A Heaven in a Wild Flower: Self, Dissociation, and Treatment in the Context of the Neurobiological Core Self

Abstract

At the heart of this article are current understandings from the cutting edge of neurobiology on the neurobiological core self. A clinical understanding of self, dissociation, and therapeutic process is shaped by: (a) current affective neuroscience work on the neurobiological core self; (b) longitudinal developmental research on attachment patterns and dissociation; and (c) neurobiological research on how dissociation affects the brain. I explore how the fundamentally coherent nature of the neurobiological core self relates to self as clinically conceived. With a clinical method based on the moment-to-moment tracking of the phenomenological manifestations of affective experience, I focus on moments that possess qualities of integrative experience, i.e., moments possessed of coherence, vitality, energy and/or subjective truth: I propose that such moments of experience are manifestations of the fundamentally integrative neurobiological core self in fractal form. Attending to them all the while being immersed in the fragmented world of dissociative experience is important: they contain resources to be recruited for the trauma and neglect work ahead. Thus equipped, dissociation and its impact on self, and then its treatment, can be considered. I conclude with some snapshots from clinical work with a patient manifesting dissociation as neurobiologically defined here. The mechanism of recognition is shown to play a major role in the search-and-rescue mission for and of the patient's felt sense of self.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The title of this article comes from a William Blake poem. This is the stanza that the line comes from: “To see a World in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a wild flower, hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour” (Blake, 1863, p. 105).

My thanks to Frank Faranda, Jon Frederickson, Michael Geiss, Ruth Lanius, Colette Linnihan, Kai MacDonald, and Jaak Panksepp for engaging conversations facilitative to the development of these ideas. My deep gratitude to the core-self-selected mentors that my seeking-system led me to, i.e., William James, D. W. Winnicott, Michael Eigen, and Emmanuel Ghent, for being such awesome interlocutors.

Notes

¹There is considerable empirical evidence, particularly from the growing neuroscientific evidence of plasticity in adult brains, for these foundational assumptions. Presenting that evidence is beyond the scope of this article. The interested reader is referred to Bushell, Olivo, and Theise (2009), Doidge (2007), Fosha (2009b), and Siegel (2009, 2010), among many works on the topic.

²The transformational process can be thought of—to use a current colloquialism—as growth on steroids.

³ Schwartz (1995), writing on the qualities of core self or core self energy, and Siegel (2009, 2010) on the features of integration arrived at a similar phenomenological description. Which is good, as it validates fundamental aspects of phenomena that come through even when being viewed through different theoretical lenses.

⁴Now widely used, the felt sense is Gendlin's term (1996): “a bodily sense of some situation, problem, or aspect of one's life. … [A] felt sense must first be allowed to come; it is not already there. A felt sense is new. … It comes freshly, in something like tearfulness or yawning come in on us” (p. 20; italics in original text).

⁵ N.B. A note on usage: In this section, and throughout, in keeping with Panksepp and Damasio's convention, the term neurobiological core self refers to the self-organization mediated by subcortical midline structures of the brain, and the term neurobiological self refers to the self-organization mediated by a coordination of subcortical and cortical midline structures. Given my focus on affectively and bodily rooted aspects of experience, in this article I privilege the neurobiological core self usage.

⁶ Edelman (1992) regarded the match between self and the world brokered by recognition processes as essential. This is how he defines recognition: “The continual adaptive matching or fitting of elements in one physical domain to novelty occurring in elements of another, more or less independent physical domain, a matching that occurs without prior instruction” (p. 74). He felt that “neurobiology is a science of recognition” (p. 79).

⁷Although dopamine and cortisol (the HPA axis) are inversely related, oxytocin and dopamine are congruent and positively correlated (MacDonald, 2012, personal communication).

⁸The phenomenology of things that do not feel right, and instead feel wrong or off, is discomfort, stress, or other manifestations of fundamentally negative somatic/affective markers.

⁹My thanks to David Mars and Karen Pando-Mars for many stimulating and inspiring discussions on their notion of Arnold Mindell's seven channels of experience (emotion, energy, name the others) and what is means for knowing or truth to be an eighth channel of experience.

¹⁰A comprehensive review of neurobiological research on dissociation is beyond the scope of this article. I selected a vein of studies that is congruent with this article's focus on the neurobiological core self.

¹¹The periaqueductal gray is a central part of the subcortical midline structures that constitute the core self (Panksepp and Northoff, 2008).

¹²It is interesting to note that, although a primordial sense of the body probably residing in the upper brain stem (Damasio, 2010; Panksepp and Northoff, 2008) is always informing the self-related processing of the core self, the structures that constitute core self do not include the insula, which is crucial to proprioception and the mediation of many other aspects of emotional experience, including the energy management aspect of emotional experiences (Craig, 2005, 2010); nor do they include the amygdala and the hippocampus, crucial structures for the generation and mediation of emotion, especially fear (Damasio, 2010; LeDoux, 1996).

¹³I include internal resources in my notion of resources. I use resources to refer both to environmental factors, i.e., the relational environment, and capacities that buttress and scaffold experiencing.

¹⁴Under conditions of life threat, a dorsal vagal shut down, i.e., the autonomic nervous system shifting to functioning dominated by the dorsal vagal branch of the parasympathetic nervous system, underlies dissociation (Porges, 2009).

¹⁵There is certainly a division, separation, disassociation between the two self-organizations I am calling the compromised self and the resilient self. But the processes responsible for that division and separation are different than the definition of dissociation I am using here. N.B.: What I am referring to as the compromised self and the resilient self are functional self-organizations that come to the fore in conditions of relative threat and safety. The neurobiological self underlies both and is reflected in each.

¹⁶Thank you, Michael Geiss, for sharing this poem with me in precisely this context.

¹⁷By the way, Winnicott's writing is, to my mind, informed by the sense of knowing, rather than thinking, which is what makes it feel true to the reader. It is as if he is articulating something that's been all along as a truth waiting to be found. That's actually true, although the apparatus—be it psychic/personal, clinical/technical, or theoretical—had to be developed to be able to articulate knowing into content possessed of the experience of truth.