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Why should psychoanalysts, who are preeminently students of the unconscious, be interested in the problem of consciousness? Two answers suggest themselves. First, one cannot understand the unconscious mind without having consciousness as a point of reference. One cannot be an atheist if there are no true believers. Second, consciousness and the perception of the self are nearly coterminous. Integration and differentiation characterize both consciousness and self. Emotions and feelings, derived from what Edelman calls value systems, are intrinsic to the evolution of consciousness and, as we know, are salient regarding the development of the self. These are very good reasons why psychoanalysts should be interested in the subject of consciousness.
Gerald Edelman, who received the Nobel Prize for contributions to immunology, began his investigations of the brain over twenty-five years ago. He accepted two ultimate challenges facing neuroscience. The first was to identify the neural correlates of consciousness; the second, to explain how the “feel”of subjective experience can emerge from chemical and electrical processes constrained by the laws of the physical world. How can matter become imagination? Explaining this “feel,” or the quality of subjective experience, is customarily referred to as the problem of qualia, a problem that has bugged philosophers for centuries. Some claim that mind/brain transformations are of such an order of complexity as to preclude a solution, that the human mind is incapable of framing an explanation, that a true understanding of the neural origin of subjectivity lies beyond our cognitive abilities. Edelman forcibly rejects this position, as Wider Than the Sky attempts to solve the mystery of qualia and to describe the neural correlates of consciousness.