Search New Center for Psychoanalysis

We invite you to join us on Friday, May 4, 2018, as Antonio Damasio, MD, presents “The Nature of Feelings and Their Consequences,” a free public lecture on the opening night of the Joseph Sandler Research Conference.

Damasio and Mark Solms will be among the international experts presenting about “Outcome Research and the Future of Psychoanalysis.”

BOOK REVIEW

The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures by Antonio Damasio

Pantheon Books, New York, 310 pp.

by Mark Solms, PhD

Anyone who thinks that psychoanalysis is old hat and that it has been eclipsed by modern neuroscience should read Antonio Damasio’s latest book, The Strange Order of Things, and think again. If something deeply true about an aspect of nature is discovered from the viewpoint of one discipline, then it should perhaps not surprise us if – given time – the same truth should be stumbled upon afresh by another discipline. This is what just seems to have happened with our understanding of the biological underpinnings of human culture.

The Strange Order of Things reads as a neuroscientific vindication of Freud’s views on the topic, as set out in his Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud, 1930) and ‘Why War?’ (Einstein and Freud, 1933) -- albeit with many updated details and slightly less pessimism about the implications for humanity. Damasio even goes so far as to conclude, in effect, that our one hope for overcoming the destructive influence of the drives in human culture is something akin to psychoanalysis. He writes: “Feelings freed humans to attempt homeostasis by cultural means, instead of remaining captive to their basic biological devices … Their job was never finished. A life not felt would need no cure. A life felt but not examined would not have been curable.” (pp. 232-3)

In short, in this book, Damasio (like Freud before him) arrives at the view that civilization and culture  are at bottom an elaboration of a deeply conservative biological force. Whereas Damasio calls this force ‘homeostasis’, Freud called it ‘drive’, but the concepts are the same. Many people do not realize that the term ‘homeostasis’ was only introduced to biology in 1929. The common tendency in our literature to equate Freud’s ‘constancy principle’ with homeostasis conceals a major misunderstanding of the latter concept. Homeostasis defines the organism’s ideal biological state; not a compromise with reality.

Freud’s definition of drive was: “a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body” (Freud, 1915, p. 122). In other words, Freud’s conception of drive was that of a pressure exerted upon the mind to perform homeostatic work on behalf of the body – in order to return the organism to its settling point (to its preferred state). Or rather, to one of its many settling points; for, as Damasio clarifies, the multiplicity of drives and instincts is a major source of the trouble inherent in culture -- about which, more below.

Although this book is rightfully billed (on the dustcover) as explaining “the interplay between nature and culture at the heart of the human condition”, it actually takes a surprisingly long time to get to the topic of culture. This is because the first 161 pages are occupied with a fulsome explication of the concept of homeostasis itself, and of its implications for affective consciousness, and indeed for consciousness in general. These pages make enthralling reading. Like Freud, Damasio takes great pains to emphasize that the homeostatic pressure of the drives is felt – in organisms equipped with a nervous system. (He also agrees with Freud that it is an oxymoron to speak of unconscious feelings.) In fact, according to Damasio, the encephalization -- and thereby the mentalization -- of homeostasis is the very origin of feeling. Simply put: “feelings are the mental expression of homeostasis” (p. 6). Feelings of unpleasure are thus revealed by Damasio (like Freud before him) to be how the organism comes to know that it has deviated from a homeostatic settling point – i.e., from a bodily state that is necessary for life and conducive to reproductive success. Conversely, pleasure broadcasts to (and for) the organism the fact that it has returned from the biological ‘bad’ towards the biological ‘good’, i.e., back towards a settling point.

For Damasio, this measurement of the direction and degree of deviation from homeostatic settling points is the very purpose of feeling, which in turn provides the quality and valence of all consciousness -- i.e., of the qualia which some philosophers (like David Chalmers) consider to be so mysterious that consciousness cannot be accommodated within normal science.  One of the many peak moments in this book is the way in which Damasio deals almost casually with the so-called hard problem of consciousness, in a two-and-a-bit-page “aside”.

The relationship just described between pleasure-unpleasure and Damasio’s conception of homeostasis has one revolutionary implication for psychoanalytic metapsychology. In essence: it becomes apparent that Freud misunderstood the relationship between the pleasure principle and the Nirvana principle. Like Damasio, Freud (1920) linked these two principles with the very origins of life. But Damasio (implicitly) suggests that Freud made a fundamental error when he took the Nirvana principle to be something ‘beyond’ the pleasure principle. The concept of homeostasis clarifies that Nirvana is nothing other than the settling point which feelings of pleasure and unpleasure impel the organism towards. In other words, the pleasure-unpleasure and Nirvana principles are not two different principles, but rather one and the same, with the former merely being an elaboration (the mental servant, if you like) of the latter. This has important implications for Freud’s conception of the so-called ‘death drive’, which Damasio explicitly references as an important source of the discontent in civilization – but which he also simultaneously redefines as the pre-mental (or proto-mental) precursor of feelings.

He redefines the Nirvana principle in two ways. First, as I have just explained, if what the organism is striving for ‘beyond the pleasure principle’ is a homeostatic settling point, then -- far from underpinning a death drive -- the Nirvana principle would describe the ideal state of the life drives: a state in which the biological needs of the organism are met perfectly. Second, Damasio points out that the destructive and self-destructive behaviors that Freud associated with the death drive must be attributed to a number of distinct component instincts, including those that Panksepp (1998) conceptualized under the headings of RAGE, FEAR and GRIEF. (Damasio repeatedly cites Panskepp’s ground-breaking insights on instinctual life with high praise.) He also makes special mention in this regard of intermale aggression and male dominance behaviour.

What is most important here is the inevitable conflict between the demands of these various component instincts. Consider, for example, the ubiquity of feelings of frustrated rage on the part of an infant towards the same person upon whose love it is utterly dependent and to which it is most deeply attached.

For Damasio, this inherent conflict between the demands of the different instincts – the resolution of which is the task of what he describes as “attempting homeostasis by cultural means” – is one important basis of the discontent inherent in civilization (rather than attributing it to a primary death drive). In other words, reflection upon our drives-as-feelings -- which is rendered possible by their encephalization, and especially (in us humans) by their neocorticalization – renders possible a biological life examined, which (as quoted above) thereby becomes a life potentially curable.

In addition to the factor of multiple conflicting drive demands, Damasio draws attention to the fact that some instincts (he specifically mentions RAGE here) seem to have outlived their biological usefulness for our species. Whereas it was highly adaptive in ancient biological times to have inborn mental equipment for unthinkingly destroying frustrating others, at the drop of a hat, this very same equipment becomes something of a liability in our civilized (post hunter-gatherer) times. It is important to recall in this respect that it has been a mere twelve thousand years since we first started planting crops and herding animals – that is, forming permanent human settlements. This led to the emergence of large social groups of a size and kind for which we had no instinctual preparedness -- which therefore required us to literally make up as we went along artificial codes of conduct, to regulate behaviour in these unprecedented social formations. It is small wonder, then, when one considers the relative age of the RAGE instinct (at least 200 million years, if not 500 million years) versus the twelve thousand years of civilization, that we do not easily subjugate our behaviour to these aspirational codes. (Witness the goings-on in the United Nations, if not the United States.) And worse still, as Damasio observes, we now have far more intelligent and dastardly ways of destroying the hated ‘others’ than our short-range instinctual equipment originally facilitated. Here he coins a beautiful new term: “the burden of consciousness”.

In this general connection, Damasio makes what I think is an extremely important point. This is the point I would like to emphasize most in this review. He mentions that “the strings of [the nature-given rules of life regulation] are pulled by the invisible hands of pleasure and unpleasure” but that “we are not conscious of the rules of their undergirding [and] we had nothing to do with the making of the rules” (p. 227, my emphasis). In other words: although the forces of natural selection evolved opioid-releasing mechanisms (for example) to reward certain life-sustaining behaviours, what motivates the individual subject of those mechanisms is not the ancient forces that designed them but rather the here-and-now feelings which they generate. This creates a risk of short-circuiting the mechanism, a by-passing of its latent purpose, for the sake of the manifest feeling alone. This -- it seemed to me while reading Damasio’s dark chapters on ‘Medicine, Immortality, and Algorithms’ and ‘The Human Condition Now’ – offers an alternative explanation for the aberrations of human conduct that Freud tried to explain by invoking a ‘death drive’.

Addiction, for example, can easily be understood as an instance of the individual subject -- motivated by the feeling generated by mu opioids rather than the biological purpose behind such feelings (e.g. attachment bonding) -- avoiding the work-in-reality demanded by the underlying drive but still claiming the unearned reward. This, in my view, can best be described as a perversion of the “nature-given rules of life regulation” (see Zellner, Watt, Solms & Panksepp, 2012). The same principle could be applied to all the phenomena that Damasio discusses in these more dystopian chapters concerning -- inter alia -- Big Pharma, Big Data, ‘designer babies’ and the hypnotic powers of Virtual Reality. Please note: these trends concern aberrations of the various drives toward Nirvana, which impel us – in health -- to engage with reality, despite all its difficulties. They are not the products of any dedicated drive towards death.

This alternative explanation enables us to include the disturbing human condition that Damasio discusses in these chapters – his discussion of the phenomena of our times that are equivalent to what Freud discussed with Einstein -- under the banner of narcissism (versus object love) without invoking any innate impulsion to self-destruction.

To close this issue on a more optimistic note: Damasio singles out the basic emotion of PLAY for special attention, alongside the other pro-social instincts that he conceptualizes as precursors of (or raw materials for) “attempting homeostasis by cultural means”. The special property of PLAY in this respect – i.e., in relation to culture -- is not merely its ‘as if’ quality, but rather the latent biological purpose of as-if-ness in general. According to Panksepp, this property of PLAY (an activity which lays the foundations of all social hierarchies, in his view), defines a limit beyond which one cannot go if one wishes to retain the participation of playmates, and thereby enjoy the joyful rewards associated with this instinctual behaviour. In short, if one crosses the as-if boundary, if PLAY becomes real, then it is no longer PLAY – instead, it becomes RAGE or LUST or FEAR, etc. With this, the play episode ends. Exactly the same principle underpins the famous ‘60/40 rule’ (the rule of turn-taking in PLAY). This insight of Panksepp’s concerning as-if-ness does not apply only to the arts – the dominant cultural sphere of as-if-ness -- the same could be said for psychoanalysis itself.

I think it is not going too far to suppose, on this basis, that PLAY is the essential biological vehicle of empathy: the means whereby we learn that we need to take account of the mental states (the feelings) of others. The psychological reward of doing so is the feeling of social fun, but the hidden biological purpose is nothing less than to form stable hierarchies and other social structures in which everyone has a stake.

If I have indulged myself in this short review by giving free rein to some lines of thinking and association that opened up in my own mind while reading this wonderful book, then I can excuse it by pointing out that this is the effect this book has on readers. I am only modelling this effect for you, in the hope that it will motivate you to buy the book. This book is indispensable reading for any psychoanalyst – and not only for psychoanalysts, of course. Damasio is the closest thing we have in the post-truth era to a great public intellectual. As Leonard Mlodinow says on the dustcover: “this book can change the way you look at yourself and your species”. And as Manuel Castells adds, this book might be “the beginning of a new scientific revolution”.

However, just as Einstein unintentionally ushered in the era of quantum mechanics -- where God plays dice – so, too, the scientific revolution introduced here by Damasio might go further than he intends. His revealing of the absolute centrality in the life of the mind of such a basic biological function as homeostasis – his understanding that consciousness is homeostasis – opens the possibility of a simple algorithmic conception of it. Damasio explicitly eschews this possibility, when he emphasises the necessary corporality of consciousness -- its “substance dependence” -- but I am not sure he is right. I hope he is right, but it might well be possible, now, to reduce the function of consciousness to an algorithm.

We must remember that the maps and “images” which are so central to Damasio’s conception of the mind are, at bottom, not really images as such, but rather probabilistic models of the world and the viscera (see Solms & Friston, 2018); and our consciousness of these things is nothing more than a registration by the organism of their existential implications -- given current external and internal conditions. This plausible reduction makes it necessary for us to take seriously the more dystopian implications of some of the insights that lie at the heart of this important book.

REFERENCES

Bettelheim, B. (1983) Freud and Man’s Soul. ****

Einstein, A. & Freud, S. (1933) Why war? Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, **. London: Hogarth, pp. ***-***.

Freud, S. (1915) Instincts and their vicissitudes. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, **. London: Hogarth, pp. ***-***.

Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the pleasure principle. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, **. London: Hogarth, pp. ***-***.

Freud, S. (1927) The future of an illusion. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, **. London: Hogarth, pp. ***-***.

Freud, S. (1930) Civilization and its discontents. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, **. London: Hogarth, pp. ***-***.

Panksepp, J. (1998) Affective Neuroscience. New York: Oxford University Press.

Panksepp, J. Lane, R., Solms, M.  & Smith, R. (2017) Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 76: 187-215.

Solms, M. (2013) The conscious id. Neuropsychoanalysis, 15: 5-85.

Solms, M. & Friston, K. (2018) How and why consciousness arises. Journal of Consciousness Studies, in press.

Solms, M. & Panksepp, J. (2012) The id knows more than the ego admits. Brain Sciences, 2: 147-175.

Zellner, M., Watt, D., Solms, M. & Panksepp, J. (2012) Affective neuroscientific and neuropsychoanalytic approaches to two intractable psychiatric problems. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 35: 2000-2008.