“The Second Coming of Sigmund Freud” by Kat McGowan
Paragraph 1:
-So, these scientists are all having this really fancy party at this fancy restaurant.
-The researchers attending include this one guy who’s known for his studies on fear.
-If even the chef who owns the place is personally greeting people, you know this is
something big.
Paragraph 2:
-And why are they all gathered here? They’re all associated with the
Neuropsychoanalysis Association (presumably), and they’re here to celebrate the fact that
concepts like the unconscious mind and the repressed impulses within are still relevant and
studied today.
-Does that sound strange? Well, did you know that Sigmund Freud, who came up with
that whole theory, began his career as a neurobiologist? Understanding how the brain worked
was important, but Freud soon decided that it was also important to understand the lesserknown workings of the mind (which could help people who were dealing with various issues),
and so from the noble cause of helping humanity, psychoanalysis was born.
Paragraph 3:
-His great theory was born in 1890, underwent much re-working, and was both in-depth
and a crazy notion to many back in its day.
-At its most basic, it was about people not knowing themselves - hidden within our
subconsciouses are great and powerful desires which nonetheless are behind much of what we
do. Distorted by the censors which guard the unconscious, these desires can slip out in certain
forms, such as dreams and neurotic symptoms, and with the help of the psychiatrist and the
“talking cure,” they can come fully into the light and a person can know themself.
-But y’all already know all of this. That was just a review.
Paragraph 4:
-After Freud’s heyday, the adherents of psychoanalysis split up into different disciplines
the way Christianity split into different denominations, but all kept the idea that one’s subjective
experience of their own unconscious conflicts is important and worth studying.
-Neuroscience, meanwhile, chose a different path, focusing on the objective and
scientific study of all the brain’s physical inner workings.
Paragraph 5:
-And by the end of the that century, the two subjects were talking about completely
different things (wait, were they talking about the same thing to begin with? Sure, Freud began
as a neurobiologist, but did his work begin as a kind of neurobiology?)
-In fact, they were kind of hostile to one another. Psychoanalysis rejected cold, objective
science, and neuroscience rejected subjective, personal experience. Or so says the author.
Paragraph 6:
-According to the co-chairman of the International Neuropsychoanalysis (a merging of
the two fields?) Society, this is both a shame and a learning opportunity. This party is basically
for him, for his mission is to bring together neuroscience and psychoanalysis, thus creating a
complete understanding of the human brain.
Paragraph 7:
-He doesn’t endeavor to prove that Freud was correct after all. He just wants to explore
his ideas via modern neuroscience (isn’t that kinda related to what Freud wanted in the first
place?). He wants to explore how the biology of the human brain produces the complexities of
the human mind.
-Psychoanalysis has the insight about people’s minds. Neuroscience has the knowhow
and scientific method. Together, they might be able to finally tell us how the human mind arises
from the human brain.
Paragraphs 8-10:
-This guy was first inspired to pursue this mission after a serious accident left his big
brother with a brain injury.
-He wasn’t really the same after that - he seemed to have lost interest in the fantasy
games they used to play, and he was so slow and inactive.
-The boy didn’t take this change very well at all. However, it got him thinking: how could
a brain injury change someone’s personality like that?
-This question influenced him unconsciously all the way through his life and into his
college years; he wanted to study brain science primarily to help people like his brother, but he
was also trying to figure out how the brain can shape the mind.
Paragraphs 11-13:
-To his disappointment, the guy found out that neuroscience did not explore psychology.
That was a complex enough subject full of subjective information, and so neuroscientists as a
whole decided to stick to what they could scientifically prove.
-And so he turned to the opposite field: psychoanalysis. He once stumbled into a lecture
about Freud’s theories on dreams and heard about how the foul beast of the id sometimes
pokes its snout into the ego by way of dreams, and about how Freud tried (and failed) to base
his theories off of neurological fact.
-And something finally clicked for this guy. These were people who were trying to
answer questions about the human mind! How exciting!
-Unfortunately, his colleagues in neuroscience weren’t nearly as enthusiastic.
Psychology was not only unscientific, but bound to provoke ridicule from many scientists. This
guy was advised not to pursue it.
Paragraphs 14-15:
-He had run straight into a stubborn conflict of ideas. These two fields were involved in
very different things, and were unforgivingly exclusive of one another (especially neuroscience
of the totally non-empirical field of psychoanalysis).
-By the 80s, Freud had become the neuroscientific community’s whipping boy, and his
theories were mercilessly trashed (his dream theory was callously explained away by one
scientist with the idea that dreams were the result of nothing more than neuron activity during
sleep (which only explains how dreams arise, not their contents).
Paragraph 16:
-But our hero (Solms is his name, by the way) would not let their derision stop him. His
life progressed normally after that: he got his doctorate, served in the military, and moved from
his South African home to London to practice as a neurosurgery doctor. But when he wasn’t
working, he was studying psychoanalysis.
-He had some skepticism about some of what he was studying (like all the speculation
and dogma), but he persevered because it was all about the important question of what exactly
we are as minds, which was criminally ignored by neuroscience.
Paragraphs 17-19:
-And like other therapists-in-training, Solms went through many sessions of evaluation
himself. Psychoanalysis is much like other kinds of psychotherapy, except that it focuses on
unconscious thoughts and motivations.
-According to Freud, the efforts exerted by the ego to keep the id locked up tight is what
can lead to neurological disorders like anxiety and depression. So it is the analyst’s job to help
the patient realize the unconscious things which cause their ego to overreact.
-That’s what Solms underwent, and he says it really helped. It helped him realized that
his brother’s accident had affected him by causing him to develop guilt for his own ablemindedness. This was his sign that he should devote his life to studying the mind.
Paragraphs 20-22:
-And so he began trying to come up with a way to examine Freudian theory scientifically.
-But he also began applying some psychoanalytic techniques he learned in his own
therapeutic practice. While it looked odd, seeing as most of his patients needed help with their
brains the most, Solms figured it would also be nice to heal any damage done to their minds as
well.
-It had long been a common practice in neuroscience to study brain damage’s effects on
thought and behavior (it looks like they have been looking at the mind, but it’s not really because
the focus is still on the brain and not the mind), but here Dr. Solms was applying the Freudian
concepts of denial and wish fulfillment (basically mechanisms used to escape reality) to this
research.
-And many of his patients indeed seemed to be disconnected from reality. Some, who
had suffered arterial ruptures in the brain and thus had their perceptive abilities impaired, came
up with ridiculous theories to explain the world (heh, what’s that remind you of?), and this
fascinated Solms.
Paragraphs 23-26:
-This one former electronic engineer, for example, who seemed to think Solms was a
coworker, believed he had two really sweet cars and played squash, and kept asking for a beer
right there in the office. Neurologically, his problem was an aneurysm in his frontal lobe which
significantly impaired his memory. But from a psychoanalytical perspective, he was acting out
fantasies in order to escape his situation. Both suppositions are somewhat true - thanks to that
memory damage, he was now stuck in a fantasy (though I’m more inclined to believe the first
option).
-Another patient said that a friend of his - an old, dead friend - had come for a visit. And
other patients, who suffered from partial paralysis thanks to partial brain damage, denied that
they were paralyzed and instead gave other explanations. It wasn’t that they were lying; they
were just unaware of the problem altogether for some reason.
-Solms didn’t accept the usual medical diagnoses (e.g. simple attention problems
caused by damage) because he didn’t think they did these really weird symptoms justice.
Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, offered an alternative explanation (“they don’t like their
current situations, so they unconsciously let themselves disconnect from their surroundings”),
and he thought it was both a better explanation and an eye-opening look at the depths of human
emotion.
-So he also used these insights in his therapy services, speaking to the emotions of both
patients and family members and explaining what he thought was happening to them. He didn’t
abandon neuroscience, though; instead, he began comparing the neurological reports with the
psychoanalytical ones, and that began his quest to re-marry the two disciplines.
Paragraphs 27-28:
-Of course, neuroscientists had reasons for avoiding psychological discussion. It has a
great potential for inaccuracy, and people’s experiences are obviously highly subjective. Even
today, people have trouble explaining psychological phenomena via objective phenomena.
-Then we get a graphic explaining the differences between neuroscience and
psychoanalysis. Basically, one deals with brain anatomy and functioning, while the other
focuses on the unconscious mind and human experiences.
-However, some neuroscientists proved the horseshoe theory correct once again and
made really dogmatic statements about how only cognitive abilities and behavior were fit and
worthy to be studied.
Paragraphs 29-30:
-And Solms wasn’t the only one who challenged this statement. There was this other
guy, a neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio, who had his perceptions changed after treating
a patient named Elliot.
-Elliot seemed to recover from his language and memory problems after his brain tumor
was fixed, but then he started making really terrible decisions and ignoring the important matters
in his life, and that couldn’t be explained scientifically (Damasio tried). It was then discovered
that the tumor had damaged parts of the frontal lobe which aided in emotional reasoning - Elliot
didn’t know what to make of his bad decisions, so he made them anyway.
-Damasio found that other people had the same condition, and through a few
experiments, he refuted the above dogmatic statements - emotions and subjective experience
do matter, because they are important in helping us reason. Take that!
Paragraphs 31-32:
-And at around the same time, there was this guy named Panskepp who was studying
what looked like emotions in animals - how their brains produced them. Now, studying the
brains of our evolutionary relatives has helped us before, but this was animal psychology, so no
one was taking it seriously; Panskepp didn’t like that very much.
-But he continued, eventually identifying seven basic emotions shared by most (if not all)
mammals and birds and studying their possible connections to human emotion. For example, in
his studies on attachment, he observed how puppies cried and then dejectedly gave up when
taken from their mothers for long periods, and he thought that maybe human depression (which
this looked a lot like) could be caused in part by attachment issues. He wasn’t a psychoanalyst,
but he thought that maybe...just maybe...depression has to do with feelings of fear and loss.
Paragraphs 33-34:
-And there were others who were studying the brain’s relationship with emotions! They
were exploring things like how emotions influence the cognitive process of learning.
-So, you see? Emotions ARE important, and more importantly, Solms discovered that
he was not alone on his journey!
Paragraphs 35-36:
-And now look what’s happened: the study of emotions has since become an important
subject in neuroscience! Heck, people are even studying consciousness now - who would have
thought?
-But they still need guidance. They need hypotheses to test, so they can learn more
stuff, so more progress can be made. And you know, Freud’s theories aren’t so bad compared
to other theories...I mean, they are pretty coherent, so…
-And as we all know, he wasn’t wrong about everything! He’s the one who came up with
the idea that the unconscious has great influence on the human mind; sure, research into that
didn’t take off until the ‘80s because of the subjectivity problems, but it still took off and it
explains a lot!
Paragraphs 37-38:
-How did people start to study the unconscious? Well, it can be attributed to this famous
study by one Benjamin Libet, in which monitoring of electrical brain activity was found that
people’s unconscious impulses caused someone to do something (e.g. push a button) a
considerable ways before they (reported that they) consciously decided to do it. This showed
that the unconscious has a part in driving the human mind!
-There’s been a ton of more studies since that, which went on to show us just how great
a role the unconscious has in our lives. In fact, Freud might have been wrong here - it seems
like he underestimated its power! We use unconscious thoughts all the time in order to make
snappy decisions - not quite what Freud had in mind when he thought of the id, but it still
counts!
Paragraph 39:
-But wait, there’s another idea of Freud’s which is now explored: the idea of our minds
being caught up in eternal internal conflict. Granted, we don’t think of the id and ego anymore,
but we recognize that limbic drives like the one for pleasure and gratification (something like the
id, if you will) can clash against the prefrontal cortex and its self-control and higher thought
(kinda like the ego) - hard. Though it’s not quite what Freud had in mind - his id was chaotic,
while the limbic system is a carefully-regulated system all its own - it still works to explain the
conflicts which Freud described.
Paragraphs 40-41:
-Freud didn’t just come up with ideas that science maybe could might use; he had to
revise his theories many, many times, and even when they came out, they were only somewhat
palatable to science. Then there’s his wrong moments; when he was wrong, he was really,
really wrooong. But the point is that he was right about enough things to count!
-Now all we gotta do is separate the wheat from the chaff and test those
hypotheses...except that’s the difficult bit.
Paragraph 42:
-For one, these two fields have different amounts of “stuff” behind them - or,
neuroscience alone cannot explain the full range of what psychoanalysis covers, because
there’s too much. For example, one can treat depression and such with deep brain stimulation,
but what accounts for the considerable variation in recovery times (if they recover at all)?
-But then again, this could work - one accounts for the basics, while the other explains
everything else.
Paragraphs 43-45:
-The combination of the two fields into neuropsychoanalysis really can help. For
example, it might give us an explanation for anorexia - neuroscience can show the interplay
between the limbic and prefrontal cortices, and psychoanalysis can point to emotions like
anxiety. One person is even trying to apply neuroimaging technology to this!
-This combinative approach - objective study met with subjective reporting (well, duh) can help solve other mysteries, too...such as what the “default mode network” (patterns of brain
activity in aimless, introspective states) is and its function (if it uses most of our brain’s energy, it
must mean something!).
-The idea of a deeply-investing introspective mode of thought does not sound new to
psychoanalysts, who see the unconscious as the sea below the surface - the world in which
many things happen and many thoughts lurk unnoticed. There isn’t any real reason to believe
so, but maybe this default mode network could be what’s behind the unconscious mind!
Paragraphs 46-47
-Solms is still very much at work today; he does neuropsychology in Cape Town, he
attends presentations on neuropsychoanalytic theories in New York, and he’s just finished (as of
this article, anyway) re-translating all of Freud’s writings for easier understanding.
-And all the while, this neuropsychoanalysis movement just keeps gaining support. It
has two cross-country organizations, and they hold global conferences! And in its growth,
Freud has finally gained some respect.
Paragraphs 48-51:
-And there could be an even greater impact from this. Since psychoanalysis offers a
more personal look at the human mind, it can be seen as more humanistic than neuroscience; if
it is included in current medical practice, it can really change the way psychiatric patients are
treated for the better.
-Take depression, for example. Sad to say, many just treat it as a chemical imbalance,
and so the focus is, by and large, just prescribing medicines that may or may not work
depending on individual people.
-But if we take the psychoanalytic approach of identifying the emotions of despair and
hopelessness and finding out where they come from (maybe the attachment instinct in
animals?) and why they hurt so much, we can improve treatment. Perhaps depression is a
malfunctioning and overreaction of that attachment drive (the same way an allergy is an
overreaction by the immune system), and maybe if we understand that, then we can understand
what is needed to treat it (and so far, results have been fairly positive!). It’s still largely using
drugs, but now we may understand the systems they should be applied to!
Paragraph 52:
-And that’s really the important thing here - making science more human, more humane.
Through neuropsychoanalysis, we can understand everyone around us as minds - we can
understand ourselves as minds - and we can care for others out of that mutual mindhood.