The socratic Method
6 Sometimes the Heart Sees What Is Invisible to the Eye Unconscious Love Love does not always manifest itself as a conscious experience. To view romantic love simply as a long-lasting conscious state is hopelessly naïve. Love doesn’t feel like an urge or an impulse; sometimes it feels like giddiness, awe, appreciation, or interest it doesn’t feel most of the time it doesn’t feel like anything at all. Most of the time we don’t give it a single thought. Even in the very few phases of my life during which I can truly say that I have been head over heels in love with someone, I have not found myself rapturously responding to my sweetheart every minute of my waking life. Love is consciously manifested only episodically. I certainly had better things to think about when the mean guy from Charter closed my windows before I had a chance to bookmark them, or when I ordered a Happy Meal while pretending to have a kid in the other room because the talking chipmunks just are so damn cute. Zoe’s love for Brandon was not pulverized when she didn’t consciously feel it. When her love wasn’t felt, it was still there in her brain in the form of long term potentiation (memory) or weak nerve signals—nerve signals that, owing to other distractions, did not give rise to conscious experiences. The same goes for other powerful emotions. The deep-rooted resentment Zoe felt toward Brandon was not surfacing as a conscious experience for years, but it was brewing inside her, like lava in a volcano. Finally it emerged as a conscious feeling that overshadowed her positive affections for him. In a recent letter she wrote: “Right now I feel maybe eighty percent negative feelings towards Brandon. Twenty percent of me is still thinking about him as an amazing person. But I know now that I never want to see him again.” There is a certain air of mystery surrounding the notion of the unconscious. But the concept really isn’t all that enigmatic. Your unconscious thoughts and emotions are simply those parts of your mind that you don’t have explicit knowledge about but which nonetheless guide your behavioral patterns and form your personality. Of course, if you are particularly good at analyzing your own behavior and personality traits, you may have insight into your unconscious thoughts and emotions. But people typically are not very self-observant, and when they are not, others may have a better comprehension of their unconscious thoughts and emotions than they do. An old friend may have noticed that you always seek out emotionally unavailable men and may have inferred from that that you implicitly fear intimacy. Or a co-worker may have observed that you always prattle on about your buddy Hank and giggle spontaneously when he is present and may have inferred on the basis of your behavior that you are crazy in love with him, long before the thought has occurred to you.
Opponents of Unconscious Affection
Despite the seeming prevalence of unconscious emotions and their influence on our lives, there is much controversy in philosophical and psychological literature over whether there are unconscious emotions, let alone unconscious love. The main reason for this is that emotions when consciously manifested are exemplars of conscious experiences. Many philosophers and psychologists straightforwardly equate emotions with feelings. They, thus, equate emotions with the conscious. They equate them with something that cannot occur below the level of conscious awareness. The idea that emotions require consciousness consciousness stems in part from studies on people with spinal injuries. American Psychologist George Hohmann conducted a study of soldiers who suffered spinal injuries in World War II. He asked them to recall emotion-arousing incidents from before and after the injury and found that those with injuries in their legs reported little to no difference. Those who were injured from the neck show normal facial expressions. They could feel some forms of romantic love and compassionate love but they could not feel sexual desire. They were deprived of some emotional life. There was clearly a correlation between the location of the injury and the range of emotional feelings. This indicates that a lack of ability to perceive changes in the body entails an absence of emotional experience. Whether there can be unconscious emotions has always been the subject of much controversy. Even Sigmund Freud, the sex-crazed doctor who was responsible for popularizing the notion of the unconscious (Friedrich Nietzsche had already offered an account of it) denied that there can be unconscious emotions. For Freud, trains are big penises, but the concept of an unconscious emotion is a contradiction. As he put it: We should expect the answer to the question about unconscious feelings, emotions, and affects to be just as easily given. It is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it, that is, that it should become known to consciousness. Thus the possibility of the attribute of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions, feelings, and affects are concerned. But in psychoanalytic practice we are accustomed to speak of unconscious love, hate, anger, and so on, and find it impossible to avoid even the strange conjunction, “unconscious consciousness of guilt,” or a paradoxical “unconscious unconscious emotions. For Freud, trains are big penises, but the concept of an unconscious emotion is a contradiction. As he put it: We should expect the answer to the question about unconscious feelings, emotions, and affects to be just as easily given. It is surely of the essence of an emotion that we should be aware of it, that is, that it should become known to consciousness. Thus the possibility of the attribute of unconsciousness would be completely excluded as far as emotions, feelings, and affects are concerned. But in psychoanalytic practice we are accustomed to speak of unconscious love, hate, anger, and so on, and find it impossible to avoid even the strange conjunction, “unconscious consciousness of guilt,” or a paradoxical “unconscious was responsible for popularizing the notion of the unconscious. One of the most telling anecdotes about Freud is the story of his encounter with American psychologist Gordon Allport. When first introduced to Freud on a visit to Austria, Allport reported that he had encountered a young boy on the train on his way to Vienna, who had an intense fear of getting dirty. Allport speculated that perhaps the boy had acquired his dirt phobia from his mother. Freud glanced at Allport for a while. Then he said sympathetically “And was that little boy you?” Freud wasn’t truly Freudian in his approach. Since Freud, psychoanalysts have attempted to create a sterile and quiet environment that can prevent the analyst from becoming a real person to the patient. Freud’s sessions were not very sterile. They would frequently be attended by his Chinese chow Yofi and occasionally by his daughter’s wolfhound that was known to sniff the genitals of Freud’s patients. © Gareth Southwell. For Freud “instinct” or “drive” are better terms for the states I want to refer to as unconscious emotions. In this respect, he is one with Helen Fisher who believes romantic love is a drive (though for different reasons). Unconscious Affect Despite the ferocious opposition to the idea that emotions can be unconscious, lots of cases appear to be candidates for unconscious emotions or affect. Scientists have discovered
that people with lesions to parts of their visual cortex, which leave them partially or fully blind, sometimes have a kind of residual vision called “blindsight.” People with blindsight report having no conscious vision in their blind field, but when they are prompted by an experimenter to make a guess about something in front of them, they can use visual processes to predict the thing’s location, direction, and color. They cannot consciously see the thing they make guesses the thing in front of them is located and what its color is, but the sixth sense does not allow them to consciously see anything. Some people with blindsight respond to emotional stimuli without being consciously aware of them. This form of blindsight is called “affective blindsight.” Individuals with affective blindsight have no visual awareness but they can correctly guess the emotional expression of a face presented to them in their blind field. Neuroscientist Beatrice de Gelder and her colleagues discovered that when threatening faces are presented to blindsight subjects too quickly to be consciously perceived, the faces can nonetheless give rise to bodily changes that indicate fear. Blindsight patient G.Y., who has damage to his primary visual cortex, was shown short video clips of a female face pronouncing the same sentence with either a happy, angry, sad, or a fearful facial expression. G.Y. was able to make greater than chance about the different emotional expressions presented to him in his blind field. He could not consciously see the emotional expressions but he could make good guesses about them when prompted by the experimenter. G.Y.’s emotional brain (the amygdala) also turned out to be activated during the presentation of the fearful facial expressions. These findings suggest that fear responses do not require conscious representation in the visual brain but can be computed in alternative unconscious (subcortical) pathways. Surprisingly, psychologist Alfons Hamm and his colleagues found that blindsight patient K.-H. J., who has no active visual cortex, had unconscious emotional reactions to facial expressions. K.-H. J. had a complete loss of vision from damage to an artery in the brain. K.-H. J. was unable to grab objects in front of him. He did not turn toward new visual stimuli and could not even recognize bright light. He did…
