Developmental Science and Psychoanalysis

Integration and Innovation

Peter Fonagy, Linda Mayes, Mary Target, Peter Fonagy, Linda Mayes, Mary Target

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429912658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

As a discipline, psychoanalysis began at the interface of mind and brain and has always been about those most basic questions of biology and psychology: loving, hating, what brings us together as lovers, parents, and friends and what pulls us apart in conflict and hatred. These are the enduring mysteries of life and especially of early development-how young children learn the language of the social world with its intertwined biological, genetic, and experiential roots and how infants translate thousands of intimate moments with their parents into a genuine, intuitive, emotional connection to other persons. Basic developmental neuroscience and psychology has also of late turned to these basic questions of affiliation: of how it is that as humans our most basic concerns are about finding, establishing, preserving, and mourning our relationships. These areas in broad strokes are the substance of mind and brain, and the last decade has brought much new science to the biology of attachment, love, and aggression.

Chapter One

Embodied psychoanalysis? Or, on the confluence of psychodynamic theory and developmental science

Ami Klin & Warren Jones

Background

What is the common ground between psychodynamic theory and developmental science? Some years ago, any attempt to address this question might have resulted in the excommunication of the attempter in both camps. And yet, there are many productive ways in which psychoanalysis and developmental science could interact, in a mutually beneficial manner, to fill in conceptual and methodological gaps in both.

Some reluctance to address potential areas of confluence comes from the attitude that these different approaches to the emergence and functioning of the human mind operate at different levels of discourse (e.g., the emotional mind vs. the cognitive mind, the clinical approach vs. the experimental approach, or the irrational psyche vs. brain-based mechanisms of information processing). This hesitation might be misplaced, however, since there are at least two reasons why these divides might be more artificial than real, and more reflective of a needless cultural battle rather than based on irreconcilable constructs and approaches: (a) The adoption of different levels of discourse was never an obstacle in cognitive science. For example, the powerful computer metaphor separating brain and mind into “hardware” and “software” processes (Gardner, 1985; Winograd, 1975) has allowed, for several decades, cognitive scientists to generate “software” models of information processing and then seek reification of their hypotheses in the brain through experiments, computer simulations, and, more recently, in functional neuroimaging studies (for a critical history of this effort in the artificial intelligence field, see Winograd & Flores, 1986). (b) A long-ignored approach to cognitive neuroscience is making an important comeback in the past few years (see Clark, 1999; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). Variably called “embodied cognition” or “enactive mind”, its main tenet is that any separation between mind and brain, or between cognition on the one hand and actions or bodily sensations on the other hand, is an artificial artefact of the cognitivist approach adopted in neuroscience since the advent of the computer metaphor. This approach states that to render cognitive processes independent of the body, in the same way as computer software is largely independent of computer hardware, is to make the psyche a “ghost” entity. This ghost hovers over an individual’s bodily reality in some artificial theoretical space very much like software hovers over the computer circuitry. The computer metaphor makes Meaning—or how something means something to someone—an inscrutable mystery. We know where the meaning of software comes from—namely, from the mind of the programmer. But how do human cognitive processes (our software) mean anything to our sensations, actions, and feelings (our intimate hardware)? In our cognitive models of ourselves we typically have arrows connecting our various modules, or how sensory data feed into perception that feed into cognition and prompt action. However, we know very little what these arrows really are (Putnam, 1973) and whether it makes any sense to divide our minds and bodies into such distinct systems—not unlike a textbook that needs to be divided into chapters, ranging from more basic to more complex ones (e.g., from sensations to higher cognitive functions).

Psychoanalysis never made this divide. In this approach, the mind is, in many ways, a result of the developmental experiences of the body. Clearly, the psyche can elevate itself to great heights of symbolism and symbolic processing, but it is never free of its primordial generating forces—namely, the bodily experiences. But paradoxically, although psychoanalysis focuses a great deal on instinctual needs and responses to the world, it shies away from dealing with the basic unit of its philosophy—that is, how bodily sensations and experiences become symbolic tools. In fact, psychoanalysis deals almost exclusively with the (irrational) transactions of symbols and what they stand for. Just as in cognitivist psychology, there is a reluctance to bring mind and body together, and there is a clear preference for the mind. In this sense, the only contrast is that the former prefers the irrational mind, whereas the latter prefers the rational one. But there is an important difference. In contrast to cognitivist psychology and its software constructs, the mind in psychoanalysis is never a ghost: it is an immediate experience, a sensation, a motivation, an action, or a perception, all rooted in the body and its developmental experiences. In this sense, psychoanalysis is much closer to the emerging neuroscience approach of embodied cognition than it is to traditional cognitive psychology. Thus it may contribute to developmental science by dispelling the cognitive ghosts and transforming them into embodied pieces of meaning. And yet, psychoanalysis may benefit from developmental science by making its most fundamental theoretical unit—how bodily sensations become symbols and symbolic transactions—more available to systematic study.

Piaget: “the affective unconscious and the cognitive unconscious”

It is very reassuring that prior to this book and its brave contributors, some three decades ago, one of the creators of modern developmental science was asked to address the confluence of psychoanalysis and developmental science: Piaget was asked by the American Psychoanalytic Association (Piaget, 1973) to discuss potential areas of overlap. Focusing on the fundamental psychoanalytic construct of the unconscious, Piaget contrasted the psychoanalytic mainstay as the “affective unconscious” with his own life work on the emergence of processes of thinking, which he called “the cognitive unconscious”. Neither process is immediately available to introspective access and hence remains unconscious unless a higher level of organization of experiences takes place through language-mediated thinking. In psychoanalytic therapy, the individual gains introspective access to, say, repressed memories, via the interpretations offered by the analyst in the process of the therapeutic “inter-view”—that is, through acts of communication (Farr, 1984). In this sense, the psychoanalytic setting makes possible the conversion of nonconceptual affective states into narrative memories through the ongoing communicative process. For example, early unpleasant memories might be rediscovered via the dynamics of free association. Piaget argued that many forms of cognitive learning were of a similar nature. In one observation he exemplifies this process in the following way:

When a child manages (on his own or by imitation) to use one or two fingers to send off a pingpong ball on a horizontal surface in such a way that it starts backwards by itself, he does not see that he made it turn backward from the start. He believes that first it was rolling forward and then it changed direction by itself. To explain the lacunae or the distortions in the conscious awareness, one would be tempted to resort to a seemingly obvious reason—that is, that the child simply does not “understand” what he did, and so all he can remember is that which is intelligible to him. But we believe that this interpretation is inadequate. It is not true that the child has not understood anything of his successful action (reverse rotation of the pingpong ball). He did understand the essential, but in action, and not by thought; that is, by sensorimotor and not representational schemas. In other words, he “knows” how to cast the pingpong ball, and he knows it as a function of a certain perceptual motor learning (and by no means innately). [Piaget, 1973, pp. 254–255]

Piaget was, therefore, very much aware of learning and meaning that occur as a result of sensorimotor experiences in the world. He quotes Binet’s whimsical expression: “Thought is an unconscious activity of the mind” (p. 250). And he goes on to describe a series of examples, typically characterized by processes of automatic behaviours or over-learned skills: for example, we can all crawl if asked to, but most of us are unable to provide a narrative that correctly accounts for how we do so; or we can run down a flight of steps, or play tennis, or improvise on the piano (if we are a little musical), but these processes not only are “unconscious”, they are also disrupted if we try to think about it while performing the task (thinking about each note you play on the piano may disrupt your improvisational attempt; worrying about the physical trajectory of the tennis ball may, in fact, ensure that you will miss the ball flying at you at great speed). This was his way of validating the psychoanalytic unconscious, although he was cautious to separate his cognitive one from psychoanalysts’ “affective” one. The “unconscious” brought the two camps together for a moment, but it is very unlikely that his audience greeted this intellectual exercise as true rapprochement. Their unconscious was loaded with emotional meaning, conflictual motivations, and social trauma. Throwing a ping-pong ball in reverse rotation was very different from having ambivalent feelings of identification and annihilation towards one’s father.

Whether it was the pressures inherent in addressing the hostile audience of the American Psychoanalytic Association or his genuine belief in processes affecting learning that were outside his “child as a little scientist” model of development, Piaget did point to forms of meaning that were generally outside the realm of conscious thinking. His focus on sensorimotor schemas is particularly enlightening, given his articulate descriptions of learning as a result of the coupling of a child’s bodily sensations and actions towards the surrounding world. What he was less prepared to tackle was the possibility that we use “sensorimotor schemas” to learn more about the world than what he described in his genetic epistemology (Piaget, 1970). There may have been a father or a mother responding in some affective way to the child’s actions on the ping-pong ball after all.

What Piaget omitted in his accounts, another creator of developmental science made into the pillar of his developmental theories. In Piaget’s world, caregivers could be imitated, but they were otherwise non-players in the child’s development. The child protagonist proceeded relentlessly in scientific pursuits of world discovery almost by himself or herself. Not so for Vygotsky (1978). In his work, and in the work of decades of Soviet developmental psychology that he generated (Wertsch, 1979), thought itself was a social phenomenon, or the inalienable result of being born immersed in social experiences. As for the American Pragmatist George Herbert Mead (1934), symbols emerged from social interaction, with its cultural relativity and complexity, but with a shared sense of regularity captured by conventional symbols such as language, which, in turn, reflected shared regularities in social experiences. The works of both Vygotsky and Mead are primarily known for their accounts of the social emergence of symbols and language (e.g., Mead’s work was reduced by his students to the concept of “symbolic interactionism”, or a call to the relativism of culture). Put simplistically, the contents of our thoughts reflect our social–cultural experiences or upbringing. Taken in this manner, Vygotsky’s and Mead’s work would have little to add to our discussion of the unconscious, except maybe the notion that we unconsciously use cultural tools that are embedded in our cultural pool. But there is nothing about the process of learning or about how cognition may result from sensorimotor actions and experiences. In other words, there is little that we can use to add the social element to Piaget’s sanitized world of the infant’s “learning in action” (where feelings and motivations are kept at bay by his scientific stance).

Thankfully, there is much more in Vygotsky’s and Mead’s work than what has crystallized as their main contributions in the literature about their writings. One of Vygotsky’s (1962) important concepts in his account of the emergence of thought and language was one that he borrowed from his predecessor, William Stern (in Vygotsky, 1962). Stern made the important distinction between the meaning of words (say, the conventional dictionary definition of a word) and the sense of words (or the body of vaguely defined, personalized, and individualized sensations that are associated with a given word). The former reflects some more-or-less accidental result of cumulative communications within a group of people or some cultural determinism shaped by the experiences of this community. Words are conventionalized to become the language of a given people within a well-delineated geographical environment and cultural landscape. The sense of words, however, reflects the individualized experiences of a person in the process of acquisition of that word or concept. Although the meaning of a word is community-wide and fairly static, a convention that can be enshrined in a dictionary, the sense of words is an individualized phenomenon, a cumulative body of feelings and sensations experienced by one person in relation to that word or concept. Thus while the meaning of the word “Mother” is a noun defined by descriptions such as “a female parent, a woman in authority, a caring female dedicated to the well-being of their offspring”, the sense of the word “mother” is as varied as one individual’s numerous experiences with a mother or mother-like figure. While the meaning of the word “mother” is by force a conscious thought, the sense of the word “mother” is an amalgam of feelings and sensations with portions that can be—but not necessarily are—brought to conscious awareness at any moment in time. And yet, they predispose us to act towards mothers in a certain way or ways. While the meaning of words may become entangled in strange associations that require free-associative narratives to become conscious thought, the words themselves are not fodder for unconscious conflicts. In contrast, the sense of words is the province of psychoanalytic thought and therapy since it reveals growths and formations of individualized meanings and experiences that hang from the fairly straightforward word definitions. In many ways, word meanings can be referred to as computer semantics (once the symbol is fully described, the computer software or the human linguistic apparatus can manipulate it to convey straightforward messages); in contrast, the sense of words can be referred to as human semantics (an almost solipsistic mapping of a person’s cumulative experiences, mapped in terms of the person’s unique life of feelings and predispositions associated with events involving that concept). Although Stern was as removed from Freud as Vygotsky was, they were contemporaneous thinkers, and it is impossible to discard some form of influence crossing the porous borders of the early Soviet Union.

Mead’s thinking about the emergence of symbols within the realm of social interaction was much better defined and elaborated. He described the process of the emergence of mind with the precision of an eighteenth-century philosopher. A student of Darwin’s writings, Mead’s life’s work was an attempt to trace the emergence of the human mind from the social environment not unlike Darwin’s treatment of human biped locomotion. And his starting point was, in fact, Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Mead’s ideas are as applicable in phylogenetic discussions of the emergence of mind as in ontogenetic accounts. Humans make gestures to one another. These gestures are facial (e.g., grimaces), bodily (e.g., waving away), or vocal (e.g., inflected sounds, speech-like vocalizations). A gesture becomes a symbol when the gesture-maker is capable of anticipating the response of the other to his or her gesture prior to actually making the gesture. The aspect of Mead’s thinking that is most pertinent to the current discussion is that Mead defined the response of the other as the meaning of a gesture. In so doing, he was not only describing the emergence of symbolic communication (and eventually of language); he was also describing a process of learning. Within the highly charged settings of human dyads, triads, or group interaction, the individual’s actions upon others become imbued with meaning as a result of the reactions of the others to those actions. These meanings are composites of feelings of pleasure, displeasure, fright, tenderness, safety and lack thereof, helplessness, panic, predispositions to approach or to flee, to hit or to caress, or, more generally, they are as complex as there are experiences resulting from the interaction of people. Thus while Mead focused a great deal of his work on what eventually becomes cultural symbols such as words, the learning mechanism that he described was a more general one.

In fact, the learning mechanism that Mead described in his philosophical writings bears great resemblance to the formation of intrapsychic dynamics between people in psychoanalytic thinking. And unlike contemporaneous cognitivist psychology, Mead’s mental meanings are as real and immediate as the reactions of others were at the times of incipience or change of these constructs. They are not algorithmic ghosts, because they stand as affective and predispositional proxies to the reactions of others. To exemplify this: to a digital being like a computer, the word “terrifying” may mean something different from the word “loving” only because the words have been given, a priori, different definitions. The computer might hardly notice an incorrect use of these words if they are syntactically correct within a sentence. Nor is the computer likely to frown at the text “The mummy opened its cavernous mouth in a loving grimace to the explorer.” In a way, words have meanings only if they have definitions that can fit into a procedure (e.g., a syntactically correct answer, or a correctly spelled word). Otherwise, computers are totally neutral to semantics: words do not mean anything to them. To non-digital beings like human beings, however, it would be impossible to stay neutral to the mummy statement. There is nothing loving about mummies. The word has meaning to us in that it makes us feel in a certain way (e.g., we feel terror), and predisposes us to behave in a certain way (e.g., to run away). In some situations, words and combinations thereof can bring about overwhelming feelings and reactions in us. They can only do so because they are proxies to real experiences that left indelible traces in our senses and emotional make-up.

The combination of Piaget’s, Vygotsky’s, and Mead’s ideas forms the starting point for the approach to the emergence of mind that we summarize in this chapter. There is a need to de-sanitize Piaget’s observations by inserting people and social learning into his developmental account. While sensorimotor learning, or learning in action, works for throwing ping-pong balls in reverse rotation, they may also work in similar ways for the infant–mother dyad. If so, there is more than a “cognitive unconscious” (i.e., learning that takes place as a result of sensorimotor explorations of the physical world); there is also a “social–affective unconscious” (i.e., learning that takes place as a result of sensorimotor explorations of the social world). Had he made this point in his 1973 address to the American Psychoanalytic Association, there might have been the impetus to compile a book like the current one at the time of his historical presentation. And while Vygotsky emphasized the social nature of the emergence of conventional language (1978), he also discussed the highly individualized senses of words (i.e., the experiential foundations of language and concepts). Echoing Stern, he suggested that those experiential components of language also emerged from within the social immersion of the child. Vygotsky’s famous definition of thought as internalized speech (1962), if encompassing the sense of words, would suggest that “linguistic experiences”, and not only words, also become part of our internal lives. And, finally, Mead (1934), whose paradigm for symbol learning was the power to anticipate the reaction of the other to one’s gesture (in other words: the meaning of one’s action is the response of the other person), provides the social process for the emergence of mind as the internalization of other people and their responses. This revisionistic approach to the work of these giants of developmental theory would make them fully compatible with psychodynamic theory. There is room for a social–affective unconscious (i.e., internalized experiences of other people and their actions), and for object relations (since the meaning of others, and of oneself, is also seen as the internal consolidation of social–affective experiences emerging in social interaction).

An attempt to create such a synthesis, however, never happened. And developmental constructs that could be integrated into a more unified theory of development spun their own literatures across rigid partisan lines. It is of interest that even within the field of non-psychoanalytic child psychology, these tensions were never resolved. And, over time, there were winners and losers. For example, Mead’s (1934) role-taking framework for the development of mind—and its Darwinian roots—was reinvented as the “theory of mind” framework. This...