What Use is Consciousness? A Clinical Neuroscience Roundtable

There has been in recent years an increasingly stimulating interface between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Freud hypothesized that the biological and neurological foundations of his theories would eventually be established and elucidated; indeed the fertile and intriguing interchange of ideas between the neuroscientific and clinical spheres has been raising important questions about our understanding of such fundamental concepts as the unconscious, memory, and trauma. It can be argued that in recent times the unconscious has been garnering increased attention, both from the neurofunctional standpoint and from the clinical. With me retreat of classical ego psychology and the movement away from a one-person psychology, the interaction of conscious and unconscious phenomena has been considered from a shifting vantage point. While the panelists' focus was to be the use of consciousness, and not the nature of consciousness itself, the characterization of consciousness inevitably became a central part of the discussion, and there was significant attention to the elucidation of conscious states, from various perspectives—historical, phenomenological, neuroscientific, and evolutionary. It was generally agreed that no clear line could be drawn between the conscious and the unconscious, with interdigitation of both neuroscientific units and clinical ones to create a somewhat fluid boundary between what is experienced as consciousness and what this state actually encompasses in terms of content, source, and function. The discussion was wide-ranging, with several themes playing a prominent role: the connection of language to consciousness, the role consciousness played in the evolution of man, the importance of consciousness with regard to creativity, and the impact made by trauma.