is the problem of consciousness a non-problem?

IS THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS A NON-PROBLEM?

Joseph Schwartz

ABSTRACT I ask whether current interest in consciousness is simply an artefactof the (low) level of cultural development of the West instead of being a problemof real interest and utility in clinical practice.

What is a Non-Problem?

The paradigmatic non-problem in science was the problem of the so-calledluminiferous ether. Once it became clear that electric signals could be sentthrough space, the question for late nineteenth-century physicists was how?In a story that is now a cliché, the problem was to find the medium, presum-ably the luminiferous ether, that could support the wave motion, withoutwhich no wave could move.

In the event, Einstein realized that the central problem for physics wasnot the propagation of the wave but the fact that the electromagnetic signaltook time to get from place to place. Einstein replaced the problem of theether by the more mind-boggling suggestion that all interactions in naturetook time – that there were no instantaneous interactions at a distance innature. To put it more dramatically, there is a maximum possible velocity innature – as it turns out, the velocity of light – that can never be exceeded.Einstein’s accomplishment was to rewrite both Newton’s equations ofmotion and Newton’s law of gravity to take into account a new fact of naturerevealed by the discovery of electromagnetic waves – nothing can go fasterthan the speed of light. As Einstein later confessed: ‘It nearly gave me anervous breakdown’ (Schwartz & McGuinness 1979).

The ether was banished as a non-problem. Electromagnetic waves propa-gated in the same way particles of matter did, both moving through emptyspace without the need for a medium to support them. Attention moved tothe hot problem of atomic structure.1

Is consciousness then a non-problem? Is consciousness the luminiferousether of the mind without which, it is believed, rational thought cannot besupported? And, does clinical work over the last 20 years emphasizing the

British Journal of Psychotherapy 21(1), 2004© The author 131

JOSEPH SCHWARTZ is a training therapist at the Centre for Attachment-based Psycho-analytic Psychotherapy. This paper is a revised version of a talk given on 5 April2003 within the AGIP series of half-day conferences on consciousness. Correspon-dence: [[email protected]]

14BJP21-1 Schwartz (JB/D) 7/9/04 11:42 am 31

central importance of countertransference tell us that consciousness is anon-problem, at least for psychoanalysis?

The Recent and Not-so-recent Problem of Consciousness

The not-so-recent problem of consciousness has held a strong interest forphilosophers with younger philosophers now making the distinctionbetween the hard problem of consciousness and the easy problem ofconsciousness (Chalmers 2004). The easy problem is meant to be theproblem of identifying the brain activity that occurs when we are aware ofseeing something, for example. The hard problem is to understand themechanisms involved when what we see makes us feel afraid. These are oldproblems in philosophy and I must confess they bore me. It simply is notclear to me what troubles the philosophers about consciousness, what it isthat they feel wants philosophical analysis.

The recent problem of consciousness is one outcome of the molecularbiological revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.2 Heady with Watson andCrick’s double helical solution to the problem of life, many members of themolecular biology movement turned their attention to the last greatproblem of science, then considered to be the problem of consciousness.

Life had been demystified. The replication of a bacterial virus had beenshown, more or less, to be to be nothing more mysterious than the repli-cation of the viral DNA molecule in the bacterial cellular environment alongwith the reproduction of some ancillary proteins to make up the viral proteincoat (Schwartz 1992). If life could be seen as something so relatively simpleand certainly no longer a mystery then consciousness surely would yield to,if not a molecular analysis, a neural analysis. As one leading molecular bio-logist has described his interest in higher brain function (Changeux &Ricoeur 2000):

As a molecular biologist, I find myself confronted with a formidable problem:how to discover the relationship between these elementary building blocks andhighly integrated functions such as the perception of beauty and scientificcreativity. After Copernicus, Darwin and Freud there remains the conquest ofthe mind, one of the most formidable challenges facing science in the twenty-first century. (p. 3)

Led in the first instance by Francis Crick (1994), James Watson’s partnerin crime, there has been a flood of books and papers reporting on theprogress of the scientific project of consciousness.3 In general this literaturehas been accepted uncritically. An exception has been Papineau (1996) who,in a review of Chalmers’s book The Conscious Mind, characterized thecurrent interest in consciousness as possibly nothing more than a fad:

If we take materialism seriously, as we should, then we should stop thinking ofconsciousness as a distinct phenomenon, a special kind of inner illumination.And once we manage to do this, I suspect that the whole vogue for theories ofconsciousness will come to seem like a curious fad. (p. 4)

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The Distinction Between Consciousness in Psychoanalysisand Neuroscientific Definitions of Consciousness

Mark Solms (1997), in an absolutely key article, has revived and developedFreud’s highly original and thought-provoking analysis of the phenomenonof consciousness.4 As clinicians in the twenty-first century, we so routinelywork with unconscious processes as pioneered by Freud in The Interpre-tation of Dreams that we tend to forget the fundamental conclusion thatFreud, himself a neuroscientist, drew about human mental life. The funda-mental proposition of psychoanalysis, a proposition we all work with on aroutine basis, is that human mental processes are all, in and of themselves,unconscious. As Solms points out in another context, even the mostconservative, reductionist neuroscientists now acknowledge that at least97% of human mental activity is unconscious (Schwartz 2000).

The central idea that all human mental processes are unconsciousrequires that consciousness be understood in a different way than iscustomary. Rather than being a primary activity of the human brainwithout which nothing, consciousness in Freud’s argument is an internalsensory apparatus that permits us to ‘see’ our unconscious mentalprocesses at work. Mental processes become conscious only through theoperation of this special organ. What we call consciousness is ‘merely’ theawareness of a particular mental event, a perception of mental activityrather than the activity itself.

Thus consciousness as an internal sensory apparatus is analogous to ourexternal senses. We see and hear the dog barking. But what we see and hearis not the same thing as the dog itself. Our investigation of the barking dog,or, as the case may be, of the dog that did not bark, needs additional probesto get to the heart of the matter. Similarly, our conscious perceptions of ourinner state, of our mental processes, are incomplete filtered as they arethrough the perceptual apparatus that makes us aware of them. Conscious-ness is the result of a sensory, secondary system of inner perception of ourmental processes and not actually the mental processes themselves.

Needless to say the idea that consciousness is the result of a specialinternal perceptual organ means that the central position of consciousnessas the defining property of human neurobiology is wrong. Consciousness isnot caused by primary human neurobiology. It is a reflection of humanneurobiology.

What then are the neuroscientists ‘seeing’ with their PET scans or MRIprobes? Here Solms makes a useful analogy to the phenomenon of thunderand lightning. The lightning does not cause the thunder. Rather it is the elec-trical discharge between ground and cloud that causes both the lighting andthe thunder (Vonnegut 1994). The thunder reaches us through one senseorgan, the lightning through another. Similarly the PET is an observation ofour unconscious mental process reaching us through our eyes while our

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subjective conscious experience is an observation of the same unconsciousmental process reaching us through our internal sensory modality.

And here we reach the radical conclusion: PET scans of our brains arenot more objective than our subjective experience. They are simply a visualobservation of the same unconscious mental events as are ‘seen’ through ourinternal sense organ, which makes them conscious. In Solms’s metaphor, theunconscious mental events are the electric discharge, the PET scan sees thelightning and our internal sensory modality hears the thunder.5

What is Consciousness?

In psychoanalysis then, as recovered from Freud and elaborated by Solms,the ego lies between two surfaces of perception, the external sensory modal-ities of sight, hearing smell, taste and touch and the internal sensorymodality that perceives our inner state. We put the two together along withour perception of previous experience (memory) to know how we are rightnow (internal) in relation to what is out there (external).

And how does the internal perception work? Through affect. What getsmade conscious is affect – it is how what out there makes us feel. Affect isa primary sensory modality along with the external sensory modalities withwhich we have lived so unconflictedly for all these years.

And so consciousness is redefined. It is no longer a problem. But in itsplace is the problem of affect. In the metaphor of the luminiferous ether, weno longer need consciousness to think. But what we do need is affect tothink. We cannot be rational as-it-were without knowing how we feel. Likethe re-emergence of the ether as the concept of the vacuum, the thing thatis not there but nevertheless affects the light emitting properties of matter,affect was supposed to be the thing that was not there in consciousness previ-ously. Now we see affect as an essential component of consciousness withoutwhich we are not conscious.

This takes us away from consciousness per se into the new neurobiologyof human emotion. Damasio (1999) has formulated his project as an effortto understand not how human beings have feelings but how human beingsknow they have feelings. The brain physiology of mammals and humanbeings is similar enough for Damasio to conclude that animals have affects.In Solms’s sense, mammals, including us, have a similar apparatus that integ-rates the outside and the inside sensory modalities into an internal state thatexpresses how the outside makes us feel (pleasure or unpleasure in Freudianterms). But the question that intrigued Damasio was what it was abouthumans that lets us know how we feel. Calling this property of the humanorganism extended consciousness, Damasio was able to locate the neuralbody responsible for our consciousness of emotional states in our uniquelyhuman, large, pre-frontal cortex.

And, in a parallel development, Schore (1994, 2001) operating out of a



developmental framework has located non-verbal, and hence so-called non-rational human communications in right brain to right brain communi-cations through other mechanisms than the left brain language centres. Thuswe have a neurobiological location of how countertransferential communi-cation of feelings (affect) occurs in the consulting room. We communicateour feelings to each other through our right brains completely bypassing theleft brain language centres.

Finally, a recognition of increased professional interest in the relationshipbetween consciousness and affect is a new semi-annual journal Conscious-ness and Emotion, edited by Ralph D. Ellis and Natika Newton, BenjaminPublishing.

Consciousness in the Consulting Room

I was raised psychoanalytically in the 1950s at a time when Freudian psycho-analysis was characterized as one of the insight therapies. Throughtalking/free association and interpretation the analysand could arrive at aninsight into his or her difficulties with living. Without further definition, suchinsight was equated with increased consciousness, assumed to be cognitive.One understood oneself better and this facilitated change. But moderndevelopments in psychoanalytic treatment focusing on countertransferencerather than transference and on affect regulation rather than cognitiveinsight invite us to re-examine our clinical experience of consciousness.Without attempting to draw excessive conclusions, we can examine ourclinical experience to see of what consciousness in the consulting roomconsists. I suspect we will find that the now moments, the hot moments, theinsights/realizations that make a change are insights about feelings.Consciousness in the consulting room is the making conscious of a previ-ously unconscious affect.

Here is a clinical vignette to illustrate what I mean. A consultant cardi-ologist had taken a leave of absence from a London teaching hospital andhad sought therapy because she felt she was no longer able to cope effectivelywith the pressures and responsibility of her job. She had been a brilliantstudent and had been one of the youngest consultants in the NHS. Inspeaking together about fairly technical aspects of her job, for example,about the problems of fluid flow in non-Newtonian systems (blood), it wasclear that, while she had always been able to be interested in both the tech-nical and clinical problems of cardiology, she actually hated medicine.Further, she knew she hated medicine long before she applied to medicalschool. The questions for us became, what had held her attached to medicinefor so long when she was perfectly aware that she had hated it and how hadshe managed to be so good at it when she disliked it so much?

Part of what emerged in part was not unexpected. Her mother was a GPwho had successfully pressured her daughter into going to medical school.

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Her daughter was far more interested in the arts and had wanted to be asculptor. But her fear of disappointing her mother and of irreparablydamaging their relationship led her to comply with her mother’s wishes atthe expense of her own. The feeling that emerged that was new was thefeeling that she was getting revenge on her mother by being so good atmedicine. The combination of two feelings, fear and anger, led her to anintensity of involvement with medicine – ‘If I’ve got to do this, I’m going tobe bloody good at it’ – as a kind of sulkiness. The course of her therapy, stillin progress, consists again, in part, of creating a considered withdrawal forherself from work that has given her a perverse satisfaction at the cost ofconsiderable pain and self-denial.

Conclusion

In many ways a reconsideration of consciousness as emotional awarenessgoes along with the ongoing reconsideration of science and scientificcreativity itself (Young 1977; Fleck 1979; MacKenzie 1981; Pickering 1984;Harding 1986; Latour & Woolgar 1986; Shapin 1994; Lewontin 2000).Rather than being a so-called objective investigation of the natural world,scientific creativity is an outcome of an intense unconflicted relationship tothe natural world in which solutions to problems ‘come’ to the participantsfrom avenues outside conscious awareness, i.e. outside our mythical concep-tions of rationality. In an example that I have used often to acquaint non-scientists with the actually lived experience of research here is Fermidescribing the unconscious process of his discovery of slow neutron reac-tivity (Schwartz 1992):

One day as I came into the laboratory it occurred to me that I should place apiece of lead in the neutron beam. Instead of my usual custom, I took greatpains to have the piece of lead precisely machined. I was clearly dissatisfied withsomething. I tried every excuse to postpone putting the piece of lead in place.When finally with some reluctance I was going to put it in its place I said tomyself: ‘No, I do not want this piece of lead here; what I want is a piece ofparaffin. It was just like that with no advance warning, no conscious priorreasoning. (p. 181)

I think it is an open question whether current interest in consciousnesswill lead to anything relevant to psychoanalysis. Rather current interest inaffect, affect regulation and emotion seems much more relevant andconsistent with on-going clinical developments as well as being consistentwith Freud’s basic proposition: human mental processes are in and of them-selves unconscious. Perhaps Papineau (1996) puts it best when he suggeststhat the vogue in consciousness studies rests on a mistake, a mistake firstidentified by Freud a century ago. If this is the case we may well ask whywe make this mistake. We’ve had a plausible, good-enough theory ofconsciousness for over a century. So what is the question that is being askedfor which an understanding of consciousness is meant to be the answer? I



suspect that interest in consciousness may have to do with the fragile senseof self and identity that is endemic in the West, an answer to the question:who am I?

Notes1. But in a classic return of the repressed, the ether was to surface 30 years laterin quantum theory under a different name as the vacuum, an ostensibly emptymedium but nevertheless richly capable of affecting the light-emitting properties ofmatter.

2. A standard history is Olby (1974). But it is a lot more fun to read the unusuallyhonest accounts by the main participants. Watson’s (1968) account is a classic ofyouthful arrogance, an arrogance undiminished as Watson has grown older but notwiser. Jacob (1988) describes developments with great psychological and socialinsight (‘This biology was performed by a very small, very exclusive club; a sort ofsecret society’). Maddox (2002) and Sayre (1975) analyse the way Rosalind Franklinwas cheated out her share of the credit. Fischer and Lipson (1988) give us a finebiography of Max Delbrück, the little-known éminence grise of the movement (‘this most demanding and difficult, but humane and brilliant colleague: MaxDelbrück’). And André Lwoff (1966) satirizes the self-importance of theprotagonists including himself (‘What makes the profession of research so irksomeis the discoveries of others’).

3. Two recent books from opposing points of view on the reductionist spectrum areKoch (2004) and Edelman (2004). Koch is a close colleague of Crick, utterly dismis-sive of anything that smacks of mind as opposed to brain. Edelman has a view ofconsciousness that includes a sophisticated appreciation of psychoanalysis. DavidChalmers (2004), a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center forConsciousness Studies at the University of Arizona, has compiled an overwhelmingbibliography of both philosophical and scientific studies of consciousness.

4. For clinicians interested in pursuing the problem of consciousness, Solms’s article,delivered as the Charles Fischer Memorial Lecture at the New York PsychoanalyticSociety, 7 May 1996, is a prerequisite to any approach to the vast literature on thesubject.

5. Solms has found it useful to illustrate and perhaps to try to legitimate hisargument by referring to Kant’s distinction between our perception of a thing andthe thing in itself, which for Kant is in principle unknowable. Such a view for amodern scientist is, to put it bluntly, ridiculous. If there is anything that modernscience has taught us it is that, with enough hard work, we can find out whatever wewant to know about anything. There is nothing in the natural world inaccessible toas complete an understanding as we desire. Nature has no secrets.

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Crick, F. (1994) The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. NewYork: Scribner.

Damasio, A. (1999) The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Makingof Consciousness. London: William Heinemann.

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Edelman, G.M. (2004) Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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is the problem of consciousness a non-problem?

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