Our Symbolic Minds: What Are They Really?

Abstract

This paper grounds the symbolic mind in the natural history of the human species. After presenting an evolutionary cognitive explication of the distinctions in communicative minds between human and non-human social species, the paper examines the affective basis of animal cognition as argued by neuropsychoanalytic theorists. In the human species, affect not only motivates learning about the world, it also forms the basis of our symbolic minds. It is the unique projection of our animalian affect into shared, external formulations that constitutes the intersubjectivity of our culturally-mediated minds. The import of this argument for psychoanalytic practice is then briefly considered.

Keywords:

• Symbolic minds
• non-symbolic minds
• affective development
• feeling
• psychoanalytic treatment

Notes

1 The complexity of mind in terms of consciousness, what and when mind is conscious, will be examined below in the section on the neuroaffective model of human development. For now no qualifications are made, and the term mind is used freely with such words as subjectivity, objectivity, affectivity, experience, and “the capacity to feel.”

2 These are terms used in cognitive neuroscientist Endel Tulving’s model (Tulving 2002).

3 No distinction is being made here.

4 This is not to say that other animals have no internal perceptual capacity, but it is very difficult for us to conceive of outside of language.

5 Gary Van Den Heuvel published an abridged edition of Langer’s three-volume work in a single volume (Langer 1988), with the “aim of introducing Langer to a wider audience, with the conviction that her magnum opus deserves a broader readership than it has achieved” (p. viii).

6 This section is only briefly developed. A second paper will focus exclusively on these implications.

7 Panksepp capitalizes the labels for these systems to distinguish his own use of common words (1998).

8 The infant’s challenge of self-regulation includes not only the maintenance of organic homeostasis but rudimentary affective interactions with her external environment. Psychoanalytically-minded infant researchers like Louis Sander (Sander et al. 1979) see a continuity between the infant’s organization of physiological state and her earliest states of feeling. Infant researchers like Evelyn Thoman (Thoman and Graham 1986) emphasize the importance of the child’s experience of her own self-regulatory capacity vis-à-vis the environmental support she requires. The organic and experiential state of the infant is hers, from day one, although critically organized around her environment. If this environment is sensitive and supportive of her personal agency, albeit immature, the child is much more likely to thrive.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Margaret M. Browning

BIO: After receiving her Ph.D. in Psychology from The University of Chicago, Margaret M. Browning continued her developmental research with colleagues focused on prematurely-born infants. Subsequently she spent over ten years at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital conducting research in health services. In her retirement she is focusing on her own area of interest in neuropsychoanalytic, developmental, philosophical psychology.