Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience

The brain’s exposure to accidents directly involves its plasticity. Under the term neural plasticity hides, in fact, two plasticities. One is positive: It characterizes the formation process of neural connections and the fact that these connections may be transformed during our lifetimes under the influence of experience and of the kind of life we are leading. Every brain has its own form and there is no such thing as two identical brains. So, in the case of the healthy plastic brain, every kind of event is integrated into the general form or pattern of the connections, and the series of events of our lives constitute the autobiographical self. There exists a second kind of plasticity, however, which refers to brain damage and its destructive power. This negative plastic power consists in the transformation of the patient’s previous personality and in the emergence of a new individual proceeding from the explosion of the former identity. We see clearly here that plasticity appears as an accurate balance between the ability to change and the resistance to change.

Damasio states that “the circuits are not only receptive to the results of first experience, but repeatedly pliable and modifiable by continued experience.”¹ This “good” plasticity, so to speak, can be interrupted by what neurobiologists call “disconnection.” A lesion that occurs in a brain region “does more than gashing a hole in this region. It removes this region from the whole brain organization.… Cerebral lesions are always disconnections.”²

In the 1840s, an unfortunate man by the name of Phineas Gage was laying railways tracks in the midwestern United States. He was pressing down a charge of dynamite into a rock formation, using a tamping rod, when the charge suddenly exploded. This caused the tamping rod to shoot through his head, from underneath his checkbone into the frontal lobe of his brain and out through the top of his skull. Partly because the rod passed through so rapidly, probably cauterizing the tissue on its way, the damage to Gage’s brain was not very widespread; only a relatively small area of frontal tissue was affected.… Gage did not even lose consciousness, and he made a rapid physical recovery. His physician, however, reported some interesting changes when he published the case in a local medical journal a few years after the incident. Dr Harlow noted that, despite the good physical recovery and the relatively small extent of the brain injury, his patient was radically changed as a person; his personality was changed.… Let’s read a passage from Doctor Harlow’s report: “he is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows.… In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said that he was ‘no longer Gage.’”3

The destructive plasticity forms what it destroys. It is not a simple annihilation or suppression to the precise extent that it has a result. This result is the formation of “someone else,” a new self, a self that is not able to recognize itself. The accident appears to be the plastic explosion that erases any trace and every memory, and that destroys any archive. And yet, such a damaged mind is still alive. It is a kind of survival that absolutely renounces the possibility of redemption or salvation.

The event of the brain damage occurs without presenting itself and forever stays out of access, out of interiorization, remaining exterior to any “becoming-subject.” Destructive plasticity is a biological deconstruction of subjectivity. All the questions Derrida raises under the name of heteroaffection—the impossibility of a presentation of the self to itself, of the I to itself, the impossibility of regarding the event as an accident belonging to the subject—all these questions seem to coincide precisely with the problems that are addressed in the neurobiological redrawing of the self.

Brain damage is also a theoretical accident that happens to the very idea of the accident in its traditional definition. All the cases of brain damage that Damasio exposes are cases of absent subjectivity. Such a subjectivity is absent to itself and to its essence as well as to its accidents—a subjectivity without affects, the extreme form of heteroaffection.

The “survivors of neurological disease,” as Damasio calls them in The Feeling of What Happens,5 lead a life that is sometimes almost totally destroyed in its temporality and its structure. All these survivors share something in common: they all endure a profound change of personality caused by this destruction: “Prior to the onset of their brain damage, the individuals … affected had shown no such impairments. Family and friends could sense a ‘before’ and an ‘after,’ dating to the time of neurologic injury.”⁶ The loss of the previous self almost always leads the patients to indifference, coldness, and a lack of concern, “a marked alteration of the ability to experience feelings.”⁷

All the cases that Damasio examines show this characteristic, which he calls “disaffectation” and, sometimes, “cold blood.” One of the first examples of this phenomenon is exposed in Descartes’ Error, in chapter 3, “A Modern Phineas Gage.” This modern Phineas Gage is named Elliot. He was suffering from a brain tumor that had to be removed. “The surgery was a success in every respect, and insofar as such tumors tend not to grow again, the outlook was excellent. What was to prove less felicitous was the turn in Elliot’s personality. The changes, which began during his physical recovery, astonished family and friends. To be sure, Elliot’s smarts and his ability to move about and use language were unscathed. In many ways however, Elliot was no longer Elliot.”⁸ Damasio continues:

Bit by bit the picture of this disaffectation came together, partly from my observations, partly from the patient’s own account, partly from the testimony of his relatives. Elliot … seemed to approach life on the same neutral note. I never saw a tinge of emotion in my many hours of conversation with him: no sadness, no impatience, no frustration with my incessant and repetitious questioning. I learned that his behaviour was the same in his own daily environment. He tended not to display anger, and on the rare occasions when he did, the outburst was swift; in no time he would be his usual self again, calm and without grudges.

This was astounding. Try to imagine it. Try to imagine not feeling pleasure when you contemplate a painting you love or hear a favorite piece of music. Try to imagine yourself forever robbed of that possibility and yet aware of the intellectual contents of the visual or musical stimulus, and also aware that once it did give you pleasure. We might summarize Elliot’s predicament as to know but not to feel.⁹

Another case is that of “L”: “The stroke suffered by this patient, which I will call L., produced damage to the internal and upper regions of the frontal lobe in both hemispheres. An area known as the cingulate cortex was damaged, along with nearby regions. She had suddenly become motionless and speechless.… The term neutral helps convey the equanimity of her expression, but once you concentrated on her eyes, the word vacuous gets closer to the mark. She was there but not there.… Again, emotion was missing.”¹¹

A third example is even more serious and concerns cases of anosognosia (from the Greek nosos, “disease,” and gnosis, “knowledge”). Anosognosia denotes the inability to recognize a state of disease in one’s own organism: “No less dramatic than their oblivion that anosognosic patients have regarding their sick limbs is the lack of concern they show for their overall situation, the lack of emotion they exhibit, the lack of feeling they report when questioned about it. The news that there was a major stroke … is usually received with equanimity, sometimes with gallows humor, but never with anguish or sadness, tears or anger, despair or panic.”¹²

Anosognosia is a lack of perception of damage. It is also known as Anton’s Syndrome. Anton was an Austrian physician living at the end of the nineteenth century. In a talk he gave to the Society of Physicians of Austria, he described these patients as “soul-blind for their own blindness.” Anton’s Syndrome is the inability to make a certain functional loss available for conscious experience. The patients who suffer from this syndrome lose any ability to wonder about anything. The feeling of wonder itself has disappeared from both their body and their mind. This disappearance is a total one, not a partial loss. In what case is the deconstruction of autoaffection the more radical: when wonder proceeds from heteroaffection, or when affects are definitely impaired? Do we have to think of a heteroaffected subject or of a nonaffected subject to complete or accomplish the deconstitution of traditional subjectivity?

Freud wouldn’t agree to consider that an emotion or an affect may totally disappear. In the psyche, he says, “nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away.”13 This capacity to preserve the past is precisely called plasticity. Freud compares the psyche to the city of Rome, in which every strata of the past is still present: every memory is still alive in the psyche. He insists upon the impossibility of total oblivion in psychic life. Every memory is thus like a monument.

every earlier stage persists alongside the later stage which has arisen from it; here succession also involves co-existence, although it is to the same materials that the whole series of transformations has applied. The earlier mental stage may not have manifested itself for years, but none the less it is so far present that it may at any time again become the mode of expression of the forces in the mind, and indeed the only one, as though all later developments had been annulled or undone. This extraordinary plasticity of mental developments is not unrestricted as regards directions; it may be described as a special capacity for involution—for regression—since it may well happen that a later and higher state of development, once abandoned, cannot be reached again. But the primitive stages can always be re-established; the primitive mind is, in the fullest meaning of the word, imperishable.

What are called mental diseases inevitably produce an impression in the layman that intellectual and mental life have been destroyed. In reality, the destruction only applies to later acquisitions and developments. The essence of mental disease lies in a return to earlier states of affective life and functioning. An excellent example of the plasticity of mental life is afforded by the state of sleep, which is our goal every night. Since we have learnt to interpret even absurd and confused dreams, we know that whenever we go to sleep we throw out our hard-won morality like a garment, and put it on again next morning.¹⁴

We clearly see that Freud only stresses the positive meaning of plasticity. Plastic means imperishable, resilient, possessing the ability to cure or to heal. The metaphor of the city of Rome shows that psychic space, thought in reference to architectural extension, is always capable of exhibiting its memory and overcoming wounds and loss. The psyche can be both extended and positively plastic or indestructible.

Neurobiology puts this so-called psychic immortality into question. The formation of a “new” identity after a brain lesion shows that the primitive psyche is not imperishable, as Freud states; it can be damaged without any return to a previous state. The patients are not allowed to regress or to seek shelter in their own history or their own past.

The value of Freud’s “excellent example of the plasticity of mental life” (i.e., dreams) seems to be put into question by some kinds of brain damage that destroy the very process of dreaming. Mark Solms shows that damage caused to sites specializing in mental imagery provokes a disturbance in the ability to dream: “If the patient loses the ability to generate a mental image, the inability to dream seems a logical consequence.”15 Three areas are involved in the process of imagery. When these areas are affected, visual experiences cease. For example, these patients lose the ability to perceive color or movement, or they lose the ability to recognize specific objects or faces. What are the effects of these lesions on dreaming? “Damage to the primary visual cortex, Zone 1, has (perhaps surprisingly) no effect on dreaming at all. Although these patients cannot see in waking life, they see perfectly well in their dreams.… Damage to the middle zone of the system, Zone 2, causes exactly the same deficits in dreams as it does in waking perception: these patients continue to dream in various sense modalities, especially somatosensory and auditory, but their visual dream imagery is deficient in specific respects. For example they no longer dream in color, or they dream in static images (loss of visual movement), or they cannot recognize any of the faces in their dreams. Damage to the higher zone, … Zone 3, on the other hand, produces complete loss of dreaming.”¹⁶

What does the Freudian definition of the plasticity of mental life mean to people who have lost their ability to dream, to people who cannot see what they are dreaming of? In what sense is their sleep a return to a previous state? What is there to find? These patients indeed do have a psychic life. We must ask ourselves what this kind of psychic life means when there is no return, no regression, no attachment to the past, and no detachment from the past either.

A neurological accident is hopeless, unpredictable, and never consumable, an accident that cannot be integrated by the psyche, that cannot make sense for it, that cannot form a moment of a personal history. This is a purely destructive event, which provokes the total disappearance of a psychic formation, or of a brain region, or of affects, particularly wonder.