Geography of feeling
Will new scientific discoveries about our -----emotional life make Freud's unconscious obsolete?
By Andreas Killen
April 7, 1999 | We interrupt this broadcast for a word from the unconscious ...
There's an old joke in which one psychoanalyst says to another: "Boy, I made the most embarrassing Freudian slip the other day." His colleague asks what happened, and the first explains that the awkward incident had occurred while having dinner with his mother. "What I meant to say, was, 'Mother, would you please pass the salt,'" he explains, "but what actually came out was, 'You bitch, you ruined my entire life.'"
It's easy to make fun of psychoanalysts and their earnest enthusiasm for hidden and not-so-hidden meanings. For Freud, as everyone knows, the unconscious had a way of breaking through the surface of consciousness in slips of the tongue, double-entendres, cigar jokes and so forth. At the time he came up with this notion, it seemed radical, but in our current, post-repressive society there's something quaintly Victorian about it. Who is shocked by unintended meanings nowadays?
In the '70s, a group of neuroscientists led by Roger Sperry conducted research on split-brain patients that suggested a simpler way of understanding the scenario described above. Working with patients whose two brain hemispheres had lost the ability to communicate with one another, this research demonstrated that the emotional meaning of the stimulus "mom" ("You bitch") can reside in a part of the brain completely separate from the perceptual awareness of "mom" ("Mother, please pass the salt"). Like Freud's binary theory of consciousness and unconsciousness, this neurological discovery suggested there were indeed two channels of human experience ... but it has also thrown the Fruedian worldview into question.
Since then, researchers in the field of cognitive neuroscience have continued recasting psychoanalytic ideas in anatomical terms. Slowly but surely these researchers are forcing their way into the stronghold of the Freudian worldview: the unconscious. What's at stake in this is nothing less than a revolution in the way we understand our emotions and psychological defense systems.
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I'm peering into a refrigerator whose shelves are lined with tubes containing rats' brains. These brains are about the size of macadamia nuts, their surfaces wrinkled and whitish, each with a large crevice running across the top dividing it into two halves. They occupy a corner in the laboratory of Joseph LeDoux, professor of neural science at New York University.
These brains contain the raw material for LeDoux's research into the neurophysiology of emotion. LeDoux is especially interested in one particular brain structure, the amygdala. This modest-looking, kidney-bean-shaped structure, roughly a couple of millimeters in diameter, is one of the newest frontiers in brain research, though it belongs to the oldest part of the brain
With his reddish goatee and piercing eyes, LeDoux could pass for a psychoanalyst himself. When I ask how he identifies himself, he laughs and shifts uncomfortably in his chair before responding: "I'm a behavioral neuroscientist with a psychological orientation." As this statement reveals, LeDoux wants to speak to different audiences, including experts in the neural sciences, behavioral psychologists and orthodox Freudians, as well as the general public. Originally from Louisiana, he participated in the aforementioned research on split-brain patients in the 1970s before becoming interested in the field of emotions, long a blind spot in the cognitive neurosciences. His pioneering work in this field was described in his 1997 book "The Emotional Brain." He's now a celebrity, with a recent article in the New York Times Magazine highlighting his contributions to the new field.
The particular emotion that interests LeDoux is fear. It is our most primitive emotion, and the one most closely identified with the amygdala, the least evolved structure in our brains. This makes it easy to reproduce and study in animals, through techniques of fear-conditioning. LeDoux explains to me that when we encounter something dangerous, such as a snake or a bear, the danger-stimulus is conveyed first to our amygdala, which initiates the proper sequence of responses: sweaty palms, adrenalin, pounding heart, flight. These are all automatic responses (as are about 90 percent of our responses). We don't need to be conscious of them; if we were our brains would rapidly be overwhelmed. It's a secondary set of networks activated by the amygdala that produces the conscious feelings we know as "fear." The awareness of fear only comes after the response, a paradox William James first noted in the 19th century.
James' notion that civilization had freed us from the grip of fears that dominated the lives of our primitive ancestors has an anotomical correlative in the new neurological findings. The cortex, a more recently evolved brain structure, offers a distinct, more self-conscious line of defense against fear. Whereas it takes only 12 milliseconds for an auditory stimulus to reach the amygdala, it takes up to three times as long to reach the cortex. This is a significant lapse of time, one that allows certain conscious mechanisms to be activated and to impose control over our reactions. For obvious reasons, this is an advantage in the modern world, where fears may erupt but need more sophisticated responses than a club to the head.
In people suffering from fear disorders such as phobias, however, the neural links between cortex and amygdala seem to break down chronically, plunging the individual back into a world of archaic fears. In this state, the amygdala has essentially taken over the mind, like a parasite or an evil troll. Unfortunately, as LeDoux puts it, "Fear learning is forever." Once fears are learned they cannot be unlearned. Phobias are especially difficult to cure, but we all carry inside us fears we don't want. It's estimated that more 20 million Americans suffer from some form of anxiety disorder, including panic, social phobia, post-traumatic stress disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety.
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