Stories We Tell Ourselves: "Dream Life" and "Seeing Things"

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 But there are, it turns out, no experts when it comes to the way our minds work. It turns out that your guess really is as good as mine—or as good as a neurobiologist’s. The neurobiologist Paul Grobstein’s ideas about how unconsciousness and consciousness work together are based on the principle that the human brain is “bipartite,” by which he means not only that “there is a meaningful distinction between ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ aspects of its structure/function” but also that “since consciousness is a part of the brain which is in turn a part of the body, consciousness has no direct information about either the world or the body, [so] whatever information it has about these things is acquired indirectly from the rest of the nervous system (the unconscious part).” He defines the unconscious as “consisting of a large number of different semi-isolated modules, each interacting with the body and through it the outside world in its own distinctive ways. It is the reports of these modules (and only the reports of these modules) that reach ‘consciousness’ and it is the distinct task of ‘consciousness’ to make sense of these reports, i.e., to come up with a story that accounts for them.” For Grobstein, “this is what consciousness does. It is what ‘consciousness ’ is in the most fundamental way. It is a storyteller that tries to make sense of the cacophony of signals it receives from the unconscious . And everything that we actually experience (perceptions, thoughts, feelings, intentions . . . in contrast to the many things that happen to us or [that] we do without being aware of it) [is] the product of this storytelling process. In short, consciousness is ‘story’ . . . a way of making sense of things (that might always be made sense of in other ways) which in turn generates new questions/observations/stories.” 138 Seeing Things Metaphor, he says, is “just one of the tricks that is used (along with ‘meaning’ and ‘time’ and ‘causation,’ among other things) to bring order to the cacophony of signals. . . . The upshot is that one actually has, at all times, two influences on one’s behavior: the multiplex state of the unconscious and the current more or less coherent ‘story’ that reflects an attempt to give coherence to that. One may, at any given time, behave in terms of the unconscious or in terms of the story or in terms of some combination of the two, [and] there is, I think, not great mystery about this, though many people are still not entirely comfortable with the degree to which behavior reflects the unconscious.” The “many people” Grobstein speaks of here must refer to his fellow and sister scientists—gentlefolk all (clearly Grobstein has not been reading the professional debunkers, who all seem to be very angry , rather than “not entirely comfortable”). Where Grobstein—like virtually all neuroscientists, and many psychologists and contemporary psychiatrists as well—is in agreement with the philosophers, literary critics, and professional skeptics who have devoted themselves to discrediting psychoanalytic theory is in his rejection of the notion of “repression” that is basic to Freudian psychoanalysis. Still, Paul Grobstein is friendly to the idea of unconscious motivation in a way that marks him as something of a maverick in his own field. For him, there is “in general no particular problem in making sense of someone . . . exhibiting behaviors that have an origin with which the person [himself ] is not familiar (e.g., a man who was abused by a red-haired woman as a child and who has trouble being comfortable with his otherwise wonderful red-haired wife),” and he appreciates “the subtlety” that is recognized by what he refers to as the “psychoanalytic storytelling tradition.” That psychoanalysis asks, “Why is it that the earlier experience is not consciously accessible, i.e., part of the story?” is something Grobstein admires. But “psychoanalytic tradition would typically attribute that to ‘repression’ or, perhaps more meaningfully, to ‘conflict,’ i.e., to something that actively prevents that aspect of the experience from becoming part of the story because it . . . is unacceptable by some criterion (the abusive woman was the man’s mother, and so the man would have to acknowledge his own involvement in violating a social proscription against incest?).” Seeing Things 139 Grobstein believes that this interpretation “misses some obvious things and in so doing overlooks some critical issues...