Organizing Self-Experiences by Marye O'Reilly Knapp

 O'Reilly-Knapp and Erskine: States of the Ego

This is an interesting paper that was recently published in the open source International Journal of Integrative Psychotherapy, Vol 3, No 1 (2012). O'Reilly-Knapp offers a different conception of parts, or subpersonalities, one based in the work of Guntrip and Fairbairn, leading figures in the Object-Relations school of psychoanalysis. But her model is also integrative, based in part on Richard Erskine's Theories and methods of an integrative transactional analysis: A volume of selected articles (1997). You can find many of the articles by Erskine at the Integrative Psychotherapy site.

She references one of her own papers that might also be of interest, although it did not seem necessary for appreciating this one - Between Two Worlds: The Encapsulated Self.

Organizing Self-Experiences
Marye O’Reilly-Knapp

Abstract:
Psychotherapy can provide an organization of experiences so that a person attains a sense of self in relation to self and others. The first part of the paper addresses the developing self, the withdrawn  self, and an introduction to the yearning self. The second part of the paper considers the domain of relatedness with a focus on the development of self via the concepts of coherence, agency, affectivity, and continuity in time.

Here is the introduction to the paper:

“There is this secret part of me”, says Linda, as she begins her session. “I do not let anyone know about this piece of me; when I am afraid I hide here.” As she spoke I thought about a little girl who has no one to help her when she is afraid. She figured out a way to protect herself from the shouts and raging behavior of her stepfather and a mother who withdrew. Linda describes to me this hidden place where big rocks surround her in darkness. She cannot be seen nor can she be found. Her rocks remind me of Tustin’s (1986) description of “an imaginary hard shell” which protects a little child from the hostile world (p. 57). In Linda’s situation her mother was unresponsive to her child and failed to provide the protection needed for Linda to feel safe. In an earlier paper on the nature of the schizoid process, the existence of an individual in such a world was described along with the therapeutic interventions needed to establish and maintain a therapeutic relationship (O’Reilly-Knapp, 2001). Using the theory and methods of Integrative Psychotherapy as developed by Erskine (1997) and Guntrip’s (1995) work on the schizoid phenomenon, a framework was identified to work with the state of self that is split off and encapsulated. Using inquiry, attunement, and involvement in working with the splits described by Guntrip, interventions were documented which invited the self into relationship. Within the theory of Integrative Psychotherapy an emphasis is placed on the therapeutic relationship as healing. The process encourages a person in the therapeutic relationship to bring to awareness what has been denied or disavowed and to be immersed in a relationship where the client can express and learn to connect with the therapist, one’s self and, ultimately with others. An empathic, client-centered inquiry, attunement to the client’s rhythms, developmental levels, relational needs, cognition and affect, and involvement in acknowledging, validating and normalizing experiences provides the course of action for working with a person’s splits.

Fairbairn (1952) and Guntrip (1968/1995) proposed that the ego splits into four parts. The first split is between the central ego which is in contact with the outer world and the withdrawn ego which pulls into the inner world. The withdrawal into an inner state is an attempt to move away from perceived danger. As the central ego attempts to deal with the outer world, the wants and needs of the child are obstructed by the persecutory ego. Thus the second split occurs. Guntrip (1995) describes the struggle with the second split of the ego as a part dealing with unsatisfied desires and needs while another part persecutes desires and needs. This active persecution “keeps the basic self weak” and makes ‘cure’ a slow and difficult process” (p. 142). He went on to describe the ultimate split of the ego into the oral ego and regressed ego. Fueled by fear and flight from the outer world and an internal conflict dealing with helplessness and aggression, this last split holds the “dread of collapse in a depersonalized state”. (Hazell,1994, p. 199).

This paper expands on the previous paper on the encapsulated self by focusing on specific interventions for working with the hidden and lost self. The self-invariants of coherence, agency, affectivity, and continuity in time as identified by Stern (1985) are incorporated in this paper as:

1.) a way to further understand the formation of a core self and
2.) a therapeutic direction to facilitate the organization and emergence of self.

Consideration is given to the person’s use of withdrawal and at the same time, the longing to be a part of life. I propose that in the therapeutic relationship, the therapist must address the discord of persecution that is occurring and the struggle between the withdrawn self and the ‘yearning self’, aching to push out toward life and the world. Since the emerging self has withdrawn into an inner world, the core of self appears to be missing. There is no sense of continuity, inner feelings are denied or disavowed, needs are out of conscious awareness, and a sense of power over one’s actions is absent. Treatment of this self-state involves a connection with the therapist and use of rhythmic attunement to mutually create the holding space for emergence. The therapist provides the relationship where a safe environment allows for the self to be in contact and grow. The involvement of the therapist in the use of one’s own self is fundamental in the therapeutic process and will be demonstrated in a case study. The methods of Integrative Psychotherapy are the foundation of the therapeutic interventions; Stern’s (1985) four crucial invariants used in the early development and emergence of the self are employed in this paper as a way to assist in the organization of a person’s self.

Read the whole paper.

Michel Foucault: The Culture of the Self Lecture at Berkeley

This old video of Michel Foucault lecturing at UC Berkeley on the Culture of the Self was posted at Posthuman Destinies - so a serious Thank You to Abdul Lateef for sharing this there. I posted the talk once before, but this time we also have the question and answer session that followed.

Here is a little of the introduction to the lectures offered by Lateef.

These are the classic lectures on Care of the Self given in Berkeley CA April 12/13 1983 that traces the history of the cultivation of Self-Knowledge and Soul-Making within the Western (Greco-Roman) tradition. He concludes his lecture on this note:. The self is not so much something hidden and therefore something to be excavated but as a correlate of the technologies of self that it co-evolves with over millennium.

For more on Foucault, check out his entry at The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Foucault: The Culture of the Self, Part 1 of 7

Foucault: The Culture of the Self, Q and A, Part 1 of 7

Maria Konnikova - How We Think Is How We Are: The Power of Self-Stereotyping

The Big Think site posted this article by Maria Konnikova on how we define ourselves through own self-identifying stereotypes. She argues that "how we think about our own selves is largely determined by how we think others think of us—how we are perceived, judged, and evaluated by the outside world."

Another way of looking at this is through the lens of attachment theory. When we do not experience healthy mirroring (a Self Psychology term for our need to have caregivers be supportive of our presence, our actions, our uniqueness, and who show this support through smiling, laughter, and joyfulness) during infancy and toddler years, we grow up more dependent on how we are viewed by others as our way of defining ourselves.

The lack of healthy mirroring is the root of a lot of self-identity issues - everything from the ubiquitous "co-dependence" issues of addictive relationships to depression and other mood disorders, to the more extreme borderline personality disorder (or, more accurately, complex PTSD) that can occur when a lack of mirroring is combined with neglect or abuse.

How We Think Is How We Are: The Power of Self-Stereotyping

Maria Konnikova on October 31, 2011

As we make sense of the world around us, our minds often take shortcuts, generalizing, cutting corners, making connections and engaging in inferences as they integrate all of the incoming information into a cohesive whole. And as we make sense of people, we typically engage in the exact same practice: when we meet someone for the first time, we’ve likely formed multiple judgments—often without realizing we have done so—before our new acquaintance has even had a chance to speak a single word. We take a look, and we generalize based on what we know and what we’ve learned through past experience. It’s far easier than having to start fresh every single time.
That process of initial, nearly instantaneous judgment is often driven by prevailing stereotypes, our own as well as those of our society as a whole and our immediate circle in particular. But what is less commonly known—or at least considered—is that we apply the exact same process to ourselves, often without realizing we are doing it: how we think about our own selves is largely determined by how we think others think of us—how we are perceived, judged, and evaluated by the outside world.

Stereotype threat in aging
One area where effects of self-stereotyping play out to quite dramatic effect is aging. It is typically thought that as people age, their memories grow worse and their cognitive abilities suffer a general decline. And unfortunately, that type of thinking seems to actually affect how the elderly actually think and remember. Studies have shown that when aging stereotypes are activated, older adults actually begin to exhibit larger memory deficits and worse performance on tests of cognitive ability. But, the news isn’t all bad: the opposite is also true. When such stereotypes are given less weight, memory and cognitive performance both improve.

A study in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science examined whether older adults would perform better on one of the memory tasks that is most often compromised as a result of aging, item-specific processing. Typically, as we age, we rely more on relational processing than item-specific processing when we make memory judgments. That is, we focus on relationships between words and concepts as opposed to differentiating information for a specific word or concept. And when we do that, individuating item information is less available when we retrieve that item from memory. So, for instance, we may find it difficult to determine if an item was actually shown before or if it’s just similar to one that we’ve seen before—creating, in a sense, a false memory. But what if the age-related stereotypes that relate to memory declines are eliminated?

 Read the whole article.

Bakari Akil II, Ph.D. - Change the Story!

Here is another older article that has been hanging around in my tabs for a while - this one looks at role theory and the narrative we construct about who we are as people.

Change the Story!

The way you define your life affects your circumstance.

Published on August 28, 2011 by Bakari Akil II, Ph.D. in Communication Central

I am a huge Seth Godin fan, and recently he penned a blog post titled, The facts. He wrote:

"The story wins the day every time… Your position on just about everything, including, yes, your salary, your stock options, your credit card debt and your mortgage are almost certainly based on the story you tell yourself, not some universal fact from the universal fact database. ---Not just you, everybody."

Godin is correct. All day we are in unceasing conversations with ourselves. We tell ourselves who we are, what we should do, how we should respond and what our mission is. This intrapersonal communication governs our lives to a huge extent and affects our overall well-being. When things are good and especially when they are great the internal dialogue is most likely positive and helps move us forward. But what about when things aren't going according to plan?

What happens when we look into the mirror that is our lives and we are wholly unsatisfied? It is in these times that we need to re-evaluate the internal conversations and monitor what we are saying.

In a recent article I discussed Role Theory, which is one of my favorite topics. Role Theory asserts that there are a multitude of 'characters' that exist in our world. Some of these roles we are born into (e.g., family relationships) and others we willingly accept (marriage, jobs, friendships). Others are foisted upon us, such as stereotypes, or we are pressured into, such as competing with neighbors (commonly referred to as "Keeping up with the Joneses/Kardashians"). Regardless of the type, social norms often dictate that we accept these roles and conform to certain standards of behavior that define them.

This is great when you're 'Winning!' However, what do you do when your thought process and roles are crushing your well being?

Read the whole article.

John Rowan - Review: Hubert Hermans & Agnieszka Hermans-Konopka (2010)/ Dialogical Self Theory: Positioning and Counter-positioning in Globalizing Society

Over at Integral Leadership Review, psychotherapist John Rowan reviews the new book from Hubert Hermans and Agnieszka Hermans-Konopka, Dialogical Self Theory: Positioning and Counter-positioning in Globalizing Society (2010). Since the book is insanely expensive, I'll have to settle for the review.

Book Review: 
Hubert Hermans and Agnieszka Hermans-Konopka: Dialogical Self Theory: Positioning and Counter-positioning in Globalizing Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2010).


John Rowan


This is a brilliant book which would be of interest to Integral people for three reasons: although it does not have a concept of levels, it does range over all four quadrants of the AQAL model; it uses second-tier thinking throughout; and it is firmly research-based.


The first chapter takes us on to the international stage, and the concept of globalization. Straight away we are introduced to second-tier thinking. “The reaction to uncertainty that is central in the present book is a dialogical one. The special nature of dialogue is that it copes with uncertainty by going into this uncertainty rather than avoiding it. Entering a dialogue, with other individuals or with oneself, opens a range of possibilities that are not fixed at the beginning but remain flexible and susceptible to change during the process itself.” (p.46)


The book goes on to explore the process of globalization in a number of fruitful ways. The authors link external processes to internal processes all along the line. “In an era of increased globalization the number and nature of voices in the self have been expanded dramatically, and we are increasingly involved in mediated forms of dialogue: “In contrast to earlier times, dialogical relationships make use of technological advances such as the Internet, e-mail, mobile telephones, multi-user dimensions, and short-message systems that expand our dialogical possibilities beyond the boundaries of self and identity as described in traditional theories.” (p.64) These authors point out that dialogical self theory allows one to make distinctions between several closely related concepts such as uncertainty, anxiety, threat, confusion and absurdity. (p.79)


After the global reach of Chapter 1, in Chapter 2 we come to the individual. Self and identity are looked at in terms of traditional, modern, postmodern and dialogical models.

Read the whole review. 

About the Author: John Rowan

John Rowan is an author, counselor, psychotherapist and clinical supervisor who practices Primal integration in England. He has worked with Ken Wilber in exploring Transpersonal psychology and has written several books on subpersonalities. He has a Ph. D from Middlesex University, is an Honorary Fellow of the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy and a past member of its governing board, representing the Humanistic and Integrative Section. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society (member of the Psychotherapy Section and the Counseling Psychology Division, the Counseling Psychology Division, the Transpersonal Psychology Section and the Consciousness and Experience Section). He is also a Fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and a founding member of the Association of Humanistic Psychology Practitioners. His most popular publication is Ordinary Ecstasy which was originally published in 1976 and is a summary and guide to all the branches of Humanistic psychology.

Gerald Young, Ph.D. - The Multiple Parts of the Self

This is a nice post from Dr. Gerald Young's Rejoining Joy blog at Psychology Today. He has a slightly different perspective on parts work than I do, but any recognition that the self is not singular, but contains multiplicities of selves, is a useful approach to personal growth.

He advocates here for seeking growing parts that may not yet be present. This is an important teaching. Likewise, it is also important to know and feel that those parts of us that are wounded or self-defeating are not the totality of who we are - they are simply damaged parts, they are not our identity as human beings. And they can be healed.

The Multiple Parts of the Self

Leading Yourself to the Stage of Growth

Published on March 17, 2011

by Gerald Young, Ph.D.

Dan felt he did not know himself. "Who am I? What is important to me? I cannot figure that out." He asked questions like these, and moved from one opinion about his core self to another, to the exasperation of his parents. Salem felt the same way, but she related her angst to her feminine identity and culture. "I'm trying to strike out on a different path, but family tell me what to do. They are too old country for me."

Many young people are trying to establish their roles, responsibilities, and sense of self. However, they need to accept that in all these areas changes are inevitable. Self-identity is never set as a tablet in stone, but keeps growing in one way or another. Moreover, the self consists of many parts, although this might not be apparent to us. We are used to thinking of the self as a single whole that defines us. For example, we might say that we have this particular characteristic or that specific passion.

Our sense of personhood is continually in transformation and seeking new areas of growth or parts. Even when our self seems to be stable, psychological energy is being expended to keep it in its present state. A stable self needs to ward off negative interferences or new ideas and aspirations that could affect it. It could be easier psychologically to entertain change than to reject it outright.

Indeed, often we strike out in new directions that might be the most challenging of tasks. Moreover, after they are completed we might start out on another. That is, even though we might think that we especially seek stability, often, after getting to a stable plateau, we seek new tasks or we encounter new problems that shake our stability and move us to growth. In these cases, the self can branch out and find new areas of growth and different parts.

Of course, it might be quite difficult to confront even the smallest of tasks in the day if we are depressed, too worried, angry at life, or fearful to the point of panic and being frozen in our actions. We might have suffered greatly and cannot take the step of feeling the suffering of others. Our core self might seem overwhelmingly negative to us, with little hope on the horizon. In these cases, the self has little room to grow.

Or, we might withdraw from a task or problem, feeling that we cannot handle it, or lack resources to help us with it. We might come to believe that we cannot cope or cannot do well. We might develop a psychology of failure, or a fear of change as part of our self-concept. In these cases, the self might even become more negative, constrict, or lose parts.

When our sense of self is limited by ideas of the self that corner us in spaces with little room for positive change, how can we take back the self from these limitations, even when we have created them ourselves? Part of the answer to this daunting question is to understand that the self is not one thing but a complex of multiple definitions and parts and to seek to have them grow and diversify into new areas.

How does this concept of multiple part selves apply to you? Even though you might think that your self is a unity, and is stable and cannot change, your self might be chafing for change and growth. Your self is psychologically complex, and it could be reaching out in new directions without you being aware of it. Or, you might take a very open decision to seek out new directions in self-growth and explore new avenues in the self.

Each of your parts has developed out of your past experiences, strengths, and vulnerabilities. Some of the parts of your self might be more prominent, for example, in the way that you present yourself to other people or in how you define yourself in moments of self-reflection.

Other parts of your self might be hidden or masked and rarely become evident. One example is that you might behave in one way most of the time when you are with other people but you might behave differently when you are with a best friend.

Parts of your self that are masked or hidden are still in your core self. You need to see them as waiting for you to give them more space or time in your core self, and to have them grow so that they are more evident to you and to others.

Think of the self as having potential parts in waiting for you to activate and have grow. Parts of your self might consist of dreams or wishes that guide you at times, but are only just glimmers in the making. Or, they might be only hopes, but they still could be very powerful motivations in your psychology. These types of part selves are the ones you should try to grow, because they can lead the way for the others, and might help you eliminate or control the parts that are problematic to you. Growth can be actively undertaken; you do not have to wait for others to start changing your sense of self.

Also, there might be quite negative parts of your self that should be better controlled or eliminated. However, you might not know how to do this, or you might even sabotage all efforts to do this. Some negative parts of the self or negative habits do not go away by wishful thinking. They require much psychological work. For example, you might present as extremely virtuous and moral to others, but drink to excess occasionally, and then be rude or act even worse.

This illustrates that your self parts might be in competition or conflict amongst themselves. They might have not learned to share the stage and find balance. No matter what happens, you remain the leader of the growth of your self, and can find new ways, paths, and joys. Dim the lights of the stage so that you can start the next scene in the growth of your self and its parts.

Tags: Gerald Young, The Multiple Parts of the Self, Enjoining Joy, Psychology Today, Psychology, multiplicity, identity, self concept, personal growth, parts, subpersonalities, selves

WildlyParenthetical - Me, myself, my mind and my brain… and I

This is an interesting post about how the ways we language mental illness that can shape and refine our sense of identity, of self, of normalcy. It's a long post, so I'll offer up a taste and I encourage you to read the whole post.

From Me, myself, my mind and my brain… and I

We tend, I think, to use phrases like ‘I have depression’ or ‘I have bipolar’ rather than ‘I am depressed’ or ‘I am bipolar’. This configuration intrigues me: it suggests ownership of the mental illness, but it also makes clear a differentiation between the self and the illness. The self itself is not ill, it has an illness. Disability activists have been aware of this issue for a long time, of course. It tends to manifest along an Anglo/USAian split (though obviously not in any absolute way) where the Brits angle for ‘I’m disabled,’ as a claim of the difference of the self, and a refusal to see disability as irrelevant to the real self, whilst the USAians tend to prefer ‘having’ a disability because it’s ‘person-focused,’ not letting the subject be obscured by the disability. This in turn is the manifestation of some very different commitments, familiar from other sites of activism, to do with the (predominantly liberal) assertion of similarity and the (predominantly radical) assertion of difference. But this configuration of illness and disability, of course, has an older manifestation. Our dear old friend John Locke explicitly situated the body as property. Inalienable property — unable to be given away or sold (though this is of course coming into question with some of the new biotech… and that’s a story for another day, a nice long story!) — but property nonetheless.

This long history, of course, is part of what is challenged by certain kinds of phenomenologists, and the feminist theorists of the body that I talk about all the time. Merleau-Ponty, for example, explicitly tells us that we do not have our body, and nor are we ‘in it’, but we are it. Elizabeth Grosz focuses on the gendering of the mind/body split, saying some interesting things about how bodyliness gets allocated:

The male/female opposition has been closely allied with the mind/body opposition. Typically, femininity is represented (either explicitly or implicitly) in one of two ways in this cross-pairing of oppositions: either mind is rendered equivalent to the masculine and body equivalent to the feminine (thus ruling out women a priori as possible subjects of knowledge, or philosophers) or each sex is attributed its own form of corporeality. However, instead of granting women an autonomous and active form of corporeal specificity, at best women’s bodies are judged in terms of a ‘natural inequality,’ as if tehre were a standard or measure for the value of bodies independent of sex…. By implication, women’s bodies are presumed to be incapable of men’s achievements, being weaker, more prone to (hormonal) irregularities, intrusions, and unpredictabilities. Patriarchal oppression, in other words, justifies itself, at least in part by connecting women much more closely than men to the body and, through this identification, restricting women’s social and economic roles to (pseudo) biological terms. Volatile Bodies, p. 14.

In exploring the inadequacies of this account, the problematic politics involved, and some of the shape of an alternative account,she goes on to say

corporeality must no longer be associated with one sex (or race) which then takes on the burden of the other’s corporeality for it. Women can no longer take on the function of being the body for men while men are left free to soar to the heights of theoretical reflection and cultural production. Blacks, slaves, immigrants, indigenous peoples can no longer function as the working body for white ‘citizens,’ leaving them free to create values, morality, knowledges. Volatile Bodies, p. 22.

It is unsurprising, then, that the mind/body split continues to so inflect these supposedly new ways of talking about ourselves. Jonna’s paper is especially nice because she’s interested in how those who take part in neurofeedback understand the connection between self (mind) and brain (body). As always seems to happen when people attempt to maintain this distinction, there are (what get coded as, given the Cartesian split) confusions, incoherencies, fuzzinesses, and willfulness attributed to both brain and self in certain ways, in certain dimensions.

The self/brain split, of course, is not quite the mind/body split: the self/brain split leaves the rest of the body irrelevant, the dramatic influence of other aspects of corporeality notwithstanding (Elizabeth Wilson’s Psychosomatic does a good job of considering the influence of, for e.g, the gut on aspects of the brain).

Read more.

Tags: WildlyParenthetical, Me, myself, my mind, my brain, I, Psychology, Philosophy, mind, self concept, mental illness, ownership, identity, disability, Normalcy, Suffering, embodiment, body, property, dualism, mind/body, self, brain

David Brooks - Social Animal: How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life

New York Times editorialist David Brooks has an article in the current issue of The New Yorker. He is waxing optimistic about how geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others are beginning to better understand the human mind, and offering:

a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.

Brooks has been writing about these topics off an on over the years - he has even interviewed Antonio Damasio (and others, I assume) about the ways neuroscience can enlighten our understanding of human beings.

It's a long article, so here is a lengthy taste.

Social Animal

How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life.

by David Brooks January 17, 2011

Researchers have made strides in understanding the human mind, filling the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.

* * * * *

We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows. They are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.

A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.

To give a sense of how this inner story goes, let’s consider a young member of the Composure Class, though of course the lessons apply to members of all classes. I’ll call him Harold. His inner-mind training began before birth. Even when he was in the womb, Harold was listening for his mother’s voice, and being molded by it. French babies cry differently from babies who’ve heard German in the womb, because they’ve absorbed French intonations before birth. Fetuses who have been read “The Cat in the Hat” while in the womb suck rhythmically when they hear it again after birth, because they recognize the rhythm of the poetry.

As a newborn, Harold, like all babies, was connecting with his mother. He gazed at her. He mimicked. His brain was wired by her love (the more a rat pup is licked and groomed by its mother, the more synaptic connections it has). Harold’s mother, in return, read his moods. A conversation developed between them, based on touch, gaze, smell, rhythm, and imitation. When Harold was about eleven months old, his mother realized that she knew him better than she’d ever known anybody, even though they’d never exchanged a word.

Harold soon developed models in his head of how to communicate with people and how to use others as tools for his own learning. Thanks to his mom’s attunement, he became confident that if he sent a signal it would be received. Later in life, his sense of security enabled him to go out and explore the world. Researchers at the University of Minnesota can look at attachment patterns of children at forty-two months, and predict with seventy-seven-per-cent accuracy who will graduate from high school. People who were securely attached as infants tend to have more friends at school and at summer camp. They tend to be more truthful through life, feeling less need to puff themselves up in others’ eyes. According to work by Pascal Vrticka, of the University of Geneva, people with what scientists call “avoidant attachment patterns” show less activation in the reward areas of the brain during social interaction. Men who had unhappy childhoods are three times as likely to be solitary at age seventy. Early experiences don’t determine a life, but they set pathways, which can be changed or reinforced by later experiences.

For several months when he was four, Harold insisted that he was a tiger who had been born on the sun. His parents tried to get him to concede that he was a little boy born in a hospital, but he would become grave and refuse. This formulation, “I’m a tiger,” may seem like an easy thing, but no computer could blend the complicated concept “I” with the complicated concept “tiger” into a single entity. As Harold grew, he was able to use his imagination to blend disparate ideas, in the same sort of way that Picasso, at the height of his creative powers, could combine the concept “Western portraiture” with the concept “African masks.”

Throughout his life, Harold had a superior ability to feel what others were feeling. He didn’t dazzle his teachers with academic brilliance, but, even in kindergarten, he could tell you who in his class was friends with whom; he was aware of social networks. Scientists used to think that we understand each other by observing each other and building hypotheses from the accumulated data. Now it seems more likely that we are, essentially, method actors who understand others by simulating the responses we see in them. When Harold was in high school, he could walk around the cafeteria and fall in with the unique social patterns that prevailed in each clique. He could tell which clique tolerated drug use or country-music listening and which didn’t. He could tell how many guys a girl could hook up with and not be stigmatized. In some groups, the number was three; in others seven. Most people assume that the groups they don’t belong to are more homogeneous than the groups they do belong to. Harold could see groups from the inside. When he sat down with, say, the Model U.N. kids, he could guess which one of them wanted to migrate from the Geeks and join the Honors/Athletes. He could sense who was the leader of any group, who was the jester, who played the role of peacemaker, daredevil, organizer, or self-effacing audience member.

One of Harold’s key skills in school was his ability to bond with teachers. We’ve spent a generation trying to reorganize schools to make them better, but the truth is that people learn from the people they love. In eleventh grade, Harold developed a crush on his history teacher, Ms. Taylor. What mattered most was not the substance of the course so much as the way she thought, the style of learning she fostered. For instance, Ms. Taylor constantly told the class how little she knew. Human beings are overconfidence machines. Paul J. H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo gave questionnaires to more than two thousand executives in order to measure how much they knew about their industries. Managers in the advertising industry gave answers that they were ninety-per-cent confident were correct. In fact, their answers were wrong sixty-one per cent of the time. People in the computer industry gave answers they thought had a ninety-five per cent chance of being right; in fact, eighty per cent of them were wrong. Ninety-nine per cent of the respondents overestimated their success.

Ms. Taylor was always reminding the class of how limited her grasp of any situation was. “Sorry, I get distracted easily,” she’d say, or, “Sorry, sometimes I jump to conclusions too quickly.” In this way, she communicated the distinction between mental strength (the processing power of the brain) and mental character (the mental virtues that lead to practical wisdom). She stressed the importance of collecting conflicting information before making up one’s mind, of calibrating one’s certainty level to the strength of the evidence, of enduring uncertainty for long stretches as an answer became clear, of correcting for one’s biases. As Keith E. Stanovich, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, writes in his book “What Intelligence Tests Miss” (2009), these “thinking dispositions” correlate weakly or not at all with I.Q. But, because Ms. Taylor put such emphasis on these virtues and because Harold admired her so much, he absorbed and copied her way of being.

By the time Harold was in his mid-twenties, he was well on his way toward a happy and fulfilling life, and the building blocks of his happiness had little to do with the lines on his résumé. There’s a debate in our culture about what really makes us happy, which is summarized by, on the one hand, the book “On the Road” and, on the other, the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The former celebrates the life of freedom and adventure. The latter celebrates roots and connections. Research over the past thirty years makes it clear that what the inner mind really wants is connection. “It’s a Wonderful Life” was right. Joining a group that meets just once a month produces the same increase in happiness as doubling your income. According to research by Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, and others, the daily activities most closely associated with happiness are social—having sex, socializing after work, and having dinner with friends. Many of the professions that correlate most closely with happiness are also social—a corporate manager, a hairdresser.

Young American men are not exactly famous for being in touch with their emotions. But Harold sensed that he was a social animal, not a laboring animal or a rational animal, and one day he went on a blind date with the woman—let’s call her Erica—who would someday be his wife. Given the stakes, we might pause over this incident, to show in slightly more detail how the inner processes of the mind interact with the conscious ones.

Read the whole article.

Tags: David Brooks, Social Animal, new sciences, human nature, make sense of a life, Psychology, brain, mind, emotions, consciousness, self concept, neuroscience, neurobiology, Daniel Kahneman, Alan B. Krueger, Keith E. Stanovich, Paul J. H. Schoemaker, J. Edward Russo, Pascal Vrticka, The New Yorker

Jay Earley, Ph.D. - Introduction to Internal Family Systems Therapy

Internal Family Systems Therapy (developed by Richard Schwartz, Ph.D.) is the best "parts" work system I have ever used - and I have used all of the major ones. This brief introduction comes from Jay Earley, one of the most experienced IFS therapist, and one who is also versed in integral theory. This is a very simplified explanation - if you are interested in the model, I suggests getting the IFS book, which is down to the right on the sidebar in the list of recommended books.

Introduction to Internal Family Systems Therapy

Jay Earley, Ph.D.

IFS recognizes that our psyches are made up of different parts, sometimes called subpersonalities. You can think of them as little people inside us. Each has its own perspective, feelings, memories, goals, and motivations. For example, one part of you might be trying to lose weight and another part might want to eat whatever you want. We all have parts like the inner critic, the abandoned child, the pleaser, the angry part, and the loving caretaker.

IFS has discovered that every part has a positive intent for you, no matter how problematic it might be. For example, Sally has a part that says, “You couldn’t be successful at your ambitious goals. Who do you think you are?” This is hurtful to her and prevents her from taking action in her life, but when she got to know this part in her IFS work, she discovered that it was actually afraid she would be punished if she stuck her neck out, and it was trying to stop her to protect her from that pain.

Bill has a part that is judgmental and competitive with other people in a way that is not consistent with his true values. However, when he really got to know that part, he discovered that it was just trying to help him feel OK about himself in the only way it knew—by feeling superior to others.

When you understand that a part has a positive intent, it doesn’t mean that you give the part power. Sally doesn’t want her part to prevent her from taking action, and Bill doesn’t want his part to act out being judgmental and competitive. However, using the IFS approach, Sally and Bill can relate to their parts with understanding and appreciation while taking the steps to heal them.

This is fundamentally different from the way we ordinarily relate to our parts. Usually when we become aware of a part, the first thing we do is evaluate it. Is it good or bad for us? If we decide it is good, we embrace it and give it power. We act from it. If we decide it is bad, we try to suppress it or get rid of it. We tell it to go away. However, this doesn’t work. You can’t get rid of a part. You can only push it into your unconscious, where it will continue to affect you, but without your awareness.

In IFS, we do something altogether different and radical. We welcome all our parts with curiosity and compassion. We seek to understand them and appreciate their efforts to help us. But we don’t lose sight of the ways they may be causing us problems. We develop a relationship of caring and trust with each part, and then take the steps to release it from its burdens so it can function in a healthy way.

In the IFS system, there are three kinds of parts—managers, firefighters, and exiles. The managers are the parts you usually encounter first in exploring yourself. Their job is to handle the world and protect against the pain of the exiles. Exiles are young child parts that hold pain from the past. (We won’t get into firefighters in this short article.)

For example, John has one manager that tries to know everything about any organization he might work with and tries to do everything perfectly. This is an incredible burden for him and prevents him from being light and flexible in his work life. When he started to get to know this manager part, he learned that it was trying to protect him from being betrayed by people or projects he might put his heart and soul into. He also realized he had another manager part that was very suspicious of people. This part checks out people carefully to see how they might betray him. Both managers are trying to protect John from feeling the pain of an exile part that felt hurt and betrayed, first by his mother and then by an organization he was part of.

In the above example Sally had a manager that said, “Who do you think you are?” Although this message has prevented Sally from taking action as she would like, it is trying to protect Sally from the pain of an exile part who felt crushed and frightened of punishment. It turned out that Sally (and other children) had been punished by the nuns in her Catholic school whenever they became too visible, so from then on in her life, she had a terrified exile and a manager who tried to keep Sally invisible.

Parts take on extreme roles because of what has happened to them in the past. Exiles take on pain and burdens from what they experienced as children (or occasionally at other times). Managers take on extreme roles in order to protect you from the pain of the exiles. IFS has a method of understanding and working with these parts to release the burdens and heal the system, so you can function in healthy ways.

The IFS Process

So how does IFS work with our parts? IFS recognizes that each of us has a spiritual center, a true Self. This Self is naturally compassionate and curious about people, and especially about our own parts. The Self wants to connect with each part and get to know and understand it. The Self feels compassion for the pain of the exiles and also for the burdens that drives managers to act the way they do. The Self is also able to stay calm and centered despite the sometimes intense emotions that parts may feel. Everyone has a Self, even though in some people it may not be very accessible because of the activity of their parts.

The Self is the agent of healing. An IFS therapist or group leader will coach the Self in how to relate to the parts, but the Self is the true leader of the internal system and can love and heal each part, so you become free of extreme feelings and behavior.

Let’s see how this works. First you learn how to access the Self. IFS has many powerful ways of doing this which are beyond the scope of this article. Then the Self chooses a part to focus on. For example, let’s look at Bill, who has a manager who is judgmental and competitive. This is distressing to Bill because he believes in being cooperative and accepting and inclusive, and to some extent he is. But his judgmental manager crops up in situations where Bill feels threatened. Often he is able to hide his judgments, but sometimes they leak out and cause problems. This makes Bill considerably less effective at work and causes dissension in his organization. It also causes problems for him in his marriage.

Bill started out his IFS work by focusing on his Judgmental Part. It wasn’t easy for Bill to be in Self because he felt disgusted with the Judgmental Part for not living up to his ideals. (The Self is never disgusted, so this was really another part of Bill.) However, with some work, he was able to be genuinely in his Self so that he was interested in getting to know the Judgmental Part. He found out that it was trying to protect an exile part of him that felt inadequate. Bill had a learning problem as a child even though he is quite intelligent and competent. So there was a young part of Bill that had felt inadequate in school. The Judgmental Part was trying to compensate for this inadequacy by feeling superior to people. Bill had grown up in a judgmental, competitive home, so that was the primary model this part knew. As Bill got to know the Judgmental Part, he understood why this part acted as it did and appreciated its efforts in his behalf.

He then contacted the exile who felt inadequate. He listened and watched as this part showed him scenes from his childhood where it felt ashamed and inadequate because of his learning problem, and he responded to it with compassion and caring. The young part responded to this by feeling cherished and valuable for the first time. Up until then, it had been hidden away in Bill’s unconscious, which only increased its feelings of worthlessness. With love from Bill’s Self and direction from the IFS therapist, this young part was able to release the burden of inadequacy it had been carrying and feel good about itself. This allowed the Judgmental manager to relax. It no longer needed to judge people to compensate for the exile’s pain. This enabled Bill to respond to people in the way he always wanted, with openness and acceptance and a cooperative attitude. As a result, he became much more effective at work, and he stopped having so many fights with his wife.

This description of the IFS process is greatly simplified for the sake of this short article. It doesn’t discuss many of the difficulties and complexities that IFS knows how to handle in order to accomplish this kind of healing.

Tags: Jay Earley, Introduction, Internal Family Systems Therapy, Richard Schwartz, parts, parts work, subpersonalities, Psychology, therapy, self concept, psychotherapy, IFS, managers, firefighters, exiles, child parts, inner child, protectors, perfectionist, inner critic

Joseph Bottum: Charles Taylor Is an Underrated Philosopher

Charles Taylor is a philosopher - and a financially successful one at that - and his Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity is a seminal work in modern philosophy, and that book alone should place him in the royalty of living philosophers. See more books by Charles Taylor here.

But he is also Catholic, which I suspect has resulted in his dismissal from the philosophical elite (Zizek, Deleuze, Habermas, and others).

Here is some brief background on his views, via Wikipedia:

Views

In order to understand his views it is helpful to understand his philosophical background, especially his writings on Hegel, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Taylor rejects naturalism and formalist epistemologies.

In his essay To Follow a Rule, Taylor explores why people can fail to follow rules, and what kind of knowledge is it that allows a person to successfully follow a rule, such as the arrow on a sign. The intellectualist tradition presupposes that to follow directions we must know a set of propositions and premises about how to follow directions. But how do we know whether or not the directions are adequate?

Taylor argues that Wittgenstein's solution is that all interpretation of rules draws upon a tacit background. This background is not more rules or premises, but what Wittgenstein calls "forms of life." More specifically, Wittgenstein says in the Philosophical Investigations that "Obeying a rule is a practice." Taylor situates the interpretation of rules within the practices that are incorporated into our bodies in the form of habits, dispositions, and tendencies.

Following Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Michael Polanyi, and Wittgenstein, Taylor argues that it is mistaken to presuppose that our understanding of the world is primarily mediated by representations. It is only against an unarticulated background that representations can make sense to us. On occasion we do follow rules, but Taylor reminds us that rules do not contain the principles of their own application.

Communitarian critique of Liberalism

Taylor (as well as Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Walzer, Michael Sandel, and Gad Barzilai) is associated with a communitarian critique of liberal theory's understanding of the "self." Communitarians emphasize the importance of social institutions in the development of individual meaning and identity.

In his 1991 Massey Lecture, "The Malaise of Modernity," Taylor argued that political theorists, from John Locke and Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, have neglected the way in which individuals arise within the context supplied by societies. A more realistic understanding of the "self" recognizes the social background against which life choices gain importance and meaning.

Joseph Bottum, in Standpoint, argues that it is a mistake to not acknowledge Taylor among the elite, while instead recognizing flash-in-the-pans such as Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Underrated: Charles Taylor

JOSEPH BOTTUM

January/February 2011

The philosopher Charles Taylor is a tall man — tall tall, as Hollywood agents say, to distinguish ordinary people from the stratospheric types — and he sprawls in his chair as he talks. Sprawls on the dais as he teaches.

Sprawls on the page as he writes, for that matter, which may be why he seems a little underrated these days. In one sense it's absurd to suggest the man needs more appreciation. In 1989, he published Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, which has only Alasdair MacIntyre's 1981 After Virtue as competition for the most-praised book of philosophy in English over the past 30 years. He came to Britain from his native Canada as a Rhodes Scholar and stayed to complete his D.Phil under Sir Isaiah Berlin and G. E. M. Anscombe. Along the way, he become a fellow of All Souls and the Chichele professor at Oxford, all while maintaining a professorship back home at McGill University, Montreal.

You may think philosophy doesn't pay — and in that, you'd be joined by every philosopher's wife, from Xanthippe onward — but Taylor's work has won him both the £1 million Templeton Prize in 2007 and the £375,000 Kyoto Prize in 2008.

And yet, in another sense, Taylor has faded. He's an eminence, everyone admits, and then they go away to talk about whatever latest bit of ephemera is making the move from the fringe of upper-middlebrow academics to the ballyhoo of the general public. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan, for an annoyingly present example — a book that takes a few reasonable observations about statistics and builds them into a rickety tower of rules for life and business. (The takeaway? It's better to be lucky than good.)

The sprawl of Taylor's prose has always prevented the reduction of his work to this kind of catchphrase, as does, in truth, the sprawl of his thought. Where Sources of the Self took up everything from Homer to Hegel, Taylor's latest major work, the 2007 A Secular Age, examines the sources of modern social structures by describing everything from the early Middle Ages to Wittgenstein. It's a testament to the book that, at 896 pages, it became as popular as it did.

Besides, every pseudo-philosophical business book like The Black Swan — or pseudo-scientific atheist book like Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, or pseudo-intellectual economics book like Levitt and Dubner's Freakonomics — is finally an exercise in instrumental reason. We want to get something useful out of them, and Taylor has spent decades decrying the instrumentalising of reason, the disenchantment of the world that follows from the self-contradictory demand for usefulness.

We do genuinely desire usefulness, even while we never quite seem to ask what makes usefulness a desirable thing. Where MacIntyre sees the incommensurability of differing systems of ethical reasoning, Taylor insists that modernity has bequeathed us a surprisingly comprehensive consensus: on the instrumentality of nature, yes, but also on human rights, the reduction of suffering, self-determination, freedom and equality.

What we lack, however, is something whose absence threatens the existence of these common goods, for we do not share any account of why they are good. We have been beaten down by modernity so systematically that we refuse, like a badly broken horse, the least suggestion of a source for morality. That allows people like Dawkins to ride us around the show ring for a while, but once all the reasons to be moral have finally been debunked, there will come a day — call it Peter Singer Day — when people start noticing that morality itself has become as illusory as they believed the sources of morality to be.

Throughout Taylor's work there have been certain constants. His rejection of the naturalism of the scientific revolution as a reasonable metaphysics, a coherent account of the world, for example. So, too, his insistence, manifest most clearly in his 1992 The Ethics of Authenticity, that selves are formed in community, even when the community has somehow decided, communally, that we each carry around our own unique, non-communal selves.

Taylor is the very model of a post-analytic philosopher, using the precise tools of arid British philosophy to dig in the rich but sloppy soil of Continental thought. He's also something of a postmodern, or perhaps post-postmodern, as when, in A Secular Age, he historicises and deconstructs Nietzsche's historicising and deconstructing of belief in God. Most of all, he's a devout Catholic — that great escape, as Chesterton once put it, from the terrible burden of being a child of one's time — and he has always seen the ways that God, the true source of morality, keeps slipping through the attempts to squeeze Him out of human life and human culture.

No wonder such books as Sources of the Self and A Secular Age sprawl across their pages. Charles Taylor is a tall man — tall tall, as they say — and perhaps we're not used to looking up enough to see how far he's reached. But surely we could raise our eyes, just a little more.

You can watch some videos of Taylor speaking at the links below.

• Can Human Action Be Explained?; Charles Taylor gives a lecture at Columbia University
• A Political Ethic of Solidarity; Charles Taylor gives a lecture on a future politics self-consciously based on differing views and foundations in Milan
• The Future of The Secular; Charles Taylor gives lecture at the New School
• "Spiritual Forgetting"; Charles Taylor at awarding of Templeton Prize

Tags: Philosophy, Religion, secularism, society, self concept, Standpoint, Joseph Bottum, Charles Taylor, Underrated, Sources of the Self, A Secular Age, Templeton Prize, The Ethics of Authenticity, ethics, morality, Kyoto Prize, Communitarian

More on Antonio Damasio's Self Comes to Mind

Antonio Damasio spoke to the RAND Corporation a while back on his newest book, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, and the video is posted on the Zocalo Public Square site. They also posted a summary of the talk, a Q&A with Damasio, and an excerpt from the book.

For balance, below this I will also post another less-than-favorable review of the book, via John Bickle at the New Scientist's Culture Lab blog.

Where Consciousness Comes From

For Antonio Damasio, author of Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, the human mind is certainly an astounding thing, but it’s not as unique as many of us may think.

“One of the main points about this book is to dispel the myth that we are alone in the specialness of mind and consciousness,” Damasio said to the full house at the RAND Corporation. “I believe what we call mind and conscious mind are the current end product of a long period of evolution.”

Damasio went on to explain where the mind began, how it works, and what it allows humans to do — from thinking about the weekend to building civilizations.

Bacteria, fish, and us

The story of the mind begins even before the story of the brain, with unicellular creatures. Today, animals, including simple ones like frogs and fish, are quite likely to have what Damasio called a “proto-self.” “I cannot prove it in the final quality of proof — which would be to get their testimony, but the fish can’t tell me, nor can the frog,” Damasio said. In any case, he added, “The burden is on us to disprove that they don’t rather than prove that they do.” The rate of brain evolution, Damasio noted in Q&A, is a mystery, though it’s clear the proto-self is millions of years old.

Beyond the proto-self is what Damasio called the “core self”, which does require a complex interaction between an organism and the world around it. It’s still not anywhere near as complex as the third part of the self — the autobiographical self. “We have a sense of personhood that is very elaborate,” he said. “Everyone in this room knows who he or she is. Everybody in this room has a narrative of the past.” Damasio imagined asking all the audience members who they were, anticipating that most would offer where they were born, what they like and dislike, and “some kind of trajectory”.

“If one is a very literary person, it will become beautiful with great words,” he said. “If one is a politician it will come with all sorts of embroidery…. If you’re an actor, probably it will come with aspects of vanity, and the same thing if you’re a professor neuroscience.”

Autobiographical selves are of course unnecessary for survival, as Damasio noted in Q&A. Single-cell bacteria have “a complex social life” — fighting in groups, building alliances — without having minds. But the complexity of human survival required the mind.

Your dog is special but not as special as you

Damasio predicted another audience response: “You can say, ‘Are you sure that my dog doesn’t have an autobiographical self? My dog does. My dog knows who I am and a sense of what was before,’” he joked. “I will grant you that your dog is very special and has an autobiographical self.”

But, Damasio said, dogs do not have a sense of the anticipated future. “You cannot say my dog is actually very preoccupied with a certain gift he wants for Christmas,” he explained. For all the humans worried about gifts and other future plans, he said, “That is something that is incredibly beautiful and distinguishes human beings. We live every moment, every second of our lives poised between the lived past and the anticipated future.”

Humans have a “particularly bizarre” ability to create memories of the future. “Every time you think what you’re going to do next weekend, you’re going to put that in your memory,” Damasio said. “So you have a memory of the future that you hope to live.”

This process is constantly moving in time, and not “an object like a bottle,” not rigid. “There are some of you that suddenly started thinking what they’re going to do this weekend, and you’ve already probably put something in your memory,” Damasio said. Even though other animals, like chimps, do plan, Damasio argued that this type of planning — the constant movement between past and future, the reaction to the present based on a remembered past and expected future — is uniquely human.

The fish next door

Because of its ability to recall past and anticipate future events, the human mind has unique emotional capacities, Damasio explained. “If we did not have an autobiographical self, we may have simple joys, but you may not have what we would call bliss,” he said. The same is true for pain, which can be amplified to suffering by the autobiographical self. That self, Damasio explained, also drove the development of memory, our reasoning capacity, language, and our relationships.

“If your sense of life is a constantly moving present, if you’re a fish, you’re probably not going to be terribly worried if the fish next door — if there were doors in the sea — is suffering, if he is being caught,” Damasio said. “But it will have a different impact if you are a person and you see suffering.”

Those relationships in turn spurred the development of civilizations and cultures, the aim of which are generally to maximize well-being. “The best of human states is a state in which we seek consistently well-being for ourselves and others, and a state in which we want to reduce pain and suffering,” Damasio said. He explained in Q&A that it’s certainly not the only state, as all humans have fundamental emotions like anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, and surprise, which are sometimes unruly and in conflict with social emotions like compassion, shame, pride, and admiration. “We did not come to being as nice people living in Santa Monica. We came to being in small tribes that were fighting against each other that had an ideal size of between 15 and 30,” Damasio said.

But the mind did give rise, through civilization, to what Damasio called “a socio-cultural form of life regulation.” Instruments of culture — morality, religion, arts, science, technology, economics, governments, “all of these things you think of as tumbling from somewhere without a cause are in fact the results of extremely direct inventions of human beings in order to make their life better,” Damasio said. As he added in Q&A, returning to Spinoza, the subject of a prior book, “Spinoza always said that the reason why you should be altruistic is that you want to favor yourself…that is a very beautiful idea.”

Like a symphony, and not

Despite having the highest form of self, Damasio said, the human mind isn’t entirely dependent on the most evolved part of the brain, the cerebral cortex. Rather, it’s in one of the oldest parts of our brain, the one whose design we share with reptiles — the brain stem. The brain stem connects “primordial feelings” with the more refined parts of the cerebral cortex. “It’s the dialogue between the very old part of the brain that we share with many other species and a new part of the brain that allows us to have all these very refined operations of mind, that allows us to become Mozarts or Shakespeares,” Damasio said. The mind also can’t be explained by particular neurons or neuro-modulators, like serotonin or dopamine, he said during Q&A. Those molecules are ancient, found in flies and fish, distributed throughout the brain and work in conjunction with other parts of the brain to generate a mind process.

Damasio closed by quoting the first epigraph of his book, from the poet Fernando Pessoa: “My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only recognize myself as a symphony.” Pessoa, Damasio noted, invented several pseudonyms, each with distinct selves, under which to write, and so well understood that the self is a combination of many elements, even if the symphony analogy is imperfect.

“You have a conductor looking at the musicians and you have musicians who have rehearsed a score,” Damasio said. “Our conscious minds are being made as they go. There is no score…. The conductor is himself an illusion that we create.”

See more photos here.
Read Antonio Damasio’s In The Green Room Q&A here.
Read an excerpt of Self Comes to Mind here.

Boy the book here.

*Photos by Aaron Salcido.

Video: Where Does Consciousness Come From?

Tuesday, December 07, 2010

(The video would not embed, so you can watch it at the link above or download it with the links below.)

• DOWNLOAD PODCAST
  
• DOWNLOAD VIDEO

Here is the review from the New Scientist's Culture Lab blog. Bickle is not terribly impressed with Damasio's synthesis of the available research, some of the most important pieces conducted by Damasio and his team of researchers.

Mapping the mind to the body – a little too easily

November 2010

John Bickle, contributor

Antonio Damasio's Self Comes to Mind has some intriguing new ideas based on solid science and makes a grand claim, but won't get its hands dirty

WHEN combining neuroscience and philosophy, one popular strategy is to present many surprising neuroscientific results and then breathlessly assemble them into a grand speculative claim about "what it all means". A second strategy is to roll up one's sleeves and dig into a specific area of neuroscience, presenting not only the eye-opening results but also the methods and rationales behind them to argue precise philosophical points.

Self Comes to Mind is an example of the first strategy - but neuroscientist Antonio Damasio is in good company. Since the 19th century many great scientists have attempted to sketch a philosophical vision, hard won over years of scientific toil. But despite the broad appeal of this intellectual-cum-popular genre, and the chatter it can raise on the intelligentsia's cocktail party circuit, it is reasonable to ask what lasting impact even the best of these tomes have on real science or philosophy. I suspect not much.

That's not to say that Damasio's book isn't an interesting read. The book sets out to explore how the brain constructs a mind and how the mind in turn becomes conscious. It is a daunting journey, and Damasio introduces some novel ideas along the way. For instance, he argues that at the root of the mind is each individual cell's "desire" to maintain its ideal living conditions, or homeostasis. Homeostasis, he argues, is the most valuable thing a biological organism can possess. Therefore evolution will surely select for anything that best maintains it - even full-blown human consciousness. This hypothesis is worthy of serious investigation.

Damasio also offers an intriguing link between the evolution of consciousness and the brain's propensity to create "maps" - networks of neurons that represent body states. Such maps allow the brain to monitor the body and make sure it doesn't stray too far from the homeostatic ideal. Neural maps, he argues, give rise to the mind - but ultimately they are about the body. I was grateful to see Damasio apply real neuroscience to this often hand-waving notion of "embodied cognition".

Readers familiar with Damasio's previous writings will find a nice continuation in his latest views about the crucial role emotions play in consciousness. But now he gives memory a new significance: the brain's evolved capacity to store vast records of motor skills, facts and events, combined with its ability to process memory records while continuing to perceive the present moment, result in the fully human "autobiographical" self - the key ingredient, he argues, that allows for the mysterious leap from mind to conscious awareness.

In the end, however, the book's adherence to strategy number one is its undoing. Rather than presenting sustained arguments, chapters are broken into often disconnected sections that read like extended aphorisms. When the philosophical going gets tough (that is, interesting), Damasio often switches topics. With a few exceptions, the science is presented similarly. We learn remarkable facts about the brain but next to nothing about how or why these facts were discovered.

Of course, when fleshing out a "synoptic vision", it is not practically possible to explain all of the scientific processes that formed the basis of one's speculative reach. Still, there's something deeply worrisome about books like this. Expounding on scientific results and using them to engage in philosophical speculations without explaining or criticising the processes that generate the data can create a dangerous intellectual conformity paraded as "scientific". Damasio knows his science, but he and others would do well to remember that many readers don't. A little explanation of the scientific process lurking behind the philosophy would go a long way.

Book Information
Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the conscious brain
by Antonio Damasio
Pantheon
$28.95

(Image: Tim Hawley/Getty)

Tags: Self Comes to Mind, Constructing the conscious brain, Antonio Damasio, Zocalo Public Square, New Scientist, Culture Lab, brain, consciousness, self concept, mind, identity, books, RAND, lecture, neuroscience, philosophy, John Bickle, emotions, human mind, autobiographical self, proto-self, core self