The Delusions of Certainty

by Siri Hustvedt

  103. Michael Naef, quoted in “Testosterone Does Not Induce Aggression,” University of Zurich News Releases, December 8, 2009.

  104. Richard Alleyne, “Testosterone Makes People More Friendly and Reasonable,” The Telegraph, December 9, 2009.

  105. Wouter De la Marche et al., “No Aggression in Four-Year-Old Boy with an Androgen-Producing Tumor: Case Report,” Annals of General Psychiatry 4, no. 17 (2005), doi: 1186/1744-859X-4-17.

  106. Allan Mazur, “Dominance, Violence and the Neurohormonal Nexus,” in Handbook of Neurosociology, ed. David D. Franks and Jonathan H. Turner (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013), 367.

  107. Lee T. Gettler, Thomas W. McDade, Alan B. Feranil, and Christopher W. Kuzawa, “Longitudinal Evidence that Fatherhood Decreases Testosterone in Human Males,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 39 (2011): 16194–99.

  108. For dopamine release in placebo, see R. de la Fuente Fernández, S. Lidstone, and A. J. Stoessl, “Placebo Effect and Dopamine Release,” Journal of Neural Transmission, Supplementa 70 (2006): 415–18. For sham surgery report, see Raine Sihvonen et al., “Arthroscopic Partial Meniscectomy Versus Sham Surgery for Degenerative Meniscal Tear,” The New England Journal of Medicine 369 (2013): 2515–24.

  109. Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein, “Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo: A Meta-Analysis of Antidepressant Medication,” Prevention and Treatment 1, article 0002a (2008), doi: 10.1037/1522-3736.1.1.12a.

  110. Fabrizio Benedetti, “The Opposite Effects of the Opiate Antagonist Naloxone and the Cholecystokinin Antagonist Proglumide on Placebo Analgesia,” Pain 64, no. 3 (1996): 535–43.

  111. Fabrizio Benedetti et al., “Neurobiological Mechanisms of the Placebo Effect,” The Journal of Neuroscience 25, no. 45 (2005): 10390–402.

  112. Margaret Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, London (1664), 185–6.

  113. Anne Harrington, introduction to The Placebo Effect: An Interdisciplinary Exploration, ed. Anne Harrington (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 5.

  114. Robert Ader, “The Role of Conditioning in Pharmacotherapy,” in The Placebo Effect, 138–65.

  115. Perpetus C. Ibekwe and Justin U. Achor, “Pyschosocial and Cultural Aspects of Pseudocyesis,” Indian Journal of Psychiatry 50, no. 2 (2008): 112–16.

  116. Juan J. Tarin and Antonio Cano, “Endocrinology and Physiology of Pseudocyesis,” Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology 11 (2013): 39.

  117. T. Tulandi, R. A. McInnes, and S. Lal, “Altered Pituitary Hormone Secretion in Patients with Pseudocyesis,” Fertility, Sterility 40, no. 5 (1982): 637–41.

  118. Deidre Barrett, “Trance-Related Pseudocyesis in a Male,” International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (1988), doi:10.1080/00207148808410516.

  119. Jean-Martin Charcot, quoted in Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (New York: The Free Press, 1992), 194.

  120. See Onno Van der Hart and Rutger Horst, “The Dissociation Theory of Pierre Janet,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 2, no. 4 (1989). For another more recent perspective on Janet, see John F. Kihlstrom, “Trauma and Memory Revisited,” in Memory and Emotions: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Blackwell, 2006), 259–91.

  121. P. W. Halligan, B. S. Athwal, D. A. Oakley, and R. S. J. Frackowiak, “The Functional Anatomy of a Hypnotic Paralysis: Implications for Conversion Hysteria,” The Lancet 365 (2005): 986–87.

  122. V. Voon, C. Gallea, and M. Hallet, “The Involuntary Nature of Conversion Disorder,” Neurology 74, no. 3 (2010): 223–28.

  123. For a summary of findings on physiological differences among personalities that goes back to research in the nineteenth century, see Philip M. Coons, “Psychophysiological Aspects of Multiple Personality Disorder,” Dissociation 1, no. 1 (1998): 47–53. For a more recent description with a case study, see Abnormal Psychology: An Integrative Approach, 7th ed., ed. David Barlow and V. Durand (Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2015), 201–7. For a wholly skeptical position, see H. Merklebach, G. J. Devilly, and E. Rassin, “Alters in Dissociative Identity Disorder: Metaphors or Genuine Entities?” Clinical Psychological Review 22, no. 4 (2002): 481–97.

  124. B. Waldvogel and Ulrich A. Strasburger, “Sighted and Blind in One Person: A Case Report and Conclusions on the Psychoneurobiology of Vision,” Nervenarzt 78, no. 11 (2007): 1303–9.

  125. Heather Berlin, “The Neural Basis of the Dynamic Unconscious,” Neuropsychoanalysis 13, no. 1 (2011): 5–31.

  126. David Morris, “Placebo, Pain, and Belief,” in The Placebo Effect, 202.

  127. Margaret Cavendish, quoted in Lisa Walters, Margaret Cavendish (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 95.

  128. In The Rise of Embryology, Arthur William Mayer presents an often articulated view, which is that for Aristotle “the male semen” contributes “the immaterial or controlling force in generation” (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1939), 135. Another view is closer to my own understanding of the role of sperm in Generation of Animals. In On Intuition and Discursive Reasoning in Aristotle (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), 92 Victor Kal writes, “For this matter, sperm, is not potentially a living body, so that the soul cannot become an actual soul by the combination with sperm. Sperm can only transport the potentially sensitive soul. The sensitive soul does not gain actuality until it has joined what is potentially the body of a living being endowed with sense.”

  129. See Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle, ed. Cynthia A. Freeland (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1998). See also Deborah K. W. Modrak, “Aristotle: Women, Deliberation, and Nature,” in Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle, ed. Bat-Ami Bar On (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 207–22. For a defense of Aristotle’s views on women, see Paul Schollmeier, “Aristotle and Women: Household and Political Roles,” Polis 20, nos. 1–2 (2003): 22–42. To get a flavor of the struggles over Aristotle, see Larry Arnhart, “A Sociobiological Defense of Aristotle’s Sexual Politics,” International Political Science Review 15 (1994): 389–415 and an opposing opinion by James Bernard Murphy, “Aristotle, Feminism, and Biology: A Response to Larry Arnhart,” International Political Science Review 15, no. 4 (1994): 417–26.

  130. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1146.

  131. Ibid.

  132. Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex: Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 41.

  133. Henry Beighton, quoted in Schiebinger, 42.

  134. Ibid., 44.

  135. Paul Broca, quoted in Stephen Jay Gould, “Women’s Brains,” in The Panda’s Thumb (New York: Norton, 1980), 152.

  136. Ibid.

  137. Pinker, The Blank Slate, 350–51.

  138. Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education: A Fair Chance for Girls (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1875), 11.

  139. Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 27.

  140. Pinker, The Blank Slate, 355–56.

  141. Janet Shibley Hyde, “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis,” American Psychologist 6, no. 6 (2005): 581–92.

  142. David I. Miller and Diane F. Halpern, “The New Science of Cognitive Sex Differences,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18, iss. 1 (2014): 37–45.

  143. The following is taken from a section on cognitive sex differences in a psychology textbook under the heading “Verbal, Reading and Writing Skills”: “Females consistently score much higher than males on tests of verbal fluency, reading comprehension, spelling, and, especially basic writing skills. Although you rarely read about the ‘gender gap’ in writing skills, researchers Larry Hodges and Amy Newell (1995) have pointed out, ‘The data imply that males are, on average, at a rather profound disadvantage in the performance of this basic skill.’ ” In Don H. Hockenbury and Sandra E. Hockenbury, ed., Psychology (New Y
ork: Macmillan, 2005). The same year the textbook was published, Janet Shibley Hyde’s meta-analysis, “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis,” found the difference in language abilities between men and women to be so small, it made no statistical difference.

  144. For a paper that found strong effects of prenatal testosterone (T) on spatial skills, see Sheri A. Berenbaum et al., “Early Androgen Effects on Spatial and Mechanical Abilities: Evidence from Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia,” Behavioral Neuroscience 126 (2012): 86–96. For a paper that found T effects in spatial rotation but found them also to enhance nonrotation skills, see Carole K. Hooven et al., “The Relationship of Male Testosterone to Components of Mental Rotation,” Neuropsychologia 42 (2004): 782–90. For a paper that found a link between T in puberty and mental rotation, see Eero Vuoksimaa et al., “Pubertal Testosterone Predicts Mental Rotation Performance of Young Adult Males,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 37, no. 11 (2012): 1791–1800. For a careful overview of the data on testosterone, the variable findings, and brain research in general on sex differences, see also Rebecca Jordan-Young’s Brain Storm (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

  145. David A. Puts et al., “Salivary Testosterone Does Not Predict Mental Rotation Performance in Men or Women,” Hormones and Behavior (2010), doi:10.1016/j.yhbeh.2010.03.005. The authors do not rule out the effects of T at organizational moments of development.

  146. R. De List and J. L. Wolford, “Improving Children’s Mental Accuracy with Computer Game Playing,” Journal of Genetic Psychology 163, no. 3 (2002): 272–82.

  147. Amanda Kanoy, Sheila Brownlow, and Tiffany F. Sowers, “Can Rewards Obviate Stereotype Threat Effects on Mental Rotation Tasks?” Psychology 3, no. 7 (2012): 542–47; Maryjane Wraga et al., “Stereotype Susceptibility Narrows the Gender Gap in Imagined Self-Rotation Performance,” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 5, no. 8 (2006): 813–19. Maryjane Wraga et al., “Neural Basis of Stereotype-Induced Shifts in Women’s Mental Rotation Performance,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2, no. 7 (2007): 12–19; See also, Matthew S. McGlone and Joshua Aronson, “Stereotype Threat, Identity Salience, and Spatial Reasoning,” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 27, no. 5 (2006): 486–93.

  148. Thomas D. Parsons et al., “Sex Differences in Mental Rotation and Spatial Rotation in a Virtual Environment,” Neuropsychologia 42 (2004): 555–62.

  149. See Aljosha C. Neubauer, Sabine Bergner, and Martina Schatz, “Two vs. Three-Dimensional Presentation of Mental Rotation Tasks: Sex Differences and Effects of Training on Performance and Brain Activation,” Intelligence 38, no. 5 (2010): 529–39.

  150. Tim Koscik et al., “Sex Differences in Parietal Lobe Morphology: Relationship to Mental Rotation Performance,” Brain and Cognition 69, no. 3 (2009): 451–59.

  151. J. Feng, J. Spence, and J. Pratt, “Playing an Action Video Game Reduces Gender Differences in Spatial Cognition,” Psychological Science 10 (2007): 850–55.

  152. U. Debamo et al., “Mental Rotation: Effects of Gender, Training and Sleep Consolidation,” PLoS One 8, no. 3 (2013), doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0060296.

  153. Moshe Hoffman, Uri Gneezy, and John A. List, “Nurture Affects Gender Differences in Spatial Abilities,” PNAS 108, no. 36 (2011): 14786–88. Drew Bailey, Richard A. Lippa, Marco Del Guidice, Raymond Hames, and Dave C. Geary all signed a letter to PNAS criticizing the methods used by Hoffman and his colleagues: “Sex Differences in Spatial Abilities: Methodological Problems in Hoffman et al.,” PNAS 109, no. 10 (2012), doi: 10.1073/pnas.1114679109.

  154. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, in The Penguin Complete Lewis Carroll (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982), 65.

  155. Pinker, The Blank Slate, 345.

  156. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (New York: Vintage, 2011), 46.

  157. E. O. Wilson, “Human Decency Is Animal,” The New York Times Magazine, October 12, 1975.

  158. David Barash, The Whisperings Within (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 14.

  159. Stanislas Dehaene, Loren Cohen, and José Morais Régine Kolinsky, “Illiterate to Literate: Behavioral and Cerebral Changes Induced by Reading Acquisition,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 16 (2015): 234–44.

  160. Allen Newell and Herbert S. Simon, “Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 19, no. 3 (1976): 113–26.

  161. Ibid., 113.

  162. Karl J. Fink, Goethe’s History of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21–25.

  163. Arthur Zajonc, “Goethe and the Phenomenological Investigation of Consciousness,” Proceedings from the 1998 Conference Toward a Science of Consciousness III, ed. S. Hameroff, A. Kasniak, and D. Chalmers (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 417-28.

  164. Michael Ruse, Defining Darwin: Essays on the History and Philosophy of Evolutionary Biology (New York: Prometheus Books, 2009), 57.

  165. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 30th Anniversary Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 37.

  166. Paul E. Griffiths and Eva M. Neumann-Held, “The Many Faces of the Gene,” BioScience 49, no. 8 (1999): 661.

  167. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 19.

  168. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1958), 511.

  169. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol. 1 (1871) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 36.

  170. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18 ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1958), 46.

  171. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis (1916–17), Standard Edition, vol. 16, 284.

  172. Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis (1933), Standard Edition, vol. 22, 95.

  173. Mark Solms and Oliver Turnbull, The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience (New York: Other Press, 2002); Georg Northoff, Neuropsychoanalysis in Practice: Brain, Self, and Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); R. L. Cathart-Harris and Karl Friston, “The Default Mode, Ego-Functions and Free-Energy: A Neurobiological Account of Freudian Ideas,” Brain 133, no. 4 (2010): 1265–83. Although Solms, Northoff, and Friston all subscribe to what might loosely be called a Freudian model, each of their approaches is different.

  174. Mark Solms and Jaak Panksepp, “The Id Knows More than the Ego Admits: Neuropsychoanalytic and Primal Consciousness Perspectives on the Interface Between Affective and Cognitive Neuroscience,” Brain Sciences 2 (2012): 145–75.

  175. Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 17.

  176. Ibid., 148.

  177. Grosz is further informed by the panpsychist naturalism of Gilles Deleuze, who was influenced by Leibniz, Spinoza, Bergson, and Whitehead. Although most poststructuralist thought is opposed to the idea of the natural, Deleuze took a different view. His perspective resists the very idea of things, essences, and subjects as unified beings and instead champions a radical form of process philosophy. Ideas affect prose, and the language of Deleuze mirrors the dynamism of the thought, in which stable definition is itself a problem. Grosz’s prose is similarly elusive. See Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). Irigaray’s prose is often ironic, playful, wild, and opaque, an echo of her desire to subvert the Western philosophical tradition. See Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).

  178. For a history of how sexual difference has been understood, see Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

  179. The literature is vast. For a “constructivist” answer
to the problem of material bodies, see Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London: Routledge, 1993). For diverse views, see Feminist Theory and the Body, ed. Janet Price and Margit Schildrick (New York: Routledge, 1999).

  180. Grosz, 149.

  181. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, ix.

  182. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1986), 112.

  183. Steven Pinker, “Deep Commonalities Between Life and Mind,” in Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, ed. Alan Grafen and Mark Ridley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 133.

  184. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 53–54.

  185. George Boole, quoted in Keith Devlin, Goodbye Descartes: The End of Logic and the Search for a New Cosmology of Mind (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 72.

  186. Devlin, 77.

  187. Whitehead, 22.

  188. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Da Capo Press, 1950), 102.

  189. Ibid., 104.

  190. A. M. Schrader, “In Search of a Name: Information Science and Its Conceptual Antecedents,” Library and Information Science Research 6 (1984): 227–71.

  191. Tom Stonier, Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe (London: Springer, 1990), 21.

  192. Rom Harré, “The Rediscovery of the Human Mind,” Asian Journal of Social Psychology 2, no. 1 (1999): 43–62.

  193. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer,” Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, www.cep.ucsb.edu/primer/html.

  194. C. R. Hallpike, On Primitive Society and Other Forbidden Topics (Bloomington, IN: Author House, 2011), 221.

  195. Pinker, How the Mind Works, 21.

  196. Jerry Fodor, The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computational Psychology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). In his introduction, Fodor remarks that although he has written favorably about computational theory of mind, “it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone could suppose that it’s a very large part of the truth; still less that it’s within miles of being the whole story about how the mind works.”