The concept of unconscious mental processes is one of the most fundamental in psychoanalysis, and one of the most promising for rigorous experimental exploration. For many years, there have been interesting and important studies of unconscious determinants of perception and cognition. However, such research repeatedly runs into barriers—the difficulty in formulating questions that can be operationalized, the problem of public objective as opposed to private subjective data, and the lack of a method that would allow us to uncover the workings of the living brain—get inside the “black box.” In recent years new methodologies have allowed us to peek inside that box, study the brain correlates of complex mental processes, and even begin to refine some of our descriptive and clinical notions of unconscious processes as a result.
An interesting experiment reported by investigators from University College London appeared in the August 4 Science, illustrating the potential of the new approaches. In discussing their findings, Benedetto De Martino and the other authors write of a mechanism “by which individuals incorporate a potentially broad range of additional emotional information into the decision process” and go on to describe this as “possibly unconscious knowledge.” When neuroscientists writing in Science talk of unconscious knowledge, it is time for psychoanalysts to pay attention.
The experiment is simple. Subjects were asked to choose between two options which were equivalent in value—one a gamble, the other a sure thing. However, the sure thing was described in two different ways—as a sure gain or a sure loss. They consistently preferred the sure gain to the gamble and the gamble to the sure loss, an “irrational” bias of which the subjects had no awareness. The entire experiment was conducted while collecting functional magnetic resonance imaging of the subjects' brains.
For many years, there have been interesting and important studies of unconscious determinants of perception and cognition. However, such research repeatedly runs into barriers—the difficulty in formulating questions that can be operationalized, the problem of public objective as opposed to private subjective data, and the lack of a method that would allow us to uncover the workings of the living brain—get inside the “black box.”
The brain imaging revealed three areas of interest. One (the amygdala) showed activity when the subjects biased their responses in the irrational direction. A second (the anterior cingulate) when they made decisions counter to that bias. The researchers interpret the results as supporting the view that the amygdala is involved in processing “contextual positive or negative emotional information,” while the anterior cingulate correlates with “the detection of conflict between predominantly ‘analytic’ response tendencies and a more ‘emotional’ amygdala-based system.”
The third finding surprised the investigators. They had anticipated that those subjects with the most active amygdalas would make the most emotionally driven decisions. However, they found rather that the more “rational” subjects had increased activity in a third area, the orbital and medial prefrontal cortex. They speculate that this area integrates emotional signals from the amygdala with cognitive information. “People who are more rational don't perceive emotion less, they just regulate it better” and “more ‘rational’ individuals have a better and more refined representation of their own emotional biases that enables them to modify their behavior in appropriate circumstances,” according to De Martino.
This gets pretty close to what psychoanalysts mean by “unconscious.” It also suggests interesting questions that we might begin to address. By studying their brains, we may be able to identify individuals who are more or less driven by unconscious emotional forces, as well as delineate specific topics or psychological states that correlate with such patterns. One might dream of a future in which the determinization of analyzability includes a brain scan, or in which we have objective tools that help us to ascertain a patient's readiness to receive interpretations or assist in the assessment of psychopathology. But those are yet dreams—this is only the day residue.
Robert Michels, M.D., is Walsh McDermott University Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry at Cornell University. He is training and supervising analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.