PAST WORKSHOP: feeling Thinkers or thinking Feelers Workshop - November 11th, 2023 | 10a-12p CST
The neuropsychoanalyst, Mark Solms, proposes that Freud got it backwards and that contemporary affective neuroscience has led us now to believe that the Id is actually what is conscious and it is the Ego that is unconscious. Neuroscientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, presents in her book, “Whole Brain Living: the anatomy of choice and the four characters that drive our life” that we are fundamentally emotional beings that think as opposed to thinking beings that feel. The late affective neuroscientist Jack Panksepp utilized a method of deep brain scans and mammalian studies (a method that was different from the likes of affect theory originator, Silvan Tomkins, and his student Paul Ekman who used observation methods) to identify seven basic emotional systems in the brain that give rise to seven primary emotional states that we inherit in-utero. These inherited emotional systems are what we might propose the metaphor of the Id is trying to describe. They produce the primal subjective experiences that guide us towards survival from the beginning. Of course these emotion fueled actions occur within the context of our initial caretakers and people all of which react to our emotional expressions with their own (be they in support or otherwise). In efforts to conserve energy our brains begin to record the initial feedback experiences from our attempts at survival. The models created from these memories and their associated affects work with other salient long term memories to guide our lives for better or for worse.
Until rather recently it was thought long term memories were secure. Turns out memory is much more of a continually constructed process than not. This was the discovery of Karim Nader (student of Jospeh LeDoux) in 2000, that long term memories become available for emendation and change when recalled and felt before they consolidate again. Since then there has been debate on the mechanisms of such a phenomenon and how much it can be utilized in psychotherapy. People like Bruce Ecker have written on its use in the clinical setting and Solms as well as Panksepp (among other neurospychoanalysts) proposed it should be a chief goal of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. So, we’re going to talk about that. The following is an outline for the time:
Briefly outline a theory of mind that frames the Id as conscious and the Ego as unconscious and humans as fundamentally feeling beings from an neuropsychoanalytic point of view
Go over the concept of memory reconsolidation.
Talk about clinical application of memory reconsolidation
Give one or two case examples
Discuss workshop participant’s cases and ideas that come up in regards to memory reconsolidation
Then, if time allows, discuss how memory reconsolidation might inform ideas around Christian formation using the conversion and formation story of St. Augustine of Hippo as a case example