Dreaming and the Self: New Perspectives on Subjectivity, Identity, and Emotion

6. Memory, Emotion, and the Imaginal Mind

CHAP TER 6 ———————— 鵽鵾———————— Memory, Emotion, and the Imaginal Mind MICHELE STEPHEN A nthropological studies of dreams, trance, spirit possession, and other alternate states of consciousness have in recent decades contributed rich new understandings of how such apparently abnormal mental states are used in positive and creative ways in many human cultures.1 Yet our models of mind used to account for and interpret such experience remain tied to assumptions and definitions that are linked to pathology, regression and maladaption (Stephen 1997). It was in the hope of developing a more open model, less tied to implicit Western cultural values, that I first formulated the concept of “autonomous imagination” as a way of talking about dreams and dream-like states (Stephen 1989a, 1989b, 1995, 1997). I originally started with the idea of a special stream of imagery thought operating outside consciousness, but for a long time I could not say precisely what was its relationship to the “unconscious” or to the mind in general, or what might be its purpose. In this chapter I argue that there exists in the mind two separate registers of memory, one which organizes information in terms of verbal categories and semantic understandings and one which records and organizes all information according to its emotional significance.2 What is usually available to waking consciousness is only the semantic/language register of memory. Outside consciousness is the emotionally-coded memory register, 97 which is linked to the stream of imagery thought I have previously identified as “autonomous imagination.” I will further argue that the function of REM sleep, which we know to be a regularly occurring physiological state, is to review the day’s sensory input and relate it to, and encode it in, the emotional memory system (an argument consistent with evidence indicating that dreams are a continuation of the concerns of waking life, for example Cartwright 1981, 245; Foulkes 1993, 13). This process of storing in memory, I suggest, involves linking new sensory information to existing emotional categories or schemas (Bucci 1997, 197–199; Eagle 1988; Watt 1990, 504–508). Numerous psychological and cognitive studies of memory have demonstrated that memory is no simple matter of recording experience, but a much more complex process of selection, evaluation, construction, and interpretation (Bucci 1997, 98ff). Thus proposing that there are two separate memory registers in the mind presupposes two separate interpretative and evaluative systems operating independently. The model I propose differs from other similar models developed by several cognitive theorists in this very respect. Others have suggested that different processing systems deal with different kinds of information in varying ways. Left/right hemisphere studies emphasize that different processing tasks (such as verbal versus spatial ) are carried out by the two hemispheres of the brain (for example van den Daele 1994; Watt 1990). Dual (Paivio 1986) and multiple code theories (Bucci 1997) propose that information relating to the self and emotion are processed by a different system from that which deals with the external world. In contrast, I suggest that all incoming sensory information is scrutinized and assessed independently by two evaluative systems and encoded differently in two separate memory registers. Such a model, I hope to show, can throw considerable new light on many old issues related to dreaming and similar states. Thought without Words Various cognitive psychologists have proposed that the mind is possessed of different systems of dealing with information, which roughly correspond to the primary- and secondary-process thinking originally identified by Freud ([1900], 1953). Paivio (1986), for example, has proposed that the mind employs, in addition to a verbal system, a separate imagery-based mode of thought. More recently Bucci (1997), on the basis of extensive research, has produced a multiple-code theory of mind that she attempts to integrate with psychoanalytic concepts of conscious and unconscious processes. Bucci’s work is especially valuable, I believe, because it shows how the latest developments in cognitive psychology are unraveling the complexities of the ways in 98 Michele Stephen which information is translated across various modes of transmission until it can be represented in the symbolic and verbal forms which compose waking thought. She identifies a number of levels of processing by which sensory inputs (percepts) come to be represented in the mind as conscious thought: these include subsymbolic, imagery/symbolic and verbal/symbolic levels. Information registered by the senses is not automatically represented as verbal thought but, as Bucci (1997, 174–175...