How will we enter the 21st century with a psychoanalysis that is both clinically effective and scientifically sound? At Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research we have been addressing that question by energetically pursuing an interdisciplinary approach to understanding neighboring scientific disciplines relevant to our own interests. Questions of importance to psychoanalysis in such arenas as memory, emotion, representation, consciousness, and self-organization are the subjects of new knowledge in the biological sciences. This new knowledge can help us better understand our own concepts and at the same time may help us modify them to achieve greater consistency with evolving theories of brain and mind.
Eight years ago, we began to devote a four-week section of the third-year theory course to a brief introduction to cognitive sciences. Three years ago, a 15-session course was included in the fourth-year curriculum that includes classes on the neurobiology of memory, affect, cognition, and consciousness, and related topics such as representation, semiotic systems, and language. The underlying concept is that mental processes rest on a foundation of a hierarchy of biological systems. These include the molecular and pharmacological levels, the neuronal or neural network levels, and the linguistic and symbolic levels.
We also have informal discussion and reading groups. For the past four years, in a reading group of faculty members, we have introduced ourselves to the literature of cognitive science, neurobiology, and psychology. The books we have read are for the general reader: for example, Merlin Donald's The Origins of the Modern Mind, Gerald Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, Joseph LeDoux's The Emotional Brain, Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, Alan Schore's Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self, and Mark Solms' Introduction to Neuropsychology. (For a suggested reading list, e-mail me at ddol@ columbia.edu or write to me at 2211 Broadway, 1H, New York, NY 10024.)
Another interdisciplinary group consists of Columbia Center faculty, candidates, residents in psychiatry, and research fellows in related biological disciplines. This mix of disciplines has gotten some research workers interested in psychoanalysis and some psychoanalysts in cognitive science. For two years the group focused on memory. Discussions of readings alternated with lectures by outside speakers on the biology of memory, types of memory, processes of false memory formation, etc. This year we turned our attention to affect. Alan Schore spoke on affect development and Beatrice Beebe on attachment behavior and its relationship to the maturation of affect systems.
We are developing a cadre of people interested in interdisciplinary work. These studies immensely increase our ability to communicate with non-analyst researchers. One of our analysts, with the help of some members of the interdisciplinary group, is now teaching a course in cognitive neuroscience to psychiatry residents.
What we have learned about the process of interdisciplinary integration might be of use to others. One lesson has been in how we introduce the information from the neighboring sciences to other analysts. Daunted by neural science, neuroanatomy, cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, and the semiotic disciplines, many analysts avoid these subjects. Those of us who have dug into these other literatures (usually on our own) may become enthusiasts. But when we try to teach the subjects to others, we go too quickly and present too much information, sometimes overwhelming and discouraging our students. In order best to teach these studies, we must relate them to clinical work. We have learned to start with clinical material and then work into explanations of the material that depend on a hierarchical, biologically oriented model.
Another thing we have learned is that with the current growing enthusiasm for the connections to cognitive science, there is a great opportunity for chaos and confusion. The possibility arises of too many courses, fragmented efforts, and non-integrative projects. Both analysts and the public can become confused. More harm than good may result. In anticipation of this problem, the Columbia Center is establishing a major committee devoted to organizing the integrative efforts, including the study groups, the coursework, and the outreach programs.
One place where psychoanalytic thinking and cognitive science can have fruitful interchanges is in developmental psychology, including observational studies of the mother-infant dyad. Modern researchers have found correlations between developmental phenomena, maturation of cognitive processes, and biological variables. Their work gives us hints about the relationship of early life to adult psychology, both normal and abnormal. This integrative process is still in its own infancy. Many of the speculations about the connections between childhood experience and adult behavior patterns are on shaky ground and no doubt will be revised. More and more, though, we sense that we are zeroing in on the roots of adult behavior. This is clearly relevant to psychoanalysis. Even now we can speculate about the biological underpinnings of the development of neurotransmitter systems and about the evolutionary basis of attachment behavior. Some of these speculations arise from research with other primates, as well as psychoanalytically oriented anthropology.
Sometimes the argument is raised against the value of these interdisciplinary efforts based on the idea that the only thing we deal with is the information that comes from the couch, which we integrate using our freely hovering attention and our empathic and interpretive capacities. This is an atheoretical approach, a version of the idea that we engage in analysis without memory or desire. But the analyst always has a theory of how the world works, even of how the mind works. In the past, the theories we employed had to do with theories of Oedipal conflict, pre-Oedipal issues, ego functions, etc. Now, with deeper knowledge of brain function, we can be both more empathic and more theoretically accurate. We can decide with some confidence if a patient is describing a learning disability, an affect disorder, or an Oedipal conflict.
David D. Olds, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons.
The question is often asked, “Why does an analyst need to know this neurologically oriented information?” Some of us studied these subjects because they are extremely interesting, or with grand hopes of finding a general theory of everything. I think the real answer to the question is that this interdisciplinary work ultimately grounds psychoanalytic theory in a number of other sciences. This work may challenge or validate many of our most basic principles.
For instance, early libido models of the mind, the notion of depression as retroflexed rage, the idea of the necessity of symptom substitution, and even Freud's idea that the function of the dream is to protect sleep have all been modified as research has provided new information. At the same time, much of what we thought about the effects of unconscious process on behavior, of the connections between early experience on adult personality, and of the interaction between genes and environment have been sharpened and given new credibility. New theories, based on empirical data, bid fair to give psychoanalysis a more scientifically legitimate foundation, relieving it of some of the mysticism and unfalsifiability that have undermined it in recent decades.
One might foresee the renaissance of a psychoanalysis that is biologically based, resting on a hierarchical series of explanations beginning with the smallest organic molecules and rising to the heights of mental activity. Freud's idea that we can understand mental function best if we entertain several “metapsychological points of view” has been extremely valuable, both in clinical work and in psychoanalytic theory. We are in a position to add yet another point of view — the neurobiological. This would fulfill the hopes with which Freud began on his famous works On Aphasia and Project for a Scientific Psychology.
It is sometimes said that it is too early to make the kinds of integration that we hope for. This may be partly true, but in the orientation of our teaching at Columbia we have begun introducing what is now available in the rapidly advancing sciences of mind to candidates who will in the future be able to integrate it. We are blessed with interesting and exciting opportunities.