A Forlorn Hope: Psychoanalysis in Search of Scientific Respectability
Review of The Evolution of the Emotion Processing Mind by Robert Langs
Christian Perring
Philosophy and Religious Studies
Dowling College
Oakdale NY 11769 USA
cperring@yahoo.com
http://www.uky.edu/~cperring/
Copyright (c) Christian D. Perring 1998
PSYCHE, 4(11), September 1998
Previously held: http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v4/psyche-4-11-perring.html
KEYWORDS: philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, methodology, evolution, psychoanalysis, theories of emotion, mental Darwinism.
REVIEW OF: Robert Langs (1996). The Evolution of the Emotion Processing Mind . International Universities Press, xvi +
233pp. ISBN: 0-8236-1775-0. Price: $US35.00 hbk.
1. The Future of Psychoanalysis
Robert Langs sets himself a difficult task in attempting "a hierarchical
theory of psychoanalysis to render it as complete a theory of the
emotional domain as presently possible" (p. 47). He knows the criticisms
that have been leveled at psychoanalysis, and he separates himself from
other apologists for the theory. He is forthright in acknowledging that
psychoanalysis up to now has been unfalsifiable and is sharply critical
of Freud and subsequent psychoanalytic theorists in failing to take
seriously the lessons of evolutionary science. Langs stays true to
Freud's view of his theory as a scientific one and does not embrace the
move towards hermeneutics taken by many other contemporary
psychoanalytic theorists. The task before him is to reform
psychoanalysis into a scientifically respectable theory by incorporating
the viewpoints of "formal science, systems theory, and psychoanatomy" as
it says on the book jacket. The fundamental methodological point that
drives this book is that "psychoanalysis cannot advance hypotheses
inconsistent with the fundamentals of evolutionary theory."
For many philosophers and psychologists the first question that may come
to mind when hearing of Langs' task is "why bother?" Psychoanalysis has
been so thoroughly discredited as a scientific theory that it is hard
for some to see why it is any longer worth any serious attention. Langs
himself generally takes it for granted that his task is worthwhile, and
presumably there are enough like-minded theorists working today for him
to have an audience, but they are a group largely isolated from the rest
of contemporary research on the mind. There are dangers of intellectual
isolation that are apparent in Langs' book. Despite all his claims to
the contrary, the book is largely programmatic and does not manage to
set psychoanalysis on a respectable scientific foundation. Instead, it
aims to explain the development of the unconscious and of death anxiety
via a speculative evolutionary history. This work is occasionally
thought provoking, bewildering at almost every point, and never
convincing.
Considering the problems of Langs' work, we might generalize our
skepticism and ask what relevance any psychoanalytic theory can have for
modern psychology. Should it aim to fit in with mainstream approaches,
and is Langs correct in his insistence that psychoanalysis should aim to
be consistent with the fundamental ideas of modern science? Or should
psychoanalysis nurture its renegade position with respect to current
psychological research and proceed autonomously? Maybe it should give up
entirely.
To state my own position at the outset, let me say that I am sympathetic
to broad features of the psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious and
I am particularly convinced of the importance of the psychoanalytic
tradition for philosophy and psychology. Although it is deeply flawed in
many ways, Langs' book also is a rich source of ideas on which to
draw. Modern cognitive science has many virtues, but it suffers from
narrowness, especially in its neglect of the emotions. Psychoanalytic
theory can provide a useful corrective to overly cognitive approaches.
The question then is what profitable role can psychoanalytic theory play
in modern theorizing about the human psyche. The baroque ornateness of
the forms of psychoanalytic theory adopted in post-structuralism,
literary theory, and some feminist theory is a dead end, it seems to me,
although I will not argue for this view here. I am confident that Langs
has no time for those appropriations of Freud. I also agree with Langs
that retreating from scientific approaches to purely hermeneutic
conceptions of psychoanalysis is the wrong way to go. (Indeed, the whole
distinction between scientific and hermeneutic approaches to the mind is
problematic, in my view, being based on a crude caricature of science
and an untenable categorical distinction between reasons and causes.)
Langs' response to the predicament of psychoanalysis today is to try to
fit it in with cognitive/evolutionary models. As I explain below, I am
unimpressed by his results. This raises the question whether his failure
is simply a result of the inadequacy of his arguments, or whether there
is a more general lesson to learn for those interested in exploring the
importance of psychoanalysis. I suspect that there is a more general
lesson to learn. Langs' major premise is that to gain scientific
respectability, psychoanalysis must lift itself up to the level of other
current scientific approaches and conform to their major results. Given
the difficulties faced by Langs, we might reasonably conclude that
psychoanalysis is currently in no condition to meet this demand.
But there is another way for psychoanalysis to proceed. Langs is
mistaken in his assumption that it is necessary for psychoanalysis to
achieve integration with the rest of modern psychology, because he has
an overly narrow conception of scientific methodology. It can be useful
for science to have a diverse set of research programs proceeding
concurrently, and this is especially true when it comes to the human
sciences. It is a moot point whether we should ever expect to arrive at
a grand unified theory of psychology or psychiatry. Some philosophers of
science have suggested that science can proceed rationally without
insisting that new theories be consistent with old theories. Paul
Feyerabend (1978) argued that there are no rules governing scientific
progress, and so it could be perfectly rational to adopt and elaborate
theories that are in tension with well accepted theories. However, I am
not suggesting that we should be ready to do away with well-confirmed
aspects of evolutionary theory. More recent philosophers of biology
(Dupre, 1993, 1996; Rosenberg, 1994) have argued against assimilating
biology with other sciences, and granting it some autonomy. We need not
expect science to be a unified, seamless whole. Similarly, we need not
expect the wide range of theories within biology to form a seamless
whole. Biology combines diverse forms of theorizing, from molecular
biology to evolutionary psychology, and different branches of biology
should have some autonomy from each other.
Furthermore, there are many more ways for theories to be in tension with
each other than strict contradiction. Theories can have different sorts
of inspirations and be associated with different world-views. It is
generally possible, and sometimes reasonable, to protect one's theory
from contradiction with the observed facts or well-accepted theories,
for instance, by surrounding it with ad hoc hypotheses. Two theories can
be at different levels of explanation or description, where the relation
between them is unclear. For example, it is not clear if biological and
psychological explanations of behavior are really competing, or instead
are just compatible theories at different levels.
So there are reasons to allow a certain amount of disunity among
scientific theories. Furthermore, it is certainly premature for us now
to be insisting on theoretical unity at this primitive stage in our
theorizing. As Kitcher (1992) points out, Freud put psychoanalytic
theory at a particular disadvantage in his stubborn insistence on
backing theories in other disciplines that had already been shown to be
wrong, but any interdisciplinary theory is likely to suffer if it tries
to do too much. If one theory is linked with another theory, then the
first loses credibility if the second is discredited. If a theory is
linked to many other theories, it is especially vulnerable to the
possibility that one of those theories will be discredited. A research
program can make itself less vulnerable to the misfortunes of other
theories if it remains relatively isolated. Of course, by doing so, it
also gets less confirmation from other theories, and so would be
unlikely to be very well accepted. But at least it could give itself
some space in which it could grow.
The issue for psychoanalytic theory today is whether it can avoid being
a degenerating research program, to use the terminology of Lakatos
(1978). Too much isolation from the rest of science will simply make it
even more irrelevant, and it will simply wither and die away, or at
least, be used only in literary criticism as a device for interpreting
novels. If it is to be a viable theory in psychological science, it
needs to find a balance between building on its distinctive strengths by
drawing on the resources of its own tradition, on the one hand, and on
the other, building bridges to other parts of psychology and biology and
showing it how it is compatible with well-established theories.
2. Programmatic Arguments
I will now turn to Langs' book and try to explain his project in more
detail. Some features of Langs' view are clear. He believes in a dynamic
unconscious, in which repressed fears and other emotions operate outside
of consciousness. He believes that one of the most important unconscious
emotions is our anxiety about death. And he believes that we can give
some account of this through an evolutionary model.
But many features of Langs' style make his views hard to assimilate. He
seems almost compulsive in his list making. There are about 57 lists in
this book, with an average of nearly 4.8 items per list. Within those
there are about 100 sub-lists, sub-sub-lists, and sub-sub-sub-lists,
with an average of about 2.7 items per list. (A good number of those
lists have only one item in them.) But rather than this helping to
clarify the logical structure of his argument and his view, it tends to
be distracting and even confusing.
Langs apparently aims to build on the work of some others. In the
early chapters he makes frequent reference to Kitcher (1992), Slavin &
Kriegman (1992), Plotkin (1994), and Dennett (1995), among
others. Later in the book he relies heavily on Donald (1991). Langs
refers critically several times to the psychoanalytic sociobiological
writer Christopher Badcock's PsychoDarwinism (1994) (which has
not been published in the US). But that's as specific as the
references get: at no point is any chapter referred to, let alone a
page number, and so of course there's no discussion of the details of
any arguments. Langs refers to his own writings at many points: in the
bibliography he has some twenty books or articles by himself (five of
which are co-authored with A. Badalementi). (The book jacket sleeve
says he has written 36 books and 130 papers, so he has been relatively
selective in mentioning his own work.) In referring to these other
works, Langs does not so much build on the work of himself and others
as merely map his ideas with respect to other large and no so large
landmarks. Those landmarks may or may not be useful to the reader. For
instance, speaking for myself, before embarking on this review, I had
a detailed knowledge of Kitcher (1992), a basic idea of what Dennett
(1995) is about, and no familiarity whatever with Donald (1991),
Slavin & Kriegman (1992), Badcock (1994), or Plotkin (1994).
It is, of course, a perennial danger of interdisciplinary work that it
requires a broad range of knowledge that few have. Langs is trying to
combine a great many ideas and approaches. It is inevitable that most
readers will be unfamiliar with many of the works of which he makes use.
But it is precisely because this is a predictable state of affairs that
Langs has a responsibility to give more of an explanation of these ideas
and the arguments that have been made to support them. He does this to
some extent, but not enough to make his case clear or convincing.
To give just one example, it is an essential assumption of the book that
the mind is a Darwin machine, a term he takes from Plotkin (1994). His
explanation of Darwin machines takes a page or so (pp. 70-1), and left
me little wiser as to what he meant. He gives no examples and stays at
the level of vague generalizations. The idea as he explains it is this,
paraphrasing Langs' own wording: our means of learning is to operate as
Darwin machines, which is to say, according to the g-t-r heuristic. The
elements of this heuristic are:
1. the generation of variety due largely to chance mutations or
variable environmental factors;
2. a test phase, during which selection operates to effect the
favored reproduction of adaptively successful strategies;
3. regeneration of the favored forms plus the introduction of new
chance variants.
The primary heuristic is that of biological genetic development, which
programs the organism selectively to know and adapt to its environment.
Secondary heuristics include the immune system, the human brain, the
human mind, and aspects of emotional cognition. There is a tertiary
heuristic that stems from culture and the sharing of knowledge among
individuals.
What I understand from this is that our minds evolve to be able to learn
about the world around them, according to the familiar evolutionary
process. It is clear that Langs supposes that there is a close
connection between the mind and our genetic nature (although I am at a
loss as to why our immune system is directly relevant, even if we can
learn some useful lessons from the evolution of immune systems [see
Gazzaniga, 1992, chapter one]). But that is about all I get from these
couple of pages, so either I have missed something important, or else
Langs is saying something simple in a convoluted and unhelpful way. I
suspect that latter option is closer to the truth. This is not an
unusual example. I am left with the same impression after almost every
paragraph.
A further factor that makes this text difficult to negotiate is the
issue of the credibility of different sources. As I mentioned before, I
am familiar with Kitcher's (1992) book, and I have great respect for it.
In it she sets out an interpretation of Freud's theories as an
interdisciplinary cognitive science and details the mistakes made by
Freud and the weaknesses inherent in his methodology. Dennett is of
course a well respected philosopher, but his ideas are controversial,
and Darwin's Dangerous Idea has had a mixed reception. Donald (1991,
p. 14) presents "an evolutionary thesis that is a best guess as to how
we arrived at our present state, and a corresponding cognitive model of
the transition from apes to humans." He hypothesizes two major
biological adaptations with the evolution of Homo erectus and Homo
sapiens, and then a third non-biological adaptation for more modern
humans. This third adaptation relies on technological developments of
storage media external to the brain. Slavin & Kriegman (1992), an
attempt to explain the nature of the mind using psychoanalysis and
evolutionary theory, is clearly a scholarly and sophisticated work. But
it is still immersed in the psychoanalytic tradition and makes use of
many of the main concepts of the theory, such as repression, resistance,
and transference. It also seems to rely heavily on case studies for
corroboration of its claims, and this methodology is highly suspect. So
I can only suppose that it is just as controversial as other recent
psychoanalytic texts, which is to say, some would view it with derision,
while others would swear by it. Plotkin (1994) attempts to develop an
explanation of the nature of our cognitive abilities using evolutionary
ideas, and draws consequences for philosophical views about knowledge,
such as Kant's conception of knowledge. This is such a wide-ranging book
that, even without looking at the details, we can be sure it is
extremely speculative and will not be able to provide a convincing
detailed argument for controversial theses. Langs prides himself on not
simply relying on the authority of Freud as so many of his colleagues
tend to do. But relying on a curious and diverse mixture of more recent
authors is little better. So if one comes to Langs' book with suspicion,
wondering whether it is worth taking seriously, as I think most readers
will and should, Langs' method provides one with little reassurance.
3. On the Status of the Claims
Maybe I have been unfair to Langs so far. One might counter my
criticisms by saying that his book should not be judged on its stylistic
shortcomings or the credibility of the literature on which it draws.
Rather, it should be judged on its own terms.
This defense of Langs might be buttressed by the observation that he is
not trying to prove his theory in this book. At the end of chapter one,
he sets out the five goals of the book (pp. 17-18). These are, briefly,
to offer a new approach to the unification of the theories of evolution
and psychoanalysis; to define the adaptive capabilities of the
emotion-processing mind in the light of its evolutionary history; to
delineate an adaptationist program that accounts for the history of the
mind; to provide support for the contention that emotionally charged
behaviors have evolved; and to advance the idea that significant aspects
of the current adaptive operations of the mind are governed by Darwinian
principles. Very little of this project is to argue for the plausibility
of the ideas. He is only trying to outline his program.
If it is true that Langs is not trying to defend his view, but just
outline it, then his project is rather less interesting than it might
have been. But even if that is all he is trying to do, it is impossible
to really understand what the project is in any detail without knowing
how he would go about defending it. The issue of plausibility is
inescapable. And there are several parts of the project which seem quite
implausible.
The book is divided into four parts: Darwin and Freud; some biological
principles for psychoanalysis; evolutionary scenarios for the
emotion-processing mind; and the emotion-processing mind as a Darwin
machine. The first two parts largely set the context for discussion. It
is in the third part that Langs at last gets to one of his main
challenges, "the delineation of an adaptationist programme for the
emotion-processing mind" (p. 103). This is where he makes most of his
substantive and controversial claims, and he makes far fewer references
to other works. I will turn to this second half of the book in the next
section.
The last chapter of the second part, which is the longest chapter of the
book, contains an extended discussion of a fictitious clinical vignette,
a therapy session of Ms. Wells. (A great opportunity was lost in not
calling the chapter "Looking Deep into Wells"; instead it is called
"Architecture of the emotion-processing mind.") In this vignette, he
sets out some details from a therapy session, with apparently ordinary
examples of therapeutic interactions and details of everyday
unhappiness. From these, Langs infers that Ms. Wells has an "unconscious
delusional belief in one's immunity to loss for both patient and
therapist" (p. 99). He also reveals some quite strict views about
therapeutic method, in his disapproval of using one's home as a place
for doing psychoanalysis and of letting one patient refer another to the
analyst for therapy. (Freud was never so strict.) He concludes that the
vignette "has amply confirmed our initial formulations regarding the
architecture of the emotion-processing mind" (p. 99). Of course, given
the difficulty that any psychoanalytic theory has had in finding
confirmation, it would be highly surprising if Langs had produced
evidence that amply confirmed such a view of the mind. This leads the
skeptical reader to scrutinize the argument.
Langs says that the emotion-processing mind should be the unit of
evolutionary study. One advantage to this approach, he claims, is that,
"clinical research has fathomed major aspects of the architecture of the
emotion-processing mind and has unearthed several unexpected features of
this mental module" (p. 77). This is why he goes into a clinical example
in some detail. He says in a footnote that the vignette is used solely
as a model and narrative illustration (p. 78). He goes on to interpret
the behavior, thoughts and feelings of his fictitious Ms. Wells,
attributing unconscious responses to her, and then summarizing what her
set of conscious and unconscious responses "reveals about the
architecture of the emotion-processing mind" (p. 91). We can see that
what Langs says leaves the status of his claims unclear. At one point he
claims that he is only illustrating a view, but then he goes on to say
that something has been revealed about the mind. Of course, he better be
only making the former claim, because the latter is highly implausible.
He has demonstrated nothing, but only forced one interpretation on a
fictitious example. Whatever claims Langs might be making to have shown
how clinical experience confirms views about the structure of the mind
are given no credible support in this book.
4. The Details
So we see that even judging Langs' work purely on its own terms,
ignoring the stylistic problems and the reliance on the work of others,
he faces deep problems. I will now come to the same judgment concerning
the third part of the book. He begins by setting out what model of the
mind he is adopting. Among his assumptions are the claims that our minds
have both conscious systems, which has its own superficial unconscious
subsystem, and a deep unconscious system. The deep unconscious system is
intelligent and efficient, and has two main subsystems, for wisdom and
fear-guilt. It is also exceedingly frame-sensitive. To explain this, I
need to explain what frames are.
Unfortunately Langs never explicitly defines what a frame is, but the
basic idea is clear enough:
The most powerful class of emotionally charged triggers for
unconscious adaptive responses as revealed through their encoded
narratives are almost always frame-related. For patients, these
are interventions that are constituted as their therapist's
management of the ground rules, setting, and other conditions of
the treatment situation.
Years of experience indicate that encoded, unconsciously
validating narratives and images from patients speak for a
universal, ideal secured frame for a psychotherapy experience that
holds the patient safely - and the therapist. (p. 30)
I take it from this and similar passages that a frame is something like
a setting or context which the patient is used to. They are classified
along with the rules and boundaries with which a patient is familiar. So
when Langs writes that the unconscious is frame-sensitive, he means that
people are unconsciously disturbed when they are in an unfamiliar
setting.
Langs lists five aspects of the mind that are unexpected and puzzling.
His aim is to show how these are compatible with, and might be explained
by, evolutionary theory. These features are:
the existence of the conscious and unconscious systems;
the tendency of the conscious system to repress knowledge which would
be useful;
the tendency of the conscious system to seek out frame changes when
coping with emotional difficulty;
the tendency of the unconscious system to try to keep to stable
frames; and
"the emotion-processing mind is split and experiences on one or the
other level a sense of danger and threat" (p. 109).
(This fifth item seems to be the conjunction of the third and fourth
items.)
There have been a number of works published on the evolutionary
development of hominid cognitive and affective capacities. Langs relies
on this literature to support his own views. He does not acknowledge how
speculative this work must be, but rather treats it as established fact.
He starts off with the Australopithecus, who first appeared 4-6 million
years ago. He tells us, "the main form of cognition in Australopithecus
was episodic, in that it was concrete, situation-bound, and
non-reflective-time-bound to the present moment." (p. 118). He goes on,
There is no suggestion of repression or denial in
Australopithecus, although repression may well have existed in
crude form as some kind of automatic exclusion mechanism directed
against painful memories when fresh, relevant events linked to
past traumas took place. (p. 121)
Langs justifies this by saying that "nature seldom creates a mechanism
de novo," so the fact that later hominids did have the ability to
repress suggests that this ability must have existed in primitive form
in earlier hominids. Of course, this is not an extrapolation of our
present knowledge; it is speculation on stilts. Langs suggests that a
critical development was that of focussed attention, and that this
emerged in Homo erectus about 1.5 million years ago. But it is only with
Homo sapiens sapiens, about 200,000 years ago, that the critical
developments in emotional capacities occurred. Then began internalized
conflict, awareness of personal mortality, the lethal danger of
conspecific fighting with weaponry, and the stresses that stemmed from
language acquisition (p. 134). Emotional stresses threatened to overload
the cognitive system's processing capacities; language acquisition
increased the ways humans could inflict emotional damage on each other;
and the prospect of personal death and the loss of loved ones made life
more difficult. Langs' approach is to consider various possibilities for
how the mind could have evolved to cope with these difficulties. He
assesses these options, and shows the problems that each faced. Of
course, he ends up with the psychoanalytic model of the mind that he
favors, with a deep unconscious consisting of two subsystems, dealing
with wisdom and fear-guilt respectively. Langs attempts to show that the
surprising features of the mind (as he sees it) were in fact adaptive to
the problems at hand. He draws the depressing conclusion though that
evolution has done a bad job: the human mind is disfunctional.
Clearly, the very fact that we are threatening ourselves with
extinction, and that we are unable to control our violent impulses
towards each other, speaks for a disfunctional mental design with
serious consequences. Indeed, the realization that the emotion-
processing mind is at the heart of civilization's current woes
places psychoanalysis at the very centre of our struggles for
personal and collective survival. (p. 205).
Thankfully, he does not propose that everyone go into psychoanalytic
therapy, but Langs does not tell us his vision for how psychoanalysis
can save humanity.
I parenthetically note that some of Langs' ideas here might be of
interest to philosophers and psychologists interested in our powers of
rational reasoning. Some social psychologists have demonstrated how
persistently humans make errors in reasoning, (summarized in Stein,
1996, chapter 3) and others have questioned whether cognitive
rationality is necessarily useful to us (e.g., Stich, 1990, chapter 3;
and Stein, 1996, chapter 6). Langs' work here could be a useful addition
to the speculation as to ways in which irrationality might be adaptive.
I will not attempt to assess the details of Langs' argument. It is
entirely too general and speculative for any meaningful assessment of
the details to be made. There is just not enough hard evidence for us to
test different theories against each other here. The speculative story
is interesting in its own way, if one is sympathetic to psychoanalysis.
If one judges the book in terms of Langs' stated goals as listed above,
he has been moderately successful. It would be going too far to say that
he has "unified" evolution and psychoanalysis, but he has at least shown
that they might be compatible. He has set out some broad features of an
approach that would account for the psychoanalytic features of the mind,
if they exist. But in accomplishing goals such as these, Langs has done
nothing to alleviate the current crisis of psychoanalytic theory. He
might have made the first steps in showing one way in which one might
try to give some scientific support to psychoanalysis, but the entire
project is so speculative that it is hard to see how it could ever be
carried out. We are unlikely to ever have enough evidence from hundreds
of thousands of years ago that could give specific confirmation to the
psychoanalytic hypothesis as opposed to alternative theories of mind.
5. Conclusion
Modern psychoanalysis now resides in an intellectual ghetto. As a
theoretical research program, it has clearly been stagnating in the
backwaters of psychoanalytic journals over the last several decades, and
if it is not to become completely irrelevant, it needs some method of
rejuvenation. I applaud Langs' effort to do this, even if I think his
particular attempt was misguided. His work might even have a salutary
effect on psychoanalysis in spurring further innovation. But those
trying to make use of psychoanalysis need not try to bring it up to the
level of other scientific theories. Instead, they can develop it in
other directions. If one wants to pursue interdisciplinary integration,
I would point to the work of John Bowlby (1982) as one of the most
satisfying developments of strands of psychoanalytic thought in recent
decades. Bowlby brought together object-relations theory and attachment
theory, with primate research and anthropological study. But one might
go in quite different directions, following those aspects of
psychoanalysis which are shared by few other parts of psychology, such
as the emphasis on the psychodynamic unconscious, the death drive,
ego-psychology, the analysis of narcissism, and so on. (Eagle, 1984,
provides one of the best summaries of recent developments in
psychoanalytic thought, and I commend it to the reader.) While such
ideas are likely to remain on the sidelines of mainstream psychology for
some time, it is a sign of a healthy discipline that it allows and even
encourages such diversity.
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