In the early days of Psychoanalysis, Freud conceptualized the young science as a "one person" psychology. The Analyst was a "blank slate" (or unresponsive "wall" as some would claim) and the patient was allowed to project their inner conflicts onto the field where they could be investigated, interpreted, and understood in ways which would allow the patient to change.
Later Psychoanalysts, prominent among them Margaret Mahler in London, soon recognized that Psychoanalysis could not occur without the active emotional involvement of the Analyst; the ideal of a dispassionate, distant blank slate was replaced by the understanding of the analytic situation as involving a "two person" psychology. You could no more have a patient without an analyst as an infant without a mother.
Mahler's contributions included her elegant descriptions of the child's sense of self emerging from the undifferentiated mother-infant matrix. She called the first glimmers of separateness "hatching"; this was followed by the separation-individuation phase later in early childhood (12-18 months). Along with the establishment of separation, the child developed stable self- and object-representations.
In Science Friday: Differentiating the Self, I described how neuroscience was finally giving us some of the tools and the data we need to understand these concepts and connect them to their physiological substrate. I used the new research to support the Psychoanalytic understanding of the development of our stable sense of self:
Typically development is a rather complicated journey... but the essential idea that multiple self-representations (ie, different images one has and develops about oneself) must be integrated to form a coherent and consistent sense of oneself has been bolstered by the finding of areas of the brain that appear to do just such integration.
The recent discovery of "mirror neurons" is a Neuropsychological earthquake. In MIRROR NEURONS and imitation learning as the driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution, V.S. Ramachandran described the existence of such neurons as a paradigm shift:
The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution — which I speculate on in this essay — is the single most important "unreported" (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.
Ramachandran now returns with some further elucidation of the links between Mirror Neurons and the development of the self. In THE NEUROLOGY OF SELF-AWARENESS, he asks and attempts to answer basic questions:
What is the self? How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense of being a conscious human being? Even this most ancient of philosophical problems, I believe, will yield to the methods of empirical science. It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brain; it arises from the activity of specific sets of interlinked brain circuits. But we need to know which circuits are critically involved and what their functions might be. It is the "turning inward" aspect of the self — its recursiveness — that gives it its peculiar paradoxical quality.
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There are many aspects of self. It has a sense of unity despite the multitude of sense impressions and beliefs. In addition it has a sense of continuity in time, of being in control of its actions ("free will"), of being anchored in a body, a sense of its worth, dignity and mortality (or immortality). Each of these aspects of self may be mediated by different centers in different parts of the brain and its only for convenience that we lump them together in a single word.
As noted earlier there is one aspect of self that seems stranger than all the others — the fact that it is aware of itself. I would like to suggest that groups of neurons called mirror neurons are critically involved in this ability.
Ramachandran's focus is on the evolutionary development of the self. However, his ideas are clearly applicable to individual psychology:
How does all this lead to self awareness? I suggest that self awareness is simply using mirror neurons for "looking at myself as if someone else is look at me" (the word "me" encompassing some of my brain processes, as well). The mirror neuron mechanism — the same algorithm — that originally evolved to help you adopt another's point of view was turned inward to look at your own self. This, in essence, is the basis of things like "introspection". It may not be coincidental that we use phrases like "self conscious" when you really mean that you are conscious of others being conscious of you. Or say "I am reflecting" when you mean you are aware of yourself thinking. In other words the ability to turn inward to introspect or reflect may be a sort of metaphorical extension of the mirror neurons ability to read others minds. It is often tacitly assumed that the uniquely human ability to construct a "theory of other minds" or "TOM" (seeing the world from the others point of view; "mind reading", figuring out what someone is up to, etc.) must come after an already pre- existing sense of self. I am arguing that the exact opposite is true; the TOM evolved first in response to social needs and then later, as an unexpected bonus, came the ability to introspect on your own thoughts and intentions. I claim no great originality for these ideas; they are part of the current zeitgeist. Any novelty derives from the manner in which I shall marshall the evidence from physiology and from our own work in neurology. Note that I am not arguing that mirror neurons are sufficient for the emergence of self; only that they must have played a pivotal role. (Otherwise monkeys would have self awareness and they don't). They may have to reach a certain critical level of sophistication that allowed them to build on earlier functions (TOM) and become linked to certain other brain circuits, especially the Wernickes ("language comprehension") area and parts of the frontal lobes. [Emphasis mine-SW]
Mirror Neurons allow us to create a model of the mind of the other. Of crucial importance, Mirror Neurons do not "know" if their input is from external sources or internal sources; this must be learned by the neural circuits over time spent integrating input from all the various sources that impinge upon the human nervous system.
In the Psychoanalytic formulation, the infant "hatches" out of an undifferentiated mother-infant matrix. He slowly builds a model of his mother's mind, all the while exerting his own influence on her behavior, in order to achieve gratification of his basic wants and needs and avoid the displeasure of deprivation. By 18-24 months, the child has achieved object constancy, that state in which he recognizes his mother as a separate person whose many aspects are all part of the same stable whole. He has begun to understand himself as a separate object from his mother.
If Ramachandran's conjectures are correct (and as an early approximation they appear to be quite promising) the child, via his Mirror Neurons, builds his model of his mother's mind and essentially incorporates this as his model of his own mind. Psychoanalysts would refer to this as introjection, or primitive identification, the taking in of large or entire aspects of the other's character. Later on, once the child has turned his Mirror Neurons upon himself, he becomes able to recognize the ways in which he is different (differentiated) from his mother. This is the beginning of separation.
One clear implication of this process, that is of the development of complex structures based on identifications comprising the self, is that character cannot change easily or readily. Psychoanalysis, when it is effective, seeks to destabilize these structures, bring them into awareness for introspection, and allow them to be reorganized at a more mature, more stable, and more functional level. This can not be done quickly or easily and requires the use of a new object, the Psychoanalyst, to become a new and important object to the patient so that he can at least partially recapitulate part of the process and arrive at a new outcome.
[Medications, on the other hand, primarily suppress or enhance parts of the personality, often to very good ends when there is an imbalance, but cannot fundamentally alter the basic subterranean structures that comprise the self. I have long held that the SSRIs, the first line treatments for depression and many other ills of the emotions, down regulate the excitability and sensitivity of the emotional and appetitive circuitry in the brain. The alleviation of depressive suffering is a secondary effect.]
In a follow-up post concerning the nature of consciousness, Consciousness and Conscious Robots, I described differing views on our ability to understand our own minds:
One of the great mysteries of science is the origin and the nature of consciousness. In The Emperor's New Mind, Roger Penrose suggested that consciousness was "non-computable", that is, so complex that it could not be adequately described by any executable algorithm. However, as our understanding of the brain and its behavior has progressed, computer scientists have become more and more adept at modeling the brain (what Ray Kurzweil has called "reverse engineering" the brain) and surprises are now becoming expectable.
It is both exciting and frightening that neuroscience and information technology are moving so rapidly to explain some of our oldest mysteries; the possibilities boggle the mind.
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