"Stripped of its depth (libido, motive, conflict, drives, body), the cognitive unconscious is technically much closer to what Freud called the preconscious: a system governed by the secondary processes, bound to word-presentations, and separated from the raging unconscious by a barrier of censorship" (159)
"The unconscious "consists of traces and associations of traces that have grown apart from initial experience, and the person can no longer enter into a direct relation with what took place: the experience has gotten lost and forms an unconscious internal reality. And because it is the destiny of experience to get lost the unconscious is not a memory." To put this another way, the unconscious is another neurological scene: it is part of the general play of neurological events, but is not directly mapable with them. For Answermet and Magistretti, fantasy and the unconscious are what happens when neurology becomes relational and strange" (164, my italics)
"Following Ferenczi, I would like to persist with the argument that the neurophysiological body is always/already a fantastic, sexualized body: it requires no associative event to render it relational and strange. From the first, neurophysiology is naturally athwart. Without question, we spend our lives elaborating the entanglements of fantasy, sexuality, biology; but these events draw on substrata that are already entangled each with the other" (164)
"Many of these difficulties arise from how the brain is commonly imagined to be a disembodied organ, even as it is promoted as embodiment par excellence. That is, the embodiment promised by neurological data is grounded too often in a kind of exceptionalism: the matter of mind, it is supposed, is of a different kind from the matter of the body. Mind is to be found here (centrally, cerebrally), but not there (peripherally, viscerally)" (165)
I really appreciate the way Wilson reframes the question of locating "the mind" (not to mention the unconscious) in neuroscience. Her argument opens up a space for her "gut feminism," her relocation of mindedness within different bodily processes.
Recently, I have been thinking about cognitivist perspectives and claims about neuroreductionism (particularly in Matthew Wolf-Meyer's Unraveling). Is the cognitivist perspective a reductionism in the service of understanding the brain (or perhaps we can extend it to "the nervous system")? As Mike explained in class, reductionism is useful so long as the reductionists-in-question understand the limits which operationalize their reducitonism.
“It is an open secret that sexuality-once the sine qua non of psychoanalysis-is no longer foundational to psychoanalytic theory and practice.33 The three empirical pillars of contemporary psychoanalysis-infant development research, affect regulation, and attachment theory-testify to this growing neglect of sexuality. All three tend to imagine an asexual infant, and a de-libidinized attachment between caretaker and infant.34 By and large, the imperatives for bonding and affect regulation have replaced Oedipal conflicts and pre-Oedipal desires as the principal explanatory tools in psychoanalytic clinical theory..it is now more likely that sexuality will be thought of as a disguise for other, more fundamental, non-sexual dilemmas of self structure and personality.35 It is the traumatized faces of Harlow's monkeys more than the sexual fantasies of little Hans or Fritz that have come to guide contemporary practice” (161)
Why this disarticulation of sexuality from contemporary psychoanalysis?
"Without a substantial engagement with the anti-foundationalism of critical theories of sexuality, soma, and affectivity, neuropsychoanalysis will become another orthodoxy. "
Does anti-foundationalism mean finding an origin story in biology?
My interdisciplinary constitution screamed through most of this piece, which was both exciting and frustrating as a fan of Wilson's other work.
Nearly every page had at least one, usually more, comments in the margins, crying, "This is evolutionary psychology...Yes, this is literally what evolutionary psychology posits...Why aren't you citing Derrida's Sign & Play, différance? Where are the references to Deleuze, lines of flight and the plane of consistency, the body without organs? I know she knows these guys!" What about Cull's differential presence as the encounter of difference, "forcing thought through rupture, rather than communicating meanings through sameness" published two years prior? (Cull, 2009, How Do You Make Yourself a Theater Without Organs?).
Why aren't people reading outside their field? One good Buss or Kenrick/Schaller/Neuberg article could have substantiated the entire discussion of the link between psychoanalysis and neuroscience.
I also don't understand why she uses the term 'incompatibilities' when referring to neuroscience and psychoanalysis - this is a rather dualistic, dichotomous, exclusive way of thinking of these two sciences. Are they really incompatible if they are ultimately combinable in the new way she proposes? What exactly is incompatible between them? What is wrong with a core compatibility between them?
So, a question for Mike, am I reading Wilson the way I initially read Derrida? Critiquing and (dis)rearticulating others but not really saying anything new? Is that the point? Am I reacting to the exact intent of the writing, to make me mad about what I thought I already knew?! Ha.
So much of this dialogue mirrors the conceptual un-framework of A Thousand Plateaus, she is clearly in agreement with much of those concepts but I just don't understand how she is saying anything different or new:
And is evocative of Lacan (obviously):
I neglected to write about this in my Hewitson annotations, but the discussion of those LoF type moments - "small, discreet failures and compromise formations (garbled words, slip-ups, contradictory ideas, and so on) that emerge in what Laplanche calls certain 'load-bearing points'" - really grabbed me as well. I think because this is essentially what I look for in my everyday interactions with others as well as subjects of my anthropological and research interests. The Freudian slips, if you will, that allow, for a split second, a glimpse behind the facade of composure and intentionality most individuals attempt to express. These slips, garbles, lines of flight, load-bearing points, what have you, are the most interesting moments, the ones in which the unconscious slips through and reminds us that despite our attempts, meaning is not fixed, thought is not exact.
I did enjoy the bottom of 163:
Which seems to track with the Hewitson's LaPlanche-Lacan-Freud combinatorial conclusions about the distinct (un)reality of the unconscious.
Wilson's final thought was, in my opinion, actually quite delicious:
For this articulation, I can give Wilson a higher mark. This feels like a new interpretation of the plane of consistency, a different way of imagining the opposite of différance or lines of flight. But also more or less confirmation bias, no? The more we identify 'things' with 'things' we were looking for or already believe, 'things' which fit the narrative we are trying to assert, the less we actually know, discover, progress, or can say is true.