Reflections on Interactive and Self-Organizing Aspects of Learning in Psychoanalysis

Many disciplines have wrestled with the topic of how human experience of the world is integrated and internalized by the individual. Psychoanalysts traditionally have addressed how unconscious processes influence perception and interpretation of experience; developmentalists address how maturation limits or enhances the manner in which experience can be processed; semioticians and linguists address the hierarchical nature of the use of signs and language; and neuroscientists have elaborated theories of how the brain is capable of interacting with the world and transforming lived experience into symbolic form. With the exception of psychoanalysis, each discipline has laid out what might be called “rules of transformation.” Such rules seek to operationalize developmental/linguistic/neurological functions, and, in so doing, hypothesize how experience in each mode is metabolized and transformed from the experiential to the symbolic. The psychoanalytic theory of internalization has not yet been operationalized into a theory of learning.

In treating certain characterologic problems, I, like others, have found that the kinds of interventions that promote change are “beyond interpretation” (Gedo, 1993). Certain problems require from me an affective response embedded in an increasingly predictable interaction which allows new learning to occur. Although I have intuitively understood this was necessary, psychoanalytic theory was deficient in explaining the mechanism of change. It is from the fields of neuroscience, cognitive science, and developmental psychology that I have found a way to quantify and perhaps operationalize new learning, and it is Edelman who I would like to acknowledge as providing for me a new way of thinking about these clinical matters. I have found Edelman's hypotheses (1987, 1989, 1992) relevant in thinking about issues of enactment and disavowal in psychoanalysis, and although what I would like to present today is related, it actually takes off from a d