Hidden Minds (33 page)

Freud’s insight was not new. The idea that complex behaviours might be produced by insensible reflexes in the nervous system had been proposed before Freud’s birth. The distinctive feature of Freud’s thinking is not that he recognised unconscious determinants of behaviour, but that he afforded this insight such monumental importance. He ranked it with the two greatest discoveries in the history of science: the heliocentric universe and evolution. A bold and seemingly outrageous claim, but also a bleak and pessimistic one.

If all human behaviour is ultimately determined by unconscious processes, to what extent can human beings really be described as free? To what extent can human beings exercise rational judgements? To what extent are the identities we cherish anything more than epiphenomena; a superficial skein of thoughts and emotions, serving only to obscure the more significant workings of the unconscious?

The conclusions that follow from Freud’s understanding of the mind are depressing. He was never sanguine about the human condition, and famously described the ‘common unhappiness’ of everyday existence; however, in the
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
Freud’s pessimism takes a more epic form. His third blow is aimed not only at the individual but at the species. Freud’s words are coloured with emotions that are close to contempt – or perhaps even disgust. He writes of man’s ‘naive-self love’, ‘ineradicable animal nature’, and ‘megalomania’.

Why? What had made Freud look so closely, and so critically, at the human race? What had compelled him to take a hammer to human pride?

The
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
were originally planned as talks, and were delivered in the course of two winter programmes between 1915 and 1917. Freud’s audience consisted of assorted academics from different departments at the University of Vienna.

Freud was nearly sixty when he began the first of his lecture programmes. This in itself may have been enough to lower his spirits. At several junctures in his life, certain ages had come to be associated with his own death. He had expected to die at fifty-one – but didn’t. Subsequently, he assumed he would die aged sixty-one. So, he was probably somewhat cowed by the prospect of turning sixty.

About this time Freud had begun to complain a great deal about feelings of tiredness and fatigue. Although his followers praised his intellectual energy, Freud was inclined to remind them that, as far as he was concerned, he was feeling his age. Establishing psychoanalysis had been an exhausting endeavour. He was not just an old man, but a very weary old man.

And of course, as he mulled over the
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,
he did so against the historic backdrop of a world at war. A war made more personal and worrying for Freud when his two sons, Ernst and Martin, were posted at the front.

Yet, apart from one brief and exceptional passage, there are no direct references to the war in the
Introductory Lectures.
He merely wrote about psychoanalysis. Although at the outbreak of war Freud had showed considerable interest in its progress, by 1917 his only wish was that the war would end. In Vienna, food and fuel had become scarce commodities. Most evenings he would retire to his study – a hungry old man – where he would record his observations of human nature with cold benumbed fingers. Curiously, he took to collecting jokes about the war in an effort to cheer himself up.

In spite of the prevailing atmosphere of gloom and despondency there was a ray of hope for Freud – it was rumoured he might be awarded the Nobel Prize. But even this failed to materialise. On 25 April he noted, rather laconically: ‘No Nobel Prize, 1917’.

So these were the circumstances in which Freud formulated and delivered the third blow. Old, cold, hungry, and preoccupied with his own mortality, worried about his sons, and anxious for the war to end. Clearly, ideal conditions for his constitutional pessimism to thrive.

In Lecture 9, which deals with the subject of censorship in dreams, Freud’s feelings about the war and human nature suddenly intrude. A paragraph -only loosely connected to the preceding line of argument – becomes an unexpected channel for Freud’s spleen.

Here, then, is the truth about human nature. According to Freud, it is senseless blaming politicians for the folly of war. The responsibility for such widespread brutality and cruelty is shared by a compilât humanity. The ‘evil spirits’ that Freud describes are in all of us.

Freud invokes the concept of guilt, but only for dramatic effect. To be guilty, an individual must make choices, and ultimately Freud does not believe that human beings are capable of making choices – at least not in any absolute sense. If behaviour is largely determined by unconscious processes, then the self is disenfranchised. We subscribe to a collective delusion of agency, but in reality the strings of the human marionette are pulled and released by powers that operate beyond the scope of awareness. Observing world affairs between 1915 and 1917, Freud was inclined to view these powers as demonic.

Through the first half of the twentieth century public perception of Freud underwent a radical transformation: the Viennese doctor with eccentric ideas about sex and dreams slowly evolved into a cultural icon. The latter half of the century reversed this process. Since the 1950s, Freud has been routinely defamed, rebuked, and slandered; however, now that both groups, evangelists and iconoclasts, have exhausted their respective supplies of zeal and bile, the prevailing, somewhat cooler atmosphere is facilitating a more accurate assessment of Freud’s standing.

In the early years of the last century science was animated by three big ideas: the gene, quantum physics, and the unconscious. It is commonly believed that genetics and quantum physics realised their early promise, whereas the unconscious led psychology and neuroscience down a conceptual and theoretical cul-de-sac.

It is certainly the case that psychoanalysis did not live up to initial expectations. The claims made for psychoanalysis as a treatment were always inflated; it wasn’t original, nor did it prove to be a panacea. As a general framework for understanding the mind and human behaviour, psychoanalysis has much to offer, but it also has profound weaknesses. In the 1970s and 1980s, the psychologist Hans Eysenck and the philosopher Adolf Grunbaum published penetrating critiques of psychoanalysis, revealing flaws and problems of a very fundamental nature – although many equally devastating critiques were also produced by those working within the psychoanalytic movement itself. Even so, Freud made many assertions that have stood the test of time, and among these we must now count his assertion that the determinants of behaviour are mostly unconscious – the nub of his ‘third blow’.

Unfortunately, psychoanalysis and the unconscious have been tarred with the same brush. Those who rejected psychoanalysis also rejected the unconscious as a matter of course; however, not only is it possible to reject psychoanalysis and at the same time accept the importance of the unconscious, it is also possible to reject psychoanalysis and accept some of Freud’s conclusions about the importance ofthe unconscious.

Freud was insistent that the most fundamental questions about human mental life could only be answered with reference to a stratum of mind unavailable to conscious inspection. Curiously, most contemporary philosophers, neuroscientists, and psychologists, have reached exactly the same conclusion. The unconscious is no longer a conceptual and theoretical cul-de-sac. The unconscious is an open road, extending to a horizon beyond which lies the future of brain sciences.

For centuries, the holy grail of philosophy and neuroscience has been an explanation of consciousness. Arguably, it is the most fundamental of all questions. How does the loose porridge of neurones and neurotransmitters filling the human cranium produce the miracle of awareness? It seems impossible that experiences such as seeing the colour blue, falling in love, or enjoying the fragrance of a rose are all ultimately generated by a clod of brain matter. Consciousness seems to be qualitatively different from everything else that exists in the known universe; a divine flame. This was certainly the view ofthe philosopher Descartes.

Much of what Descartes had to say on this subject is written in his lyrically titled
Treatise on the Passions ofthe Soul,
which was published in 1649. According to Descartes, there are two kinds of substance that exist in the universe. The material substances (res extensa), that make up the world and the brain, and an immaterial substance (res cogita), from which the mind is formed. He wrote: ‘this ego, this mind, this soul, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body’; however, in the Cartesian system, the mind is somehow linked to the brain by the pineal gland, and is thus able to influence the rest of the body through it. Descartes’ account of the mind and body is described as ‘dualistic’ because it requires the existence of two quite different substances – ‘mind stuff’ and ordinary matter. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatsoever for the existence of’mind stuff’. Regardless of how closely the contents of the skull are examined, nothing other than material substance appears to be present. Thus, investigators are left with what the philosopher Gilbert Ryle derisively called ‘a ghost in the machine’.

There is nothing ghostly or speculative about a brain. Yet, belief in a gossamer mind, snagged and trapped in the biological machinery, remains an enduring and remarkably tenacious image. Even today, in spite of prodigious advances in brain sciences, there are many well-informed commentators who are prepared to argue that consciousness is completely beyond the reach of human enquiry.

A common defence of this position is that the brain is too insubstantial an organ to account for what a human being is capable of experiencing. There just doesn’t seem to be enough of it. But exaggerating our own mystery might be yet another example of what Freud would automatically describe as human narcissism; another attempt to preserve an increasingly tired and shoddy claim on divine provenance. There are 10 to the power of 10 plus neurones in the brain; and, considerably more synapses (junctions involved in the transmission of chemical signals). To count the number of connections between cells in the outer layer of the brain alone – at the rate of one a second – would take approximately thirty-two million years. That is, roughly the same time as it has taken the very early apes to evolve into human beings. There are, in fact, more neurones in a single brain than there are stars in the known universe. Why shouldn’t such an object be capable of generating consciousness? However, even if it is provisionally granted that the brain is sufficiently complex to produce consciousness, the magic that turns biological complexity into a person remains opaque.

One ofthe most widely cited biological explanations of consciousness is the so-called
homunculus solution.
This is the suggestion that the brain contains an area designate where images and impressions are interpreted and bound together. Thus, consciousness is manufactured in a precise location -albeit one difficult to determine.

This idea is known as the homunculus solution because it implies a central executive: a little man, reduced in size, occupying a chamber in the brain from where he performs his singular and very demanding task.

Unfortunately, the homunculus solution has two very fundamental problems. Firstly, in spite of considerable efforts to find the homunculus’s hideaway, it seems that there is no specific area in the brain which monitors, combines, and interprets incoming sensory information; secondly, the homunculus solution immediately recreates the initial problem: how does the homunculus achieve consciousness? Another, even smaller homunculus? The ultimate solution is never provided. Instead, it is postponed indefinitely by an infinite regress of increasingly diminutive homunculi.

The homunculus solution highlights the problems associated with trying to explain something by simply describing it in a different way Suggesting that consciousness is explained by processes that operate in the ‘consciousness producing area’ of the brain does little to advance our knowledge. In order to understand how a flame works, it is necessary to understand how fuel is ignited in the presence of oxygen. Observing that a flame flickers and emits heat is merely a description – one of many possible descriptions. For centuries, philosophers and scientists have attempted to understand consciousness by scrutinising and describing the flame of awareness. Paradoxically, the answer to the riddle of consciousness might not be in the light, but in the darkness.

There is now widespread agreement that consciousness is an emergent property. Scanning studies show that brain activity is distributed among numerous specialised sub-systems. None of these is conscious. None of these can think, talk or feel; however, working together, the ensemble seems to generate something greater than the sum of its parts. Given the complexity of the brain, it might be that consciousness spontaneously arises once the nervous system evolves beyond a critical threshold of information-processing density. In all probability, understanding consciousness will be better served by examining the unconscious processes that generate consciousness, rather than consciousness itself.

The concluding section of the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s seminal work
Consciousness Explained,
published in 1991, contains a telling passage: