DOI: 10.1097/NMD.0b013e318195fe58
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Issn Print: 0022-3018
Publication Date: 2009/02/01
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Excerpt
Francois Ansermet and Pierre Magistretti, Translated by Susan Fairfield. (2007) New York: Other Press. ISBN 9781-59051-222-7. xviiiv + 254 pp. $29.00. Paperback.
One of us (J.B.) has watched with amusement the early days of neuropsychoanalysis (npa), and the other (E.S.) has recorded the history of this movement (Stremler, 2006) and the well meaning efforts to bring Freudian orthodoxy in line with neuropsychology and brain function (e.g, Solms, 1997). In this volume, the authors—a neuroscientist and a Lacanian analyst—state the premise as follows (p. 11): “We suggest that psychoanalysis be linked to the neurosciences by the concept of plasticity,” which refers to synaptic plasticity and epigenesis, and that through plasticity one is, in a striking oxymoron, genetically programmed to be free.
Yet it is a platitude that cognition is malleable, creative, and altered by experience; indeed, experience is never repeated or recollected exactly. We learn, grow, and change. What do biological correlates at the synaptic level add to our understanding of mentation apart from a protest against fixed circuitry? Although the authors postulate nothing short of a philosophical breakthrough in the concept of plasticity, the fact is that change and stability, novelty and permanence, becoming and being, debated since Heraclitus and Parmenides, are not decided by synaptic modifiability, which is, in the hands of these authors, a mantra that adds nothing to the debate between neuroscience and psychoanalysis, much less the philosophical issues.
They go on to ask (p. 78), “how do we move from several dozen…indeed thousands of facilitated synapses in the course of an experience to the representation of this experience,” responding that 1000s of synapses consolidate experience by repetition, i.e. a manifold of synapses reinforced by repeated occurrences. Does multiplying synapses explain how we name or recognize a chair? They postulate chains of signifiers but do not explain the origin of a sign. They postulate meta-representations but do not explain a representation. Before we get to the complex scenarios of the couch, please explain how the word chair is stored, recognized, and revived.
To say the trace is dynamic means what? On one view, the trace is the entire process through which an act, object, or word is realized. The trace of the word chair consists of the unconscious activation of precursor configurations linked to respiratory timing, i.e. the breath group, to posture and prosodic contour, object and lexical concepts, the realization of a lexical frame into which the phonological segments of the word deposit, and the final articulatory innervation. This is a specification out of generality, not an association of synapses. Surely, the relative synaptic strengths of myriad neuronal configurations at successive phases in the mind/brain state (the description of which would be a good place to begin) are involved, but it seems more likely that a traveling wave of qualitative transformation is the likely bearer, bottom-up, of the cognitive process with contents in consciousness dead-on-arrival, replaced from below. The talking cure works, if it does, by serially exhausting the potential of underling concepts into surface actualities—idea, image, object—that are not the source elements.
The authors decompose complex events in perception, feeling, and memory into constituents that, by way of associations and somatic markers, travel through the unconscious. Explanation is by association related to synaptic strength with no discussion of the intrinsic structure of events associated. A Christmas dinner and a love affair are conceptual wholes that elicit reactions by associative chains. The authors lapse into brain talk when a cognitive account is needed and into case histories where neuroscience breaks off.
