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  • Commentary on "Connectionist Hysteria"
  • James Phillips and J. Melvin Woody

Lucynet raises challenging questions for both the clinician and the philosopher. The most provocative of these questions arises as soon as we attempt to understand the meaning of Lucy's symptoms in terms of the surprising performance of Lloyd's connectionist model. Freud's explanation is entirely psychological or hermeneutic in character. He explains Lucy's rhinitis and olfactory hallucinations by interpreting the unconscious meanings of those symptoms as semantic elements in an intelligible history.

By contrast, although Lloyd has tried to model the meanings in Freud's hermeneutic account by assigning extra weight to the events that proved significant in the course of analysis, the operation of Lucynet is as hermeneutically opaque as a medical diagnosis that would make no appeal to meaning but would explain Lucy's symptoms in strictly causal, somatic terms. Indeed, from the psychological standpoint the most interesting feature of Lloyd's model seems especially puzzling. Why does the network eliminate from active memory precisely those events whose learning parameter has been increased fivefold?

Yet the fact that Lloyd's network reproduces Lucy's symptoms without resort to unconscious meanings challenges one to reconsider the classical model. Can Lloyd's connectionist alternative be reconciled with the interpretive process that is at the core of any psychoanalytically oriented therapy? While his model will seem strange to the reader accustomed to the familiar Freudian method, it may in fact be closer to the clinical data.

Lloyd writes that "[u]nconscious memory is not an explicit store of event memories withheld from consciousness, but rather a complex set of dispositions to activation within consciousness itself." What does clinical experience suggest about this contrast? Freud informs us that between the two participants in psychoanalytic treatment "[n]othing takes place . . . except that they talk to each other" (1959 [1926], 187). In this dialogue one thing leads to another, associative connections are made, memories are recalled. Freud explains this process as an unearthing of repressed memories, but this explanation is after all only a heuristic or hermeneutic device. What is happening is a therapeutic dialogue (Leavy 1980) in which the complex of active associations changes over time. It is arguably closer to the experience (and more parsimonious) to state that what is changed is a "complex set of dispositions to activation within consciousness itself" rather than "an explicit store of even memories withheld from consciousness."

Around this point, finally, we would nudge Lloyd one step further. In offering a connectionist alternative to Freud's model he tends to adhere to Freud's static notion of memory. For Freud there is the event with its impact, the repressed memory, and the recovery of the memory. [End Page 89] For Lloyd there is the event with its impact, the altered associative state, and the return of altered associations to a conscious state. Rather than mirroring so closely Freud's static system of memory, with its vision of permanent encoding, we would suggest that Lloyd's analysis lens itself naturally to the more dynamic view of memory as an ongoing recategorizing process proposed by Gerald Edelman (1992) and given psychoanalytic articulation by Arnold Modell (1990). Lucy's successive traumas, and their resolution, offer a striking example of the fact that "[w]hat is tore in memory is not a replica of the event, but rather the potential to generalize or refind the category or class of which the event is a member" (Modell 1990, 64). The end of the therapeutic process is less a recovery of repressed memories than a reorganization of active associations.

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Commentary: Commentary by Phillips and Woody

James Phillips
Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA
J. Melvin Woody
Department of Philosophy, Connecticut College, New London, CT, USA

References

Edelman, G. 1992. Bright air, brilliant fire: On the matter of the mind. New York: Basic Books.
Freud, S. 1959 [1926]. the question of lay analysis. In The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, trans. J. Strachey, 20: 179-258. London: Hogarth.
Leavy, S...

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