This essay shared Section V's 2006 Morton A. Schillinger Prize
By Todd Essig, Ph.D.
Although some current versions of the posthuman point to the antihuman and the apocalyptic, we can craft others that will be conducive to the long-range survival of humans and the other life-forms, biological and artifical, with whom we share the planet and ourselves.
(Hayles, 1999, p. 291)
In 1953, at the birth of the information age during the interdisciplinary "Macy Conferences," Warren McCulloch, the noted neuropsychiatrist and researcher, and Lawrence Kubie, the noted psychoanalyst, had a fight. Fifty or so years later, during a treatment that radically changed course when digital communications devices entered a patient's life, I had a similar fight, albeit with myself. A closer look at these two clashes between psychoanalysis and the information age, which this essay endeavors to provide, shows how issues first contested in that infrequently cited episode of intellectual history were also present many years later in my own internal struggles as I worked through a 21st-century clinical challenge. Taken together, these similar issues speak directly to the necessity of the unconscious.
As will be discussed, the first issue shared in both fights is the nature of information, what is it and how does it work. In western culture we currently take for granted a definition of information as being an abstract entity that can flow freely across different material substrates. This definition allows us to treat the thoughts in our heads, the songs in an iPod, and the content of your email as all containing the same stuff, i.e., "information." The second issue shared by the McCulloch-Kubie fight and my later clinical struggle concerns the challenges, and anxieties, presented by the reflexivity of both psychoanalytic treatments and cybernetic systems; those back and forth Escher-like shifts in perspective in which that which was observer becomes participant, causes become effects, and inside becomes outside, and then back again. The third and final issue to be discussed is the delicate clinical balance between expertise and humility when confronting phenomena unimagined(able) in psychoanalytic theory and practice: How do we protect our capacity to appreciate newness or difference instead of sinking into a comfortable defensive protection of what we already know? Across all three issues that characterized this pair of clashes between psychoanalysis and the information age, and probably many others, I will be arguing that concepts of the unconscious have a foundational importance. In other words, because of our reflective participation in and attention to unconscious processes, motivations, meanings, and potentials, psychoanalysts may just be able to find a way to meet the clinical challenges the 21st-century will be throwing our way.
There were 10 meetings between 1946 and 1953 of what were eventually called the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics. Organized by Frank Fremont-Smith for the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, it brought together many, if not most, of America's top-shelf researchers, natural scientists, and social scientists "to explore feedback and circular causality," which was the title of the first meeting. They had the tremendously ambitious aim of developing a general theory of communication, even human nature itself. Along with Kubie and McCulloch, the core group of participants included such familiar luminaries as Gregory Bateson, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, Molly Harrower, Kurt Lewin, Margaret Mead, and many others. Fremont-Smith's overarching agenda in organizing the conference was to create a meta-discipline that would help reconstruct post-WWII society. While this did not happen, and towards the end the participants themselves were pessimistic about having achieved anything at all (Heims, 1991), in retrospect we now see they came closer to achieving Olympian ambitions than they could possibly have seen at the time: "The result of this breathtaking enterprise was nothing less than a new way of looking at human beings. Henceforth, humans were to be seen primarily as information processing entities who are essentially similar to intelligent machines." (Hayles, 1999, p. 7). From our vantage point 50 plus years later, the Macy Conferences can clearly be seen as significant events that helped usher us into the information age.
McCulloch was the chairperson of the conferences. Along with his colleague Warren Pitts, he was well known for developing an abstract model of neuronal function known as the "McCulloch-Pitts neuron." This mapped logical processes onto specific, researchable brain functions. In doing so, it moved neuroscience towards the neural-network, information-processing model that has been so productive. His work helped locate mind in digital logic rather than in messy brain tissues.
Kubie, an orthodox Freudian and well-known analyst from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, was a regular invitee to the Macy Conferences, a member of the "core group." In addition to this being a time when psychoanalysis had a regular seat at the table of culture creation, e.g., Erik Erikson was an invited guest to the 3rd meeting in 1947, Kubie (1930) had published a paper describing neurotic function in terms of reverberating and recursively looping neuronal circuits. He was a logical invite to the core group. However, to the irritation of many of the "hard scientists" and a harbinger of the fight to come, his first paper at the first conference was not about neurotic loops, addressing instead traditional Freudian energy-based explanations for neurosis. Even so, from the very start, Kubie and Freudian psychoanalysis were very much part of what turned out to be these history-making meetings. In fact, the available transcripts of the Conferences reveal (Heims, 1991) that Kubie spoke more frequently than any other participant. But in the fight that developed with McCulloch he lost, and lost big.
Although fevers ran high, it should be no surprise that the fight never devolved into physical violence. These were, after all, serious men engaged with serious business. No punches were thrown, nor was there any brandishing of fireplace pokers. Instead, they fought with increasingly angry papers, reputation-trashing letters, and whispered questions about personal psychopathology. In other words, and as a way to introduce the first issue, they fought, depending on whose side you took, with either information or with ideas. That difference in how the weapons of engagement could be conceptualized, information versus idea, characterized one of their central conflicts: In any act of communication, be it between organisms, across different sectors of a single organism, or between organisms and a digital computing machine, what was the basic, irreducible unit being communicated? Was it information? Or an idea? In the new meta-discipline they were endeavoring to create, was the core content of communication to be the digital precision of decontextualized and dematerialized information, essentially a probability function, or would the analog complexity of fully contextualized ideas carry the day. In other words, how was information to be defined and measured: Was it to be the relative measure of pattern versus randomness within the message or would it be measured in terms of the effect it had on the receiver, be it a person or a device? McCulloch favored the former, Kubie the later. McCulloch clearly promoted the transmission of measurable decontextualized information that can flow freely across different substrates. Kubie was on the other side, highlighting the irreducible centrality of contextualized meaning, including an unconscious context, as the basic entity for the new meta-discipline the conferees were trying to create. From today's vantage point as participants in an information society, one where we surf the web directing bits of information to flow this way or that across the Internet or use ATMs to move money without ever touching paper, we take the first definition for granted. "Information" today has come to mean a measure of the bits in the message. The definition is no longer contested. However, it is important to highlight that the way we now think about what we process with such apparent ease was once a sharply contested issue, the content of scholarly debate, and the starting point for a breach between scholars.
But the fight, as noted, included other issues along with this fundamental difference of opinion about the nature of what gets communicated, and these other issues helped transform it from a scholarly debate into a fight. At the Seventh Macy Conference, Kubie gave a paper titled "The Relation of Symbolic Function in Language and in Neurosis." Hayles (1999), who along with Heims (1991) wrote the histories on which the current recounting rests, cites this paper as the opening salvo in a battle she termed "Kubie's Last Stand." Freemont-Smith, summarized this paper by saying "What Dr. Kubie is really trying to say is that language is a double coding: both a statement about the outside and a statement about the inside" (Hayles, 1999, p. 71). In a direct challenge to the scientific objectivity cherished by many of the participants, Kubie was seen as brazenly asserting that even scientifically objective statements about the world were simultaneously subjective. He claimed that the subjectivity of the scientist/observer, specifically his/her unconscious determinants, was always part of what was being asserted, even as objective scientific fact. He challenged the conferees to accept that the reflexivity of inevitable subjectivity was an unavoidable feature of all communication.
McCulloch, feeling personally attacked by this, retaliated. In a subsequent paper given to the Chicago Literary Club, he tried to rescue scientific objectivity by fiercely trashing psychoanalysis in a paper called "The Past as Delusion." Basically, he described psychoanalysts as a bunch of greedy sexual deviants who used psychoanalytic theory as a way to express personal pathology. Psychoanalysis, but not science as he understood it, really was an expression of the unconscious conflicts of its proponents. He concluded with a warning never to engage a psychoanalyst in theoretical or scientific debate, all that would result would be an interpretation of your resistance.
Kubie, a true-believer, really did believe he was speaking simple, clear truths. So much so that any sharp disagreement really had to have been due to a resistance. Not only was orthodox psychoanalytic theory of 1953 fundamentally and unassailably true, all this talk about information being made independent of substrate was simply a dead end. So, in what hindsight makes appear almost a caricature, Kubie then responded by claiming McCulloch's paper was an example of his pathology, thereby enacting the very criticism that had been offered for why it makes no sense to argue intellectually with a psychoanalyst. However irresistible this was to Kubie, maybe even inevitable given the time and what was at stake, it is also possible to see that McCulloch's humanity made it easy for him. As noted by Alex Andrew, who worked for a time with McCulloch at MIT, in a recent review of a biography of Norbert Weiner, "It was also true that Warren McCulloch was fond of alcohol and had bouts of overindulgence in it" (Andrew, 2005, p. 1287). Thus, after Kubie learned of an episode that was probably related to such overindulgence, Kubie even went so far as to send a letter to Fremont-Smith questioning McCulloch's health, "... in him the boundary between sickness and health has always been narrow" (Heims, 1991, p. 137). Furthermore, in a move that Heims noted would have enraged McCulloch had he known about it, Kubie even tried to have a Boston area psychoanalyst meet McCulloch socially so he could arrange for treatment.
But it was not until the 9th Macy Conference when Kubie gave a paper titled "The Place of Emotions in the Feedback Concept" that the rift became extreme. Hayles states, "he delivered his final presentation at the ninth conference in what sounds like a state of controlled rage" (1991, p. 72). This is in sharp contrast to his demeanor up till then. Heims writes of Kubie, "his patience with hostile comments can be construed as reflecting his psychoanalyst's habit of tolerating every kind of transference from analysands and trusting that the transference will eventually be broken" (1991, p. 125). But by the 9th Conference, his patience was gone and Kubie's participation can be seen to have had the narrative arc of having conducted a failed treatment. In the paper itself he argued that the psychoanalyst's role is to be a "naturalist" who uncovers and collects the facts that are then to be explained by the mathematicians and theorists. In this telling, the psychoanalyst simply gathers the facts of nature. He was arguing, in his "state of controlled rage," that the reflexivity, the irreducible subjectivity found even in scientific assertions, still applies to all, except psychoanalysts! Caught by his desire to authenticate the scientific status of psychoanalytic propositions, Kubie accomplished just the reverse. He lost the fight. As a result, rather than remaining mid-wives in the birth of the information age, we were sent out to the waiting room to talk among ourselves, taking the unconscious with us.
That, in a nutshell, is the story of the McCulloch-Kubie fight. It helped create a tone of mutual animosity between psychoanalysis and the information society still with us today. I want to turn now to a clinical vignette and the three main conceptual issues present in both; the readily apparent need for humility that allows difference or newness to be separate from resistance or defense, the reflexivity of both psychoanalytic practice and cybernetic systems, and the definition of information as disembodied . My intention is to use these issues to understand my response to a peculiar aspect of this case thereby demonstrating, I hope, how terribly much the 21st century needs the unconscious.
Ms. W was a very talented, professionally successful, self-destructive woman prone to dissociative acting out. That aspect of her treatment I will be discussing is how she found what she said was "true love" and changed the course of her life. During the time she launched and then settled into this enduring relationship I found myself, for reasons that will be discussed, struggling with what I later realized were clinical versions of the same three issues noted above. It seems that her life-changing relationship depended on, and would have been impossible without, emerging information technology; the two of them stayed in constant contact using Blackberries, email, and cell-phones. Eventually, after I fought with myself for quite some time, I was able to hear and genuinely believe that this relationship could in fact be the true love she felt it to be, although unlike any true love I could have imagined. The process of this transition in thinking, my own psychoanalytic clash with the information age, required attention to unconscious processes, motivations, meanings, and potentials. Please note that when discussing the unconscious I intend to be inclusive of the dynamic unconscious, the dissociated unconscious (Bromberg, 1998; Stern, 1997), nonconscious implicit relational knowings (Boston Change Process Study Group, 2005), and even the adaptive unconscious of general psychology (Wilson, 2002).
Ms. W had been in treatment for several years when she embarked on this relationship that she eventually described as having found true love. She was someone never able to hold in mind for any length of time anyone's good feelings for her. Without someone there to see her or love her, and do so in the moment, she often felt herself disappear. For her, the time between sessions were unbearably lonely and terrifying. Weekends were an especially empty, painful time she would fill by gouging her hip, or the area under her breasts, with sharp objects, like the raised foil edge of a medication bubble-pack. But never razors since that, she said, required planning she could not do when those states of mind took over.
When she met him on a business trip their relationship started like many others. Her sophistication, financial independence, and movie-star good looks meant she never lacked for male attention, and she sought it out often, typically from men who were obviously ill-suited for her. Usually, after some initial passion or, from her point of view, desperation packaged as passion, she would grow increasingly disappointed and needy. She would start to make unmeetable demands and the relationship would end in fiery and often rageful disappointment. Her fearful emptiness would always get its revenge. But with Mr. M the good part did not stop. It spread over several encounters while they were each on the road. Months went by and the relationship continued. Then a year. She began reporting new feelings, saying she felt him with her always, always wanting her, always being there for her, always wanting her to be there with him. It was true love, soul-mates. She reported a new feeling of missing him, of being lonely rather than terrifyingly alone. The cutting decreased and then stopped. In describing her state of mind she at first said she felt happy for the first time but corrected that, she had often been happy. What she said was new was that she could remember feeling happy, of feeling safe with him, even when she was not feeling that nor being with him. Some of the gaps in her experience were getting filled in. She even reported in session that she began to feel what she called "emotional links," in contrast to more intellectual, cognitive ones, between her mother's profound, psychotic (and often untreated) depressions, and her own difficulties.
But he was a married man 20 years her senior who lived in another city. He was also troubled, or so she said. Fiercely bright but with a profound history of what she called ADHD, he achieved significant success as a commodities trader and used that success to leverage an extraordinarily successful business. Business was the only place, before her, she said he was able to feel good about himself. When he satisfied or soothed her, she said he felt good about himself. The better she felt, the better he felt. Since they both traveled for business they were able to meet every 2 to 4 weeks or so, sometimes less frequently, sometimes more.
I was quite perplexed as this relationship began to gather importance. I was initially unable to hear either its importance or its potential value, actually fearing she was heading into some sort of catastrophe. It was while I was warily listening that their practice of constant digital contact grew in significance. From almost the beginning, they actually started this practice after their second chance encounter while on the road, they were in constant, and I mean constant, contact using their Blackberries, email, and cell-phones. They exchanged hundreds and hundreds of messages a day. Although they could sometimes go several days without being on the phone at the same time or go several weeks, or even a couple of months, without seeing each other, they rarely went longer than 30 minutes or so without some sort of message, be it email, texting or voice-mail. Some of the messages expressed love, others support. But most of them were more descriptive reminders to the other that the other was there. They would describe the minute details of life such as "going 2 meeting" or "on the bus" and the other would send follow-up questions about the meeting or bus ride, or just describe where they were and what they were doing. Even when there was content, contact was most salient.
There was even a technological dimension to their in-person encounters. When they would meet, even several years into the relationship after his divorce when they had become each other's main relationship, although still living in different cities and seeing each other 2 to 3 weekends a month and on vacations and holidays, Viagra played a significant role. Because Viagra was always a possibility she claimed she never feared him disappointing her, nor did he fear disappointing her thereby reducing what she said were his chronic fears about performance. Whether ingested or not, they used the Viagra to help make each of them feel more comfortable.
As I began to hear the significance that this technologically-mediated relationship had for her I found myself pulled into an internal struggle over how to listen to her. I was starting to fight with myself. My listening and thinking lost a familiar quality of flow, a back and forth between and within participating and observing. Judgemental thoughts kept getting in the way. On the one hand, the relative absence of direct, embodied interaction inclined me to see this not only as a defensive relationship, but a diminished one. Was this a pre-depressive caving-in to what had been a promising but troubled life? I wondered if this coupling was merely a feel-good drug, a "crack-berry" addiction to use some cyber-slang. I was always fighting with the thought, "have something 'real,' don't settle for a simulation!" But I was also fascinated, intensely curious watching those digital sutures hold together a wounded psyche. And she did not have a problem with it, and by all appearances was starting to thrive. Eventually, and thankfully before I started to (mis)interpret a defensive function for this relationship, my judgmental responses lost. I was finally able to realize that this relationship was indeed something real, although a new kind of real. In retrospect, in a way that I will now delineate, my internal fight to find the "new real" in this treatment required me to engage each of the three issues identified in the McCulloch-Kubie fight. But unlike that clash of psychoanalysis with the information age, thinking about the unconscious enabled a different outcome, one in which I believe neither the patient nor I lost.
The first issue I will discuss is that of striking a psychoanalytic balance between humility and expertise when confronting the unimagined, something clearly present in both fights. It would be all too easy in situations such as this one to adopt an anti-technology stance and romantically harken back to an idyllic time of green pastures (Edwards, 1996); back in the garden we could once again be unalloyed experts. We could be like Kubie at the start of the Macy Conferences, comfortably interpreting disagreement as resistance. Then, we would not need to feel how deeply our world is changing. But it is. We are part of a species that has created and built these incredibly powerful tools and, in a process called by some "radical evolution" (Garreau, 2005), we now live in a world in which these tools are re-making us. While radical evolution sees the tools we make remaking human nature, through developments such as neural implants, performance enhancing drugs, and modifications to the human genome, others argue (Clarke, 2003) that being re-made by our tools is what human nature is. For a clinical psychoanalyst this difference is slight, as slight as the difference will be for us and our work between the current situation of Ms. W and her Blackberry and the next generation of neurally implanted communications devices.
I came to see that there are two parts to striking a balance when confronting these new possibilites made real. First, we have to be open to the possibility that we actually are seeing something new and different. Our initial challenge is to see new technologically-mediated modes of experience and relationship in their own terms, and not automatically see them as diminished or shadow versions of the familar. Even frequent letter writing, like the relationship between a breeze and a hurricane, is just not the same as Ms. W's moment-by-moment digital contact. But that is not nearly enough. We then have to hear the meanings a new technologically-mediated mode of experience or relationship has in terms of its unconscious resonance. That is where we as psychoanalysts can bring something unique to the table. It was only when I was finally able to grasp what Ms. W and her now husband were doing with their Blackberries was I able to begin appreciating its healthy, progressive qualities.
As an example of a contrasting unconscious resonance to a new technologically-mediated experience, consider a man I was treating at the same time who had developed a powerful attachment to Internet pornography. He'd spend hours every night in Internet "peep shows" and interactive video services. Like Ms. W staying in constant digital contact, this was also a "new real" and it needed to be apppreciated in its own terms. But though it too was something new, the unconscious resonance was far different. This was a practice that led him to diminished, decreased contact with other real, live-bodied human beings: Why bother with the risks of another person, even one paid to perform, when you have a sure thing flickering there on screen that can get you what you want? Even from this bare sketch, I hope you agree his "new real" really was quite defensive and diminished, even though there was neither more nor less technological mediation. The difference is found in the unconscious resonances of these two different "new reals," one embraced embodied humanity facilitating growth while the other celebrated a schizoid, disembodied withdrawal that made stasis soothing. As technology continues to develop as it will, some say at an exponentially accelerating pace (Kurzweil, 2001), psychoanalysts will need to stay anchored in our ability to hear the unconscious resonance of new experiences, to hear both the human and the antihuman in the "new reals" that will be emerging. In this way we can best help our patients move towards expanding rather than diminishing their embodied humanity as we weather together the technological storms ahead.
Reflexivity, the second issue found in both fights, posed a specific challenge during Ms. W's treatment: How to work within the familiar reflexivity of a psychoanalytic treatment relationship when it gets invaded by an alien, digital component, or at least something that feels like an invasion? Like Escher's drawing of the right hand drawing the left drawing the right, her treatment was facilitating her engagement with new experiences which were facilitating the treatment. Like all reflexive moments, that which was creating the experience could be seen from another perspective to be part of the experience being created. But my thinking along this familar arc kept glitching: I was not sure I wanted to be part of all this technological mediation. It was new and different and it made it hard to work along familar paths.
Providing psychoanalytic care is so familiarly reflexive that, like the air we breathe, we do not usually notice it, unless its particularly sweet or malodorous. Depending on theoretical tradition, and I do not mean to blur the real, substantive differences among them, only to follow the thread of reflexivity they all share, we are professionally comfortable thinking through the figure-ground shifts of an interpersonal or intersubjective field, a relational matrix, the multiplicity of multiple-function, or the hyphenated coupling of transference-countertransference. But with Ms. W there was something in the air and I kept getting stuck trying to switch from figure to ground and back again. I just had no way to think about the apparent power of her digitally-mediated connections, and I was not sure I wanted to be part of it. In exactly what would I be participating? My fight was unlike Kubie and McColloch who were fighting to maintain observational platforms outside the systems they studied, and then fighting because their platforms were incommensurable. My problem with reflexivity was not that I lacked an observational platform that allowed me to stand outside the system. I was not trying to do so. Rather, recognizing my inevitable participation in the system of relationships and experiences under consideration, I was not sure I wanted to be part of what was taking place.
What I eventually came to realize, and what enabled me to once again embrace being a participant, was that given her obvious and evident problems with dissociation and self- and other-representations, the constant digital contact was functioning like an unconscious prosthesis, holding for her that which could not be held in mind. It did not even need to be a transitional activity, a step towards mentalization and healing, any more than an artificial limb is a step towards growing a new leg. Rather, the movement is towards integrating the prosthetic, the point at which "it" becomes "my leg" or, in Gregory Bateson's frequently discussed example, noticing that eventually the cane becomes part of the blind man. Like the increasingly familiar interaction in which someone says "Yes, I know the address" only to then take out their Palm Pilot and use that cognitive aid as an extension of personal memory, an extension that feels and becomes part of self, Ms. W integrated her prosthetic into the functional organization of her unconscious life. In studying problem solving, memory, judgment, and other functions of mind, many cognitive scientists (Clarke, 2003) now see mind as distributed rather than locked within the brain of any one individual. What Ms. W reveals is that unconscious mental life can also become distributed across information processing tools. The functional organization of Ms. W unconscious mental life now included a digitally mediated connection, a phenomenon whose frequency of appearance in our psychoanalytic offices is likely only to increase.
However, even attuned to the life-affirming unconscious resonance of her "new real" and open to the possibility of her integrating an unconscious prosthesis into the functional organization of mental life, the third and final issue of disembodied information was still a powerful irritant in my experience. In fact, this issue seemed to make my resolution of the other two issues into convenient fictions simply because the nature of their contact contained so little of that freely-flowing informational stuff. After all, how could communications that contained so little information, 10-12 text characters, orders of magnitude less information than a picture or the sound of someone's voice, have such a huge impact on someone's life? Even if we take all the information transmitted during the course of a month, lets say 10 or so messages an hour for 12 hours a day for a total of 3,600 messages a month, we would still have significantly less information than that which would be conveyed, for example, in a single 15-minute telephone conversation. There they were, two people spliced together into a single circuit by communications technologies that allowed information to flow freely, and there did not seem to be enough information to account for the massive effects that were seen. There were just not enough bits for the bite. Once again, this time using the conceptual tools of the information society in which I too am a participant, I was being led to see Ms. W as someone engaged in a diminished activity.
What was missing in my thinking at this point was part of what Kubie lost in his fight. Not the belief that we as psychoanalysts have an Archimedean platform on which to stand, nor the perhaps well-intentioned judgments of difference as other people's pathology, but the basic idea of attending to the functional consequence of information, not its abstract measurement. Even though he lost and our information society has been productively built from a definition of information as disemobdied and dematerialized, it is still the idea, including the meaning given to it by its unconscious context, and not just the information that matters. When it comes to the richness of experience, bandwidth is not everything. Perhaps this was a tangle I should have been able to more easily avoid. But if so, my sense is that many of us are starting to struggle with the clinical implications of these new forms of relatedness and new modes of experience. In that struggle, I want to offer a simple reminder that even in, to use the off-putting but commonly used terms, the most cyborgian or posthuman encounter, like true love growing in the soil of text messages and pharmaco-passion, what we can do as psychoanalysts is attend carefully to the personal and immediate unconscious meanings, motivations, processes and potentials. In fact, I believe, harkening back to the quotation from N. Katheine Hayles I used to introduce this essay, we have a responsibility not just to our patients but to our species to do just that.
References
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