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Abstract
By integrating data from general psychology and perinatal clinical psychology with neuroscience and psychoanalysis, the author discusses the relations between memory and consciousness, the aim being a unitary definition of the concept of unconscious. Nobody has a brain that can be the same as any other person's: the biology of memory lies in neural networks that have been constructed in the brain of that specific person by their experience. From the fetal stage, each brain progressively learns its own individual functions during its relational neuropsychic development. The author underlines how the continuous emotional biological work of the brain, together with a person's entire relational life, produces the construction of the whole functional and individual mindbrain. The whole construction is memory and this is unconscious; indeed it may be the true unconscious. From the continuous silent work of the mindbrain of a person, some forms of conscious level may emerge in his individual's subjectivity: some functioning of mindbrain makes what an individual person can consciously remember. The unconscious is only what appears in some form in an analyst's consciousness, at some specific moment in his relationship with a patient, and which the analyst translates into some form of his verbal interpretation.
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Notes
1 Or rather, a simplistic conception of the Freudian model such as the one criticized by Meltzer (Citation1981) – the “hydraulic model”. The transfigured concept of drive that Solms offers us (Citation2015) is very different.
2 I deliberately use the term with a capital letter here, with the meaning described by Elliott Jacques (Citation1955), in opposition to the concept of Organization.
3 An expert pianist can play by memory, without remembering which sequences of notes appear on the score, or which fingers to move: he “thinks” a music that he obviously remembers, while his fingers pass over the keys automatically, in synchrony with his “musical thought.”
4 Nobody can ever know how much of what an individual “perceives” via the senses is the same as or different from what another person perceives; we can only acknowledge that so-called “normal” adults all know how to interact with reality.
5 As early as 1961, Money Kyrle had stated that the affects are the first way in which the human being gets to know the world.
6 Secondary, but also as though they were hindrances and obstacles with respect to an ideal mind: “affect” has the same etymological root as “affect in relation to disease”: “I am affected by … .”
7 See Cena & Imbasciati, Citation2014; Cena, Imbasciati, & Baldoni, Citation2010, Citation2012; Imbasciati, Citation2013b, Citation2015, Citation2016b, Citation2017a; Imbasciati & Cena, Citation1991, Citation2015, Citation2017, Citation2018; Imbasciati, Dabrassi, & Cena, Citation2007, Citation2011; Manfredi & Imbasciati, Citation2004.
8 Animal experimentation has shown how the production of protein chains that can establish new synapses, and therefore new synaptic networks and modifications of the whole structure, depends on the right level of stress in the brain at the time of the new experience.
9 The name, with its etymological root that recalls disease (adfectum, affection), indicates how fearful the human being is of what in him is not clear and which often goes beyond the illusion of his “free” will. On the other hand, the nominal distinction that is usually made between affect and cognition proceeds exclusively from how much and in what way the adult can understand within the direct relationship with himself and with others (cf. below).
10 Psychology was in itself psychology of consciousness, as it appeared in the subject and as it appeared in the observer, so that Freud had to make use of the term “metapsychology” when he showed that there existed something mental beyond the consciousness.
11 Let us remember the Freudian wish Wo Es var soll Ich werden [Where Id was Ego will be] (Freud, Citation1932). In actual fact, what an analyst interprets to the patient does not necessarily become consciousness in that way, except in a momentary verbalization that the patient seems to share. In actual fact, what the analyst interprets is not the unconscious as such, but what the analyst at a given time of his brain translates into a verbalization. That this then has a therapeutic effect is another problem, to be studied in the transit of emotions that the neural networks construct and/or change.
12 See the hypothesis of Damasio (Citation1999) on the various levels of “mapping” in the brain of the states of the body, and of reference of the consciousness to a nuclear self, that is, to the individual that recognizes being the conscious protagonist of what happens.
13 Some neuroscientists consider dreaming a form of consciousness.
14 With respect to “normal,” it has continuously been thought that the functioning of the memory proved its (natural?) “normality” in the fact that remembering (equivalent to “memory”) remained constant. If it disappeared, the reason why was asked and, above all, if it was found to have changed, it was thought that “something” must have changed its presumed normality (Imbasciati, Citation2005, Citation2007). The term “trauma” in itself indicates that some norm deemed natural has been broken.
15 It was not until Bion (Citation1962) that the term “learning” appeared in the psychoanalytic literature. As I have already emphasized on several occasions (Imbasciati, Citation2013a, Citation2013b, Citation2015) the separation of the study of affectivity, which has remained at the centre of psychoanalysis, from that of the cognitive processes, left to experimental psychology, resulted from Freud’s drive energy theory, which, with the concept of repression, simplistically solved the problems related to memory.
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Notes on contributors
Antonio Imbasciati
Antonio Imbasciati was full professor of clinical psychology and director of the Institute of Clinical Psychology of Brescia University, Italy, and is a full member and training analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society. Now he is professor emeritus. He took a degree in medicine with specializations in psychotechnics, clinical psychology, and infant neuropsychiatry. He trained as a researcher at the Institute of Psychology of the Milan Catholic University between 1961 and 1971 (with a university teacher’s qualification in 1970), and as psychoanalyst since 1963 within the institutional structures of the Italian Psychoanalytical Society, of which he is a full member and training analyst. He has worked in Milan and Brescia as a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist, and researcher, and university teacher, supervisor, and training analyst. He has published more than 350 works, of which 66 are books. His major works in English are Constructing a mind (Brunner & Routledge, 2006) and Mindbrain, psychoanalytic institutions and psychoanalysts (Karnac, 2017).