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In the recent literature on split-brain research, two semantic modes or forms are recognized. These reflect, as the author points out, hemispheric distinctiveness in cognitive capacities. It has become customary to characterize one hemisphere (the left or “dominant” hemisphere in all but a few truly sinistral individuals) as logical, time-oriented, and adapted for lexical meanings. The so-called non-dominant hemisphere specializes in recognition of
complex patterns in a way that is non-verbal and non-time-oriented. But Mc Kinnon draws attention to the fact that these different capacities are not housed in their respective hemisphere in a black or white fashion: each can perform to some degree the functions specialized in by the other, especially in the face of unilateral injury early in life. For this reason, Mc Kinnon suggests terms less burdened with overtones regarding left versus right. One form he prefers to call auditory-sequential (AS); the other, visuo-spatial (VS).
The author then sets about examining the qualities of similar modes employed in traditional psychoanalytic metapsychology. He finds that there is a homomorphism between the AS and VS forms, as utilized by the split-brain neurophysiologist and the “secondary” and “primary” processes of psychoanalytic theoreticians.
There is a tendency for secondary process (analogous to AS) material to be explicit and immediately comprehensible. Primary process material (analogous to VS) tends to require careful “translation” into the language of everyday logical speech. Many of the well-known primary process devices, such as displacements and condensations, depend upon one symbol standing, visuospatially, in the precise place of another. In metaphor (used by both the poet and the schizophrenic), likewise, there is the assertion, analyzable as a visuo-spatial statement of equivalence, that one thing or person “is” (in the exact place of) another” “I ‘am’ Napoleon.”
Mc Kinnon makes the excellent point that all of us