Hierarchical and Nonhierarchical Models of Consciousness: Commentary on Paper by Hilary Hoge

Abstract

Understanding consciousness as either hierarchical—as a single reality with various levels of depth—or nonhierarchical, as a self-organizing multiplicity of embodied states with an emergent intelligence greater than the sum of its information, makes a decisive difference in clinical practice. It leads to a fundamental difference between imagination and illusion. Imagination is understood as an efficacious aspect of reality, not as its opposite. To this perspective the dreamer did not create the dream but belongs to the dream. Images possess us more than we have them. The efficacy originates in the images. Using an example of a dream worked by Freud, which locates its meaning in a historical event, the author demonstrates the difference between historical interpretation and correspondence between dream image and historical fact, creating a meaningful reverberation. He shows how the body can be used as a receptacle of multiple sense memories corresponding to multiple embodied states, which when experienced simultaneously give rise to fresh consciousness. He concludes by showing the difference between a co-construction of meaning, which ascribes meaning, and the emergence of meaning from the multiplicity of embodied states enveloping analyst and patient.

Notes

¹“A spontaneous flashback is a moment in which the traumatic environment suddenly reestablishes itself and the traumatized person finds herself in a repetition of the traumatic events. An artificial flashback, on the other hand, arises from a careful re-collection of the environment until it is fully present again. Because the artificial flashback has slowly been constructed, the traumatized person knows that she is in a flashback, and is thus in a dual consciousness: on the one hand she is utterly present to the traumatic situation, which once again fully surrounds her, while on the other she realizes that she has artificially brought this condition about, and is simultaneously safely sitting in a room with a therapist” (Bosnak, 2007, p. 42). Artificial flashbacks can also be established by inhabiting nontraumatic memories or dreams through careful multimodal observation of as many details recall may provide.

²The book Embodiment (Bornak, 2007) follows the work with a man who is about to identify with a cat in his dream: “I encourage him to feel into his body and feel it mimic the movements of the cat. As his body state becomes more like the cat, the chances increase that Cat substance will enter him and infuse him with Cat intelligence. In order to make this happen he has to become as much like the cat as possible” (p. 130).

³“[William] James set out to answer his question … : do we run from a bear because we are afraid or are we afraid because we run? He proposed that the obvious answer, that we run because we are afraid was wrong, and instead argued that we are afraid because we run: 'Our natural way of thinking about … emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to bodily expression. My thesis on the contrary is that the body changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion'” (LeDoux, 1996, p. 43).

⁴“What we usually think of as conscious memory we now call, following Squire and Schacter, explicit (or declarative) memory. It is the conscious recall of people, places, objects, facts and events. … Unconscious memory we now call implicit (or procedural) memory. It underlies habituation, sensitization, and classical conditioning as well as perceptual and motor skills” (Kandel, 2006, p. 132).

LeDoux (1996) gave the following example of the difference in these memory systems: “Suppose you are driving down the road and have a terrible accident. … You consciously remember where you were going and who you were with. You also remember how awful it was. But in the declarative memory system there is nothing different about the fact that you were with Bob and the fact that the accident was awful. Both are just facts, propositions that can be declared, about the experience. … It is a declarative memory of an emotional experience. It is mediated by the temporal lobe memory system and has no emotional consequences itself. In order to have an aversive emotional memory, complete with the bodily experiences that come with an emotion, you have to activate an emotional memory system, for example the implicit fear memory involving the amygdala” (p. 200).