Apropos neurology, Changeux’s theory of learning reflects what LeDoux characterizes as the “use it or lose it” doctrine of neural “selectionism.” According to this doctrine, the initial “exuberance” of an infant’s neural networks—there are more synaptic connections present in early stages of development than will be needed later by the more mature organism—is pruned down through “subtraction,” through the exchanges between organism and environment determining which connections will be used (and, hence, will be kept) and which ones won’t be used (and, hence, will be allowed to atrophy or completely wither away).52 Changeux describes this selectionist process as “the epigenetic stabilization of common neural networks”53 (i.e., a social dynamic mobilizing mirror neurons in which the language-supporting structures of the young child’s brain are sculpted through pruning to be more or less sufficiently similar, for purposes of linguistic acculturation, to his/her older fluent sociosymbolic others).54
Pommier recapitulates everything summarized in the preceding paragraphs.55 The Lacanian supplement he adds to the neuroscientific theories is an emphasis on the irreducible role of intersubjective and transsubjective variables (i.e., Imaginary others and Symbolic Others) in the genesis of sociosymbolic subjectivity in the immature subject-to-be. Pommier adamantly maintains that spontaneous endogenous developments within the physiological systems of the nascent parlêtre don’t account for language acquisition and the subjectification it brings with it. That is to say, the eliminations and selections imposed on the child’s neural networks—these eliminations and selections are pruning processes through which the wild thickets of lalangue’s jouis-sens-laden babblings (i.e., primary processes) are cut down (albeit, for psychoanalysis, not purged altogether without remainder) into the narrower confines of recognizably meaningful forms of une langue (i.e., secondary processes)—are imposed thanks to the interactive interventions of significant (and signifying) others actively engaging with the child. For Pommier, “the signification of sounds depends on a sense given by an exterior authority: it breaks with the organicist model of auto-organization. This rupture with organizational self-sufficiency distinguishes itself from the muscular model. Organicism cannot render an account of neuronal modeling, since the only efficacious sonorities are those that signify something for the Other.”56 He quickly proceeds to link this with a more general theme emerging from the life sciences and philosophical interpretations of them: the plastic human brain in particular is genetically destined to be turned over to shaping vicissitudes far from entirely governed by evolutionary-genetic influences alone, and is naturally preprogrammed by genetics to be nonnaturally reprogrammed by epigenetics or nongenetics; in short, hardwired to be rewired.57 As Pommier puts it regarding the Lacanian Other as the locus of epigenetic or nongenetic factors of a symbolico-linguistic sort, “It is henceforth innate that it wouldn’t be innate”;58 or, as his fellow Lacanian neurosympathizers Ansermet and Magistretti articulate the same idea, it is “as though, when all is said and done, the individual were to appear genetically determined not to be genetically determined.”59
To make one last fast-and-loose reference to Žižek’s contrast between life 1.0 and life 2.0, an argument parallel to the one I laid out in chapter 12 apropos the layering of life 1.0 and life 2.0 that is neither natural nor antinatural (i.e., the critique of Žižek’s critique of Damasio’s alleged naturalism) can and should be made with regard to a Lacanian neuro-psychoanalytic recasting of the distinction between lalangue and la langue: just as life 1.0 isn’t entirely erased after the fact of the genesis of life 2.0, lalangue (here analogous to life 1.0) likewise lingers on as indelible traces of primary process jouis-sens infused within and between the secondary process matrices of la langue (here analogous to life 2.0). Of course, such a claim is merely in good keeping with Freudian orthodoxy insofar as psychoanalysis, despite certain widespread misunderstandings, isn’t a developmental psychology, at least not in any straightforward sense. More precisely, due to what Freud characterizes as the “timelessness” of the unconscious,60 prior phases of ontogenetic development (i.e., past periods of psychical experience and structure) are not expunged and replaced by subsequent phases of development. Instead, the effects of the passage of time on the psyche involve the cumulative sedimentation of interacting layers, rather than successive demolitions of the old by the new (this point being illustrated by Freud with that image of the city of Rome in which all of the strata of its historical development are preserved side by side, sandwiched together).61 But, what relevance does this have for a Freudian-Lacanian neuro-psychoanalysis of affective life?
The sociosymbolically subjectified parlêtre comes to consist (inconsistently) of, so to speak, a sort of Tower of Babel cobbled together out of a jumble mixing together flows and assemblages of both “immature” lalangue (which, as suffused with jouis-sens, is neither strictly affective-energetic nor signifying-structural) and “mature” la langue. Additionally, the affect-languages of the latter (i.e., the words and phrases of natural languages designating emotions and feelings) are notoriously ambiguous and vague. In fact, one of the most familiar ways in which people arrive at a palpable awareness of the limits of language is when they wrestle with the clumsy, clunky inadequacy of their mother tongue in trying to express linguistically the subtle nuances and fine-grained shades of fluid affective phenomena. The combination of affectively influential (yet consciously difficult-to-recognize) associations at the level of lalangue with the superimposed level of the inelegant affect-languages of la langue makes for a confusing and dizzyingly disorienting intrapsychical and subjective cacophony of tongues, a multivoiced soliloquy that sometimes loudly clamors and sometimes softly murmurs. Consequently, knowing how, what, and why one feels what one feels can be nearly impossible in certain instances. With this in mind, it now will be productive to circumnavigate back to the neurosciences of the emotional brain.
Panksepp mentions the complications that considerations of language introduce into the heart of affective neuroscience. From his perspective, the key problem here is one of constructing an accurate taxonomy of affects: how should primary and secondary emotions, various feeling states, and related phenomena be classified, and with what linguistic labels?62 Panksepp directly evinces the concern that the affect-vocabularies of natural languages are too equivocal and imprecise to furnish affective neuroscience with concept-terms of sufficient clarity and distinctness to carve with rigorous representational precision the realities of the emotional brain at, as it were, its real joints. This is the exact juncture at which a proper Hegelian gesture with respect to Panksepp’s neuroscience of affects is both possible and productive, a gesture mobilizing the interrelated life-scientific facts and notions of neuroplasticity and epigenetics.63 (It’s no accident that Malabou’s philosophically fruitful turn to the neurosciences was initially motivated by her sophisticated appreciation of the role of plasticity in Hegel’s anthropology.)64 The Hegel-style move to be made in this context is to assert that the difficulty of naming affective phenomena is not external to the thing itself. Worded differently, the ambiguities, vagueness, equivocations, and imprecision of the intermingled affect-languages of both lalangue and les langues don’t remain neatly confined to a separate representational outside (say, scientific discourses supposedly apart from their objects of investigation) without effects on neurologically grounded emotional being. Or, put in yet other terms, the uncertainties Panksepp highlights that raise doubts about any taxonomy in affective neuroscience aren’t just indicative of purely epistemological-representational inadequacies internal to scientific discourses; these uncertainties reflect the uncertainties of affective life in and of itself, a life in which felt feelings circulate among a much vaster range of unfelt and misfelt feelings.
This Hegelian gesture vis-à-vis Panksepp is justified for a number of reasons, many of which I have formulated already. To begin with, neuroplasticity is now a well-established, undisputed matter of scientific fact. Part of what the side o
f plasticity involving flexibility and malleability entails is the brain’s genetically dictated openness to epigenetic or nongenetic dictates.65 In Lacanian eyes, symbolic orders constitute one of the most significant sources (if not the most significant source) of more-than-genetic factors influential in the vicissitudes of ontogenetic subject formation. The physiologically and psychologically momentous period of language acquisition is a time during which (in Lacanese) lalangue is affected by la langue (an affecting for which neuroplasticity is one of the crucial material conditions of its very possibility that is contingent yet a priori).66 This transition into linguistically mediated subjectivity, the time of becoming a speaking subject qua $, is a passage through which the exogenous imposition of language as la langue becomes metabolized by the living being undergoing this, digested, and thereby appropriated as endogenous (i.e., subjectified insofar as subjectification arises from introjections of others and internalizations of symbolic orders as big Others). Obviously, one sizable sector of the language or languages thus identified with consists of vocabularies for affective phenomena. Once created on these bases and in these ways, the parlêtre, the speaking subject who speaks to him-/herself and others about, among other things, affective phenomena using arguably hazy and inexact affect-vocabularies, is autoaffecting, an autoaffection that both (re)acts on the neural foundations participating in its generation and is routed through the heteroaffective mediation of others and Others.
Furthermore, it’s worth remembering at this point that the contemporary sciences of the brain emphasize the co-penetrating entanglements of the cognitive and emotional systems of the massively interconnected human central nervous system (or, translated into Lacan’s terminology, signifiers and affects aren’t, in actuality if not in theory, cleanly partitioned and independent in relation to each other). This means that the cognitive dimension of affect-language gets woven into the emotional dimension of affects themselves, setting in motion an oscillating, back-and-forth dialectic of mutual, two-way modulation between affects and signifiers. (LeDoux draws attention to this in less technical terms.)67 Consequently, the reflexive autoaffective dynamics of the parlêtre qua $, dynamics in which the confusing muddiness of the emotional lexicons of overlapping lalangue and la langue swirls about, result in fuzzy and imprecise affect-vocabularies literally bedding down in the brain itself, sculpting and rewiring this groundless neural ground. Hence, Panksepp’s lack of Hegelian sensibilities when considering the linguistic naming and representation of emotions and feelings is an instructive example of what Pommier might mean when he accuses neuroscientists of “forgetting” the issue of language (particularly language as understood in Lacanian psychoanalytic theory).68 This also lends illustrative support to Pommier’s contention that “more and more of the numerous results of the neurosciences are illegible without psychoanalysis.”69
A similar absence of Hegelian finesse afflicts the non-Lacanian neuro-psychoanalysis advocated by Solms. Alluding to both Spinoza and the American analytic philosopher of mind Donald Davidson, he and his collaborators proclaim “dual-aspect monism” to be the ontological framework through which their particular version of the synthesis of the neurosciences and psychoanalysis approaches the central matter of the mind-body relationship.70 In either its Spinozist or Davidsonian incarnations, this framework risks maintaining too sharp a demarcating line of nondialectical distinction between mental and physical dimensions (the presupposed monistic ontological underbelly posited by dual-aspect or anomalous monism remains epistemologically inaccessible, a noumenal substratum an sich).71 A philosophical paradigm sharply partitioning mind and body as separate and autonomous “aspects” (à la Spinoza’s “attributes”) is in danger of theoretically blinding its adherents to, among other things, precisely the phenomena brought out in stark relief through the immediately preceding Hegelian critique of Panksepp: theoretically postulating the mental-subjective and the physical-objective as independent angles of stratified refraction appears not to allow for taking into account the full extent of the consequences of linguistic mediation (including the mediations of affect-languages) on subjects emerging out of plastic neural systems sustaining both auto- and heteroaffections.
These dangers and difficulties aside, Solms and Turnbull helpfully highlight a number of interesting sites of overlap between psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. In particular, they emphasize, in a resonation with earlier discussions, the various important roles of neurologically hardwired “blanks” in the human brain, namely, hardwired absences of hardwiring. Such preprogrammed openings, openings for reprogramming, are, in their view, crucial conditions for the potential eventual genesis of the forms of subjectivity familiar to quotidian experience generally and psychoanalytic clinical practice specifically. Appropriating Panksepp’s taxonomy of the evolutionarily primary basic emotion systems shared between humans and other mammals, Solms and Turnbull associate the SEEKING system with the Freudian notion of the id-level seat of the drives, that is, the motivational foundations of the libidinal economy. In so doing, they claim that Freud’s crucial thesis regarding the “objectless” status of the drives72 is vindicated by the neuroscientific discovery that the SEEKING system acquires its orienting coordinates (i.e., what exactly, in terms of objects and states of affairs, is craved, desired, wanted, and so on) exclusively over time through experience, learning, and so on.73
Apart from the SEEKING system, Solms and Turnbull, when addressing as a whole Panksepp’s overall taxonomic schema for the evolutionary foundations of the emotional brain, are anxious to underscore that adopting this schema isn’t tantamount to capitulating to a reductive naturalism or mechanistic materialism eliminating much of what a psychoanalytic approach would wish to conserve. (In relation to this, one could maintain that Freud never repudiated without reservations the neurosciences tout court, only the reductive or mechanistic versions of them prevalent at the time, versions centered on establishing neuroanatomical localizations of mental processes rather than appreciating these processes as involving dynamics distributed across multiple neural networks and subsystems.)74 While admitting that the genetically shaped brain is hardly a tabula rasa to be overwritten by epigenetic or nongenetic variables—this empiricist-style (à la Locke and Hume) image of the brain is empirically quite false75—Solms and Turnbull nonetheless repeatedly stress (much more so than Panksepp) that the human brain’s various blanks are the plastic openings through which the unique complexities of a human subject’s life sculpt the idiosyncratic contours of a person’s absolutely singular brain and corresponding psyche.76 As Damasio puts it, “Each brain is unique.”77 One can’t help but hear echoes of the original French title of the Lacanian neuro-psychoanalytic book by Ansermet and Magistretti: “To each his own brain” (À chacun son cerveau).
In what seems to be a strangely neglected book, La causalité psychique: Entre nature et culture (1995), the ex-Lacanian André Green directly confronts some of the challenging, vexing issues haunting any effort to bring together psychoanalysis and the neurosciences. (Borrowing David Chalmers’s phrase,78 one could credit Green with tackling head-on the neuro-psychoanalytic version of the “hard problem” around which mind-body debates in Anglo-American analytic philosophy orbit.) Green touches on a number of claims and topics dealt with earlier here: the significant influence of language as a higher-order cognitive function on the embodied psyche;79 the contextual mediation of the brain as dependent for its structures and dynamics on its particular physical and cultural-symbolic environs;80 the inseparable entanglement of nature and nurture in human subjects, to the point of the difference often being indiscernible for all intents and purposes;81 the biologically inborn incompleteness of human beings as naturally destining humans to sociosexual denaturalization;82 the drive-level intersections at which soma and psyche are soldered to each other while nonetheless remaining relatively distinct from one another.83 For anyone acquainted with Lacan’s writings, the title of Green’s book is likely to call to mind the écrit “P
resentation on Psychical Causality” (1946). Therein, Lacan speaks of “the intersection of the biological and the social.”84 He proceeds to remark that “man is far more than his body, even though he can know [savoir] nothing more about his being.”85 Lest this remark be mistaken for marking an abrupt break with anything biological, Lacan, consonant with contemporaneous lines of his thought expressed elsewhere,86 hints a page later at the relevance of psychoanalytic insights and concepts for the life sciences.87 These indications from 1946 audibly reverberate in Green’s book published in 1995.
When it comes to what “causes” human subjects to be what they are, Green insists again and again that the psychical causality isolated and explained exclusively by psychoanalysis is neither natural nor cultural.88 He identifies the Freudian id as “the genuine intercessor between the brain and the psyche.”89 Emergentism also is alluded to by Green:90 “psychical causality is that which emerges from the relations between nature and culture.”91 Such thus constituted, ontogenetically emergent subjects, as loci of convergence for a vast multitude of overdetermining vectors of “natural” and “cultural” influences, are therefore, in part, incredibly dense condensations of “hypercomplexity.”92 Both the theory and practice of analysis allegedly address themselves to this hypercomplexity, attending, through free association, to the irrational reason and illogical logics arising out of beings situated at the multifaceted intersections of so many converging (and frequently conflicting) forces and factors.93
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