A BRIEF DIGRESSION: THE DRIVES
So far, we have been discussing Tomkins’s theory that affect amplifies anything with which it is assembled. In this respect it is sort of like the amplifier section in your home audio equipment, which takes relatively weak signals from the radio tuner, the compact disk player, or the tape cassette unit, and changes nothing but the amplitude or intensity of the information. This newly amplified signal is then fed to the loudspeakers or earphones, so that electrical energy is converted to the physical movement of little sheets of paper and plastic, which we experience as sound. Interest–excitement, enjoyment–joy, surprise–startle, fear–terror, distress–anguish, and anger–rage are alike in that they share the ability to amplify variations in the rate of flow or the steady-state density of information coursing through the neurological equipment. Whatever need or information they amplify is altered only in the style or quality intrinsic to that specific affect.
We have not really looked at the types of information available to the affect system, the categories of data that it will amplify. This is easy to do in the adult, for we become interested in, or happy about, or startled by, or frightened of, or stressed by, or angry at, anything we can see, hear, touch, remember, or even hallucinate. We expect this information to come from the various organs of perception, cognition, or memory. But these are pretty sophisticated sources of data, streams of information dependent on knowledge and experience. There is nothing here to explain why an infant cries in distress when it is hungry or screams in terror when it cannot breathe properly. We must ask, what is hunger and how does it work? How does the body know it needs oxygen, and how does it get this information to the affect system so that we become upset enough to do something about our hunger for air? How do these bodily needs fit into a psychological scheme?
We take for granted that the more advanced a life form, the more time it needs to spend in the company of its elders from the moment of birth until ready to take its place as a full adult. Birds stay in the nest until they are able to fly, puppies with their dam until they are able to forage for food by themselves, humans more or less among family until adolescence. What happens during this prolonged period of dependence on elders? Why are the young at so much risk? It turns out that there are two reasons for childhood.
On the one hand, not all the neurological systems that will be present in the adult are fully functional in the newborn. Some experts say that the development of the human nervous system is not complete until early adolescence, for up to about age 13 we can still find nerve tracts in the process of building the protective myelin sheath so important for the conduction of impulses. The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1968) showed that in our move from tiny children to full-fledged adults our ability to think changes greatly. Even a brilliant child does not think like an adult. Despite the eventual or even the intrinsic intelligence of an individual, the thinking processes normal for those who have passed through adolescence are technically impossible for the small child.
On the other hand, as life itself becomes more complex, it is not safe to release a child into the world until he or she is taught the ways of that world. We provide various levels of schooling that teach children what types of information are available, as well as methods for gaining access to that information.
Complicated stuff, and quite labor-intensive. Any mother will tell you how difficult it is to teach anything to an infant. Imagine how much more troublesome our lives would be were we required to figure out when the baby needed food or whether its level of oxygen were high enough. For food, that would necessitate our ownership of gadgets capable of assaying the level of glucose in the baby’s muscle tissue; for oxygen, we would need another group of devices. All this equipment would have to be connected to alarm systems informing us about danger points when the levels got too low or too high.
The reason we do not have to purchase, maintain, and keep our attention glued to such equipment is that babies are born with a group of internal mechanisms called the drives. Each drive is a separate biological system that informs the organism about the need for a particular substance and the place where that need is to be satisfied. The hunger drive analyzes the level of glucose in the blood, tells us when it is too low and that we need to put food in our mouths. The breathing drive tells us that the level of oxygen is too low and that we need to breathe in the mouth, nose, and chest.
A drive, then, is a prewritten program that acts as an information source by creating a wish or a need. As Tomkins defines the drive system (1962, 31) “The basic nature of this information is of time, of place and of response—where and when to do what—when the body does not know otherwise how to help itself.” These drive mechanisms must be sensitive enough to tell the organism about a need long before the lack they sense is dangerous—if the level of glucose (for example) falls too low, we can become unconscious. And they must be capable of “letting go” before consummation is complete, for we lose our hunger long before food has been digested enough for nutrients to be distributed to the tissues. People who override this mechanism can eat themselves to death.
All drives inform us about bodily systems that are necessary for life; as such, all drives are equally important. But since we can only go without oxygen for a couple of minutes before our brain tissues are irreparably damaged, the need for oxygen is more acute than the need for food. We can fast for days with relative ease, but we dare not hold our breath for more than a minute or so. Our need for air is more frantic than that for water, which is needed more urgently than food, which in turn is needed more insistently than sex, which is needed at least once in the lifetime of an individual if the species is to survive. Though all drives are equally important, they inform us about needs with dramatically different temperaments.
Pretend, for a moment, that we have a kit from which we can assemble any drive with any affect. (That’s actually what happens in real life anyway, for each affect can be assembled with any other bodily function to give it “meaning” or motivation.) The assembly of hunger with interest makes for our pleasant anticipation of a good meal; with distress it creates the sobbing hunger of early childhood. One who is hungry and frightened may eat furtively or not at all, while one who has been made ashamed of hunger may avoid food completely. In all of these people the drive called hunger has done its job exactly the same way. It has sensed the level of glucose in the blood and informed us that we must put food in our mouths. The quality of each experience is determined by the governing affect.
Everything we have been taught about the sex drive suggests that it is an imperious force demanding urgent satisfaction. But is this really a characteristic of sexuality itself or of the affects with which the sex drive is assembled? When sexual desire (a need just like the other drives) is assembled with interest or excitement, it produces the combination we know so well as lust. Indeed, Freud misunderstood this one particular union of drive and affect as the source of all excitement! Freud thought that all curiosity was sexual interest with the sexual part neutralized. But desire can be assembled with fear to create, for some, the thrilling sense of taboo and the forbidden, and, for others, the chill of impotence or frigidity. Assembled with anger, sex blends into sadism; assembled with shame, sex can lose all excitement or be accepted as masochistic submission. Linked with disgust, the very idea of sex can produce great displeasure rather than any positive experience.
Very little of Freud’s original theoretical system linking sexuality and the mental-emotional organization holds any water today. Most of us in the psychotherapy world have given up the idea that the sex drive is the operating force that runs the human and powers our emotions. This decrease in acceptance for what has come to be called “drive theory” has forced a long hard look at aggression, Freud’s other drive. Basch, especially in his papers 1975a, 1975b, and 1984, has stressed the need for psychoanalysis to drop this archaic concept. You will recall that I mentioned earlier that Freud was unable to explain everything in human behavior on the basis of a life-giving drive, and was forced to postulate the existence of a life-destroying drive. In classical psychoanalytic theory all anger, hatred, meanness, cruelty—indeed, all the negative passions—are traced to this hypothetical destructive force. Nevertheless, even the brief description of the negative affects offered in the preceding pages should allow the reader to assemble any emotion that previous theorists thought was caused by “aggression.”
Even the biologists who study other members of the animal kingdom have been forced to renounce the concept of innate aggression. Aggressive behavior obeys none of the rules common to other instinctive forces—it has no intrinsic periodicity, there are no metabolic changes produced by its absence (as when the organism is deprived of food, water, or air), and animals do not need to attack unless provoked.
So extensive is the modern study of affect in infancy and early childhood, and so damaging for classical psychoanalytic theory are its findings, that many eminent scholars have attempted to force some sort of reconciliation between the new and the old systems. Otto F. Kernberg (1990) calls attention to Freud’s early supposition that the affects appeared when drive energy was prevented from reaching its goal, and now suggests that libido and aggression are actually formed from building blocks made up of affects and experiences. It is illogical to assume that “the primary affects themselves are the ultimate motivational systems,” he says, because “a theory of motivation based on affects rather than on two drives would be complicated and clinically unsatisfactory” (121). Seeing the affects “as complex psychic structures that are indissolubly linked to the individual’s cognitive appraisals of his immediate situation” (125), he makes the action of affect quite subordinate to neocortical cognition, despite his apparent rejection of the James-Lange hypothesis.
One wonders how so literate and gifted an observer can so thoroughly misunderstand the nature of innate affect. One clue may lie in Kernberg’s deeply clinical focus: “Psychoanalytic exploration of intense affect storms in regressed patients, in my experience, consistently demonstrates that there is no such thing as ‘pure’ affect without cognitive content” (123). Such an attitude resembles an attempt to determine the biology and life cycle of chickens and cows from the study of cake. Eggs and milk are so thoroughly altered by the baking process that scant clues to their origin remain in the final product. Yet all psychoanalytic theory is based on Freud’s belief that the way things developed might be discovered by decomposition of their final end product.
Okay. If we discard the “aggression” drive as an unnecessary and nonphysiological creation of the founder of psychoanalysis, and then reject the idea that the sexual drive is responsible for all the excitement of life, we are left with sex as just another biological drive shorn of the special characteristics given it by Freud. These two assumptions remove the mysticism that surrounds psychoanalytic theory and return psychology entirely to biological science. With these two changes we are able to ask whether there are any special features of the drives that influence our study of the emotions. Dissmell and disgust—two affects that Tomkins feels are among the most recent to evolve—are mechanisms that protect the hunger drive.
The six innate affects we have discussed so far are all alike in that they amplify stimulus conditions that are basically quantitative variations in the level of brain function. As we discussed earlier, they are ways that relatively meaningless quantities are given significance through their association with specific qualities of experience. Three affects remain: Dissmell, disgust, and shame–humiliation: affects equal in importance to the others, but triggered by different mechanisms. They are the “attenuators” of the drives and the affects, acting to limit other functions once they have been turned on. Notwithstanding their physiological basis, these three become the affects of interpersonal distance. As such, they take on tremendous significance in the realm of social interaction.
Although shame–humiliation can, like all the affects, be assembled with any other function to lend its particular kind of urgency to that function, a great deal of our personal concept of what is shameful comes from our lifetime response to the affects dissmell and disgust. We will now investigate these two affects that monitor and protect our intake of food.