[lbo-talk] Neuroscientists heart Freud

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Sun Sep 28 14:11:36 PDT 2008


The cognitive notion of "implicit" memories has little in common with Freud's concept of the unconscious. Can people process information without conscious thought? Yes, that has been amply demonstrated. However, psychoanalytic theory does not simply make the claim that implicit processing is possible. Freud asserts that there is a mental realm/entity ("the unconscious") that exerts a significant impact on conscious thought and behavior. Classic Freudian example: inordinate anxiety and difficulties at the age of toilet training will cause someone to become "anally fixated" in later years. This unconscious fixation will lead to compulsive cleaning and stinginess (or by reaction formation, sloppiness and compulsive spending). The cognitive notion of implicit cognitive processing has little to do with the Freudian idea of the unconscious, even though both approaches posit mental processing without conscious thought. Miles

--------------------

Agreed. Just to extend this line of critique more, consider the brain morphology and development. The brain develops in the mammalian fetus like a flower, from the inside outward, so that the all the motor neurons from the stem and spinal cord are embedded inside and grow and make their connections from the earliest (in both evolution and individual development)sections first. The effect of this physical topology on development is one of function, functional foundations. The last to develop are of course the frontal lobes on the cortex or most outter layer.

Now keep that in mind, and then reconsider something like toilet training, or feeding schedules or the daily timing cycles we all had to entrain in our children. In performing these trainings, we are socially conditioning the more `primative' sections of the babies brain. In turn these patterns form the foundational layers for the rest of our socializing processes. The cooing and other vocalizations we contantly bath our babies and children with are conditioning and patterning their only semi-differentiated linguistic emotive complexes---where various aspects of the limbic regions and its allied sections compose the `emotive meanting' of language, and our other symbolic forms---hard rock and soft classical piano.

Meanwhile our constant handling, caressing, or holding firmly, whatever, are embedding patterns on all these systems at once---because the kinestic regions of the brain are also the most `primative', that is foundational. After a certain amount of development the little monsters start crawling and cooing and are performing their own patterning feed back loops on these systems, i.e. they are learning.

So then that is why I agree: ``The cognitive notion of implicit cognitive processing has little to do with the Freudian idea of the unconscious, even though both approaches posit mental processing without conscious thought...''

Certainly. Dancers, musicians, and athelets have to teach themselves to perform complex motor skills and make them `unconcieous' so that the timing is not delayed by any thought at all. Well, just like babies have to learn to walk and run without thinking.

The other issue that came up while I was reading this very interesting post, was that there is still little attention paid to the patterns of socialization and cultural embedding of the individual psyche.

These guys have to get out more and look around them and begin to coordinate their ideas and studies with a more broadly concieved system of society and culture. They need to do that for completely empirical reasons. How can they consider what they find, of universal significance, if they can't show cross-cultural comparisons and constrasts?

CG



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list