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Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for

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Commentary by Jorge L. Ahumada

Jorge L. Ahumada
Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Jorge L. Ahumada (2002) Commentary by Jorge L. Ahumada, Neuropsychoanalysis: An
Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 4:1, 24-25, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.2002.10773373
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Jorge L. Ahumada

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Commentary by Jorge L. Ahumada

A comment on Dr. Milrod's paper ``The Concept

of the Self and Self Representation'' must take
into account its central purpose, in his words: ``to
build a fragile bridge of understanding'' between
two dierent elds of endeavor, the neurosciences
and psychoanalysis. It is no surprise that the term
self does not have the same sense in the
neurosciences and in psychoanalysis, or indeed
for each neuroscientist and each psychoanalyst.
The issue can be tracked centuries back to the
Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, where
Descartes responded to his undisclosed interlocutor, Michel de Montaigne; Ego cogito ergo
sum, probably the most famous sentence in
history of philosophy, instals deductive reason
at the center of knowledge and at the center of the
``I'', and it establishes an ontological break
between the self as a disembodied self transparent
ego, and the purportedly purely mechanical
nature of our own bodiesnot to speak of the
purely mechanical status of speechless animals.
Priorizing the unreliability of the senses, and
assuming the (mechanical-like) generality and
immutability of ``laws of nature'', pure deduction
from God-warranted rst principles gained the
upper hand over detailed observation. Variants of
the Cartesian program have been vastly successful
in the exact sciences, and presently in the
technosciences shaping the age.
The above leads to two lines of comment.
Firstly, that the term ``ego'' has, before its use as a
psychoanalytic term, a long and central history in
philosophy, where it tends to be synonymous with
the term ``self''. Freud uses the two sides of the
term: in his more ``theoretical'' papers, it will tend
more to being a ``dynamic structure'', interacting
with those other structures, the Id and the
superego; but at no time it fully departs from its
more conventional connotation of a personal
``self''. And thus, Janus-like, it partakes of the
``mechanistic'' and the individually personal.
Secondly that, as noted somewhere by Charles
Peirce, we human beings have two, and just two,
ways of thinking, mechanical and anthropomorphical, may help understand that both dimensions
are there in the Freudian concepts of the ``ego'',
the ego as mechanism, and the ego as ``self'' in the
sense of an individual person. Now, is this a
problem with Freud, one we should sort out for
the sake of specicity and dierentiation, as Dr.
Milrod proposes?
This he attributes to analysts generally, but

seen from standpoints other than the Freudian

Hartmanian, such priorizing pertains to egopsychology stances. Samely for emphases on
distinction of cathecting psychic representations
rather than external objects, and the self-representations rather than the self. My own preoccupations would put the accent elsewhere, on the
everpresence of paradox, on the distinction of
non-psychotic and psychotic parts of the personality (which nowadays tends more and more to
appear as autistic-mimetic parts), on the multiplicity of splitting processes. I'd put less emphasis
on the distinction between an ``outside'' and an
``inside'', which often enough tend to be blurred
to the point of nonexistence on the basis of
projective identication. The idea of ``object
constancy'', valuable as it is, must often, in
practice, be taken with more than a pinch of salt.
Take, for example, Andre Green's (1981) apt
consideration that, once past the youthful ames
of passion, it is not uncommon that the heterosexual situation in couples switches and the man
is adjoined more and more the role of caring
mother by his wife; thisand the defences against
itbeing a likely source of conict. One could
speak in such cases of a much too persistent
``object constancy''?
Can self and ego be fruitfully put apart in
more distinct, clear ways, or is this an aporia that
we must learn to live with and work upon? From
this second position, one would not put up
dierentiation between ego and self to be
necessarily be a core topic in the dialogue between
the neuroscientist and the psychoanalyst. The
oncoming bridges may well be found elsewhere,
and we must keep all options open. (Nonetheless,
I'd bow to Dr. Milrod's general scheme in that,
keeping closer to the lines of Freud's neurologyinspired ``Project'', it might prove more suitable.)
Bridges may come from the eld of aect,
which is newfound for neurosciences but not for
psychoanalysis. I am not acquainted with Pankseep's work, but from what Milrod cites, I rejoice
at the frankness with which he joins Freud on the
centrality of a ``bodily ego'' and in stressing that
``man's values are handled down by genetic
heritage from our ancestral past''; a view which
goes across the accusation of Lamarckism ofttossed against Freud on the topic of his belief in
inherited memory, or, to put it in better terms, of
the cognitive component of instinct. There is
nothing Lamarckian about this. To take an

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Commentary on The Concept of the Self and the Self Representation

example from ethology that can be observed
again and again, chimpanzee mothers know they
must not, for a quite long period of time, allow
the youngest child (then aged about ve) to touch
a newborn one: this might be well called a
motherly knowledge of sibling rivalry. Adolescent
daughters are quite another matter, and they can
be oft relied upon as helpers. And, no chimpanzee
adult male will badly hit a baby chimpanzee when
he interferes on his coitus with the baby's mother,
he'll just shove him away; again, should an
adolescent child interfere, he'll be treated in
rougher fashion (Goodall, 1986).
Genetic heritage should not be thought of as
rigid or self-propelled; rather, as exquisitely
context-dependent and individual-history dependent. To take an example, in what concerns their
sexual urges Fouts' (1997) human-reared chimpanzees show occasional sexual curiosity but
never come close to mating; having grown
together they are probably under an incest taboo,
as it happens in families growing together in the
wild (pp. 381382). That poorly weaned chimps
do not attain full emotional maturity (Goodall,
1986) may by the way have relevance for the
current times, where ``electronic paciers'' are
king.
Also, connections with psychoanalytic ndings arise out of Damasio's idea that the self
much antecedes consciousness and verbal cogitations, of a core consciousness and rst- and
second-order neural maps organizing non-verbal
narratives, and that these later may get translated
to words. All of which furthers the relevance of
what we are not aware of, and goes right against
the primacy and self-transparency of consciousness which was a premise to Descartes and to the
philosophers of the theme of the ``linguistic turn''
presently dominant in academia; where, as said by
Poster (1989), text replaces mind as the locus of
enunciation.
As Peirce pointed out in 1905, already the
Scottish philosophers recognized that our original
beliefs (and this he judges valid also for our
everyday acritical inferences) were of the general
nature of instincts (p. 293). The Unlust/Lust
Prinzip, Freud's arguably most basic formulation,
implicitly posits a perceptive inferential agent able
to discriminate and respondat whatever level
to what impinges on displeasure and pleasure; a
``self-referencing mechanism'' as Milrod puts it in

25

p. 6, which can be alternatively put down as a selfreferencing agency. In the case of us humans
Freud extends this unbeknownst inferential capacities (unconscious thought) beyond, and often
enough against, what is being consciously
grasped.
Now, if I may be allowed to propose issues
for the neuroscientists to carry on, perhaps they
could usefully point their instruments to the study
of eects on the brain of visual addictions, both
to the ``dumb box'' or to current heirs and
derivatives such as the videoclip or the videogame, which, I sustain elsewhere (1997) may be
giving pride of place to an autistic-borderline
culture. There is growing public awareness of this
theme, as shown by an American Medical
Association warning that the lives of children
should be virtual-reality-free up to at least the age
of two. Given that, in the case of obese children,
TV addiction has been reported to able to depress
basal metabolism to close to hibernation levels,
present-day neuroscience technologies could
likely pick up evidence of akin eects at brain
levels.
It should prove feasible there to put to
practice double-blind studies of dierent groups,
a technique which nds mighty obstacles in, say,
studies of the analytic process itself. And were it
the case that detectable anomalies be found, it
must be possible to test their reversibilityor
notunder child psychoanalysis as compared to
other means.

References
Ahumada, J. L. (1997), The crisis of culture and the
crisis of psychoanalysis. In: The Logics of the Mind.
A Clinical View. London: Karnac, 2001.
Fouts, R. (1997), Next of Kin. New York: Morrow.
Goodall, J. (1986), The Chimpanzees of Gombe. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard Univ. Press.
Green, A. (1981), Aggression, femininity, paranoia and
reality. In: On Private Madness. Madison CT:
Internat. Univ. Press., 1986.
Peirce, C. (1905), Critical common-sensism. In: Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler. New
York: Dover, 1955.
Poster, M. (1989), Critical Theory and Poststructuralism: In Search of a Context. Ithaca & London:
Cornell Univ. Press.