cure is to make
the unconscious (repressed) conscious. All in all, without the
unconscious, there would be no such a thing as
psychoanalysis.
For decades, psychoanalysis has had a monopoly on the
unconscious. From the 1970s onwards, however, the
cognitive orientation has studied it in the scope of several
empirical settings and under a variety of concepts: at the very
least, one must mention the terms “implicit memory”,
“implicit knowledge”, “procedural knowledge”, “semantic
activation without conscious identification”, and “tacit
knowledge”. We can even say that after the cognitive
orien-tation—or cognitive science—had become interested in
consciousness, there was a boom in the study of the
unconscious.
Moreover, in the scope of evolutionary theory, perspectives
have emerged that are more than closely related to the
Freudian unconscious. First, in the 1970s, Robert Trivers
published his classic work The Evolution of Reciprocal
Altruism, which laid the ground for the biologists’ interest in
self-deception. Second, present-day evolutionary psychology
is built on the claim that evolution has “programmed” in us
certain strivings that we are unaware of.
It seems that scientists are almost swarming around the
Freudian cornerstone. However, the situation is not that
simple—the relation between psychoanalysis and mainstream
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science is polarized. On one hand, several respected
researchers—neuroscientists Joseph LeDoux, Gerald
Edelman, and the Nobel-laureate Eric Kandel, for
example—hold that (at least some) old Freudian insights still
make sense, and that the psychoanalytic way of studying man
has to be taken seriously by present-day scientists. The new,
promising endeavour of neuro-psychoanalysis also raises
hopes for the integration of psychoanalysis and present-day
brain research. On the other hand, Freud-bashing is almost a
branch of literature: there are dozens of widely cited books
the core claim of which is that Freud was a charlatan, and that
psychoanalysis is fundamentally and irreparably flawed.
On this basis it is not a surprise that, although psychoanalysis
and cognitive orientation have shared an interest in the
unconscious for about three decades, between them there is a
disagreement on even the most fundamental thing—the
essence of the unconscious. When a cognitivist holds that the
unconscious is just the brain, psychoanalysts have stressed
that the unconscious is mental. In short, in psychoanalytic
circles it is held that the mind has an unconscious part where
repressed memories and desires lie, and whence they may be
brought (or transformed) into the domain of consciousness.
The aim of this book is to create a conception of the
“Freudian things” around the unconscious that takes seriously
both the clinical data gathered in the scope of psychoanalytic
clinical practice during the past 110 years, and the empirical
and theoretical achievements of cognitive science and
evolutionary theory. Tensions between the psychoanalytic
and other views give a hint that the task is anything but easy.
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