Introduction
Recent developments, some of which are briefly sketched below, have made it reasonable to think that the main claims of psychoanalysis can be relatively directly integrated with contemporary computational and affective neuroscience. This in turn is part of a much larger interdisciplinary integration. Other approaches in psychology, including attachment theory, are also seeking integration with neuroscience; and neuroscience itself is undergoing integration with genetics and Darwinian evolutionary biology.
This integration of perspectives is particularly important for the psychoanalytic understanding of groups. Human beings are unique in the animal kingdom in the way we satisfy our needs and desires through in-group cooperation for out-group competition and conflict. In this we continually form and re-form communicating and cooperating in-groups, which compete with comparable out-groups, in hierarchies of ascending complexity.
This process evidently begins with family, as described in a well-known proverb:
Myself against my brother
My brother and I against the family
Our family against the clan
All of us against the foreigner
Just as individual cells cooperate with potential competitors as parts of multicellular animals, so individuals who might otherwise compete with one another nonetheless cooperate with potential competitors in order to compete as part of a larger group. Again, the resulting groups, which would otherwise compete, nonetheless cooperate with potential competitors, in order to compete as parts of larger competing groups. In consequence, each individual finds herself in a nested series of larger and more complex groups, each of whose subgroups cooperates to compete with comparable groups at the same level of complexity. Over history this process has evidently progressed from the cooperation of competing families in tribes, clans, and city-states, as partly registered in the proverb, to the current world-encompassing organisation into competing and often warring alliances of nation-states.
The problem of political violence can be seen as one of many – including the interwoven prospects of nuclear war, global warming, and mass extinctions of species – that arise from this form of life. For insofar as we cooperate in groups only to compete in groups, we cannot cooperate as a single group, however important the shared interests that might impel us to do so. Rather we regularly reverse attempts at agreement or coordination that might serve humanity as a whole, once we see these as disadvantageous to our in-groups or advantageous to our out-groups. Attempts at species-wide cooperation thus constantly regress to forms of all of us against the foreigner.
These processes have deep roots. As Darwin hypothesised, in-group cooperation for out-group conflict – the competition of tribe with tribe – has been a primary factor in the evolution of what he described as the intellectual and social faculties of man. In consilience with this, Freud described the mechanisms of development and defence – in particular those of identification and projection – that have evolved to implement and foster this cooperation to compete. In early life these mechanisms harness the evolutionary forces of parent-offspring and sibling conflict, universal in sexually reproducing species, to establish the family as a basic in-group. In this they systematically direct aggression away from the family and higher-level in-groups and towards the out-groups with whom they are in potential or actual conflict.
In consequence, identification and projection on the part of each individual constantly represent forms of interpersonal and group aggression as solutions to the internal frustrations and conflicts of everyday life. In this, as I will discuss below, they draw on the earliest and deepest sources of human aggression, including those that Freud and Klein (mistakenly, but with clinical justification) described in terms of a death drive. Moreover, the projective phantasies or beliefs that energise these conflicts, and so foment the forms of political violence that attend them, function to defend the individuals who espouse them from feelings of guilt, shame, and other forms of emotional distress. Thus, as in the case of individual neurosis and psychosis, group competition and conflict can be accelerated to avoid potentially painful awareness of the destruction and loss they cause.
These hypotheses show increasing consilience with findings in neuroscience; but we can give these only brief introductory attention here.1 After this we will focus on understanding in-group cooperation for out-group conflict by relating psychoanalytic and evolutionary theory.
Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Neuroscience
Freud framed many of the basic claims of psychoanalysis in the fall of 1895, shortly after he discovered that he could use the process of free association to analyse his own and his patients’ dreams. After this both he and his patients sought self-understanding by following and describing the rapidly changing contents of their own conscious states, in as much detail as possible and without omission or censorship.
This proved a uniquely informative mode of self-disclosure, which even now remains without parallel in any other discipline. An individual’s associations made it possible to consider a whole range of what would emerge as motivated behaviours (verbal utterances, nonverbal actions, thoughts, dreams, and symptoms) together and in relation to one another and to the motives that gave rise to them.2 Together with his own self-analysis this enabled Freud to learn as much about his patients’ states of mind as they were able to put into words, and to extend this by framing and testing hypotheses about what their (and his own) associations indicated that they could not put into words.
Accordingly, he rapidly discovered that ‘the pathological mechanisms which are revealed in the most careful analysis in the psychoneuroses bear the greatest similarity to dream-processes’ (1895/1950, p. 336). In this he began to provide detailed empirical support for a long-standing tradition linking dreaming and mental disorder, as exemplified by Kant’s (1764/2007, p. 71) claim that ‘the deranged person’ was ‘a dreamer in waking.’ And with this he began to shift his investigative and therapeutic focus away from what he and Breuer had taken to be veridical but repressed memory, and towards the fundamental and memory-distorting role of imagination and phantasy. As he would later say, the phantasies produced by the primary process ‘possess psychical in contrast to material reality; and we gradually learn to understand that in the world of the neuroses it is psychical reality that is of the decisive kind’ (1915–17/1957b, p. 368).
Freud’s first love in research had been the study of the nervous system, in which he had shown unusual distinction.3 Hence as his new data prompted new hypotheses, he initially tried to formulate them in neuroscientific terms. Within a few weeks he had composed the ‘psychology for neurologists’ later published as the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895/1950), in which he presented his main hypotheses as integral parts of an account of the brain as operating to minimise a form of free energy that was specific to the nervous system.
This was a prescient hypothesis. As Carhart-Harris and Friston (2010) have observed, the main features of Freud’s account parallel those of the contemporary paradigm of free energy neuroscience now being advanced by Karl Friston and colleagues.4 In this account the brain is seen as a statistical inference engine, which embodies a generative model of the objects and events that cause the impingements on its sensory receptors. The brain uses this model to predict the impingements, and operates in both waking and sleeping to minimise the variational free energy constituted by its own errors in prediction.
In both Freud and Friston the free energy to be minimised enters the nervous system via sensory impingement, the main source being the inescapable flow of ‘endogenous [interoceptive] stimuli’ that reflect ‘the peremptory demands of the internal needs’ (1895/1950, p. 297). In Friston these stimuli predict departure from the continuously recalculated targets for homeostatic/allostatic equilibrium (Pelluzio et al. 2015). Hence as Freud speaks of such inputs as creating a ‘demand for work’ to produce ‘specific actions’ that ‘bind’ (inhibit) this free energy, so Friston speaks of ‘an imperative to minimize prediction error … through action’ (2012, p. 248) that likewise inhibits the interoceptive sources.
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