The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 22, 1953, No. 1: Lawrence S. Kubie. 'Some Implications for Psychoanalysis of Modern Concepts of the Organisation of the Brain.'

In a learned and difficult paper Kubie surveys a number of converging streams of recent research on the central nervous system in order to indicate some of the ways in which they may illuminate psycho-analytic theory and therapy. He reviews such questions as how activities are generated in the central nervous system, and whether exteroceptive and interoceptive impulses can alter the quantity of energy in this system or only its distribution, and he points out the importance of such questions for the understanding of problems of dynamics and memory.

Combining the work of Bateman and Papez, Penfield and MacLean, he discusses the difference in memory rôle of the sensory cortex and of the temporal lobe. He points out that the rhinencephalon, much of which lies in the depth of the temporal lobe, includes archipallium, paleopallium, and mesopallium, and has extensive connections with the hypothalamus. It is thus the crossroads for external and internal perception, for past and present, for the phylogenetically and ontogenetically old and new. Following MacLean's conception of the visceral brain, he regards this as the physical basis of the 'gut' component of memory. In psychological terms it is the part of the brain where the I and the non-I poles of the symbol meet—since he regards every symbol as 'anchored simultaneously both in the world of internal and external perceptions". The visceral brain is thus the organ of the central nervous system which can mediate translation into somatic disturbances of psychological tensions. It is the psychosomatic organ.

Kubie believes that Penfield's 'centrencephalic system', a diffuse neuronal system centred high in the brain stem and including the cell masses of the thalamus, is a conception which may help in the solution of the problem of the mechanism of conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious processes, and of repression. Since cortical lesions, no matter how extensive, do not obliterate consciousness, it is probable that,