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Affect and the Integration Problem of Mind and BrainBarry Opatowa

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To cite this article: Barry Opatow (1999) Affect and the Integration Problem of Mind and Brain, Neuropsychoanalysis: AnInterdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 1:1, 97-110, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.1999.10773250

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Affect and the Integration Problem of Mindand Brain

Barry Opatow (New York)

The body cannot determine the mind to thought, neither canthe mind determine the body to motion nor rest, nor to anythingelse, if there be anything else [Spinoza, Ethics III, Prop. 2].

Introduction

For whom is there an integration problem of mind andbrain? I mean the really important theoretical problem.Not the merely practical dilemmas attending the tor­ments of hunger, sex, and the terror of death. If we,as theorists, take metaphysical monism as a regulatoryprinciple for science, we say that mind and brain areultimately one. We hold consciousness and matter tobe the same thing, even though we do not know (norcan even imagine) how such identity could possiblybe made intelligible (McGinn, 1991; Searle, 1992).How can subjective experience be explained in objec­tive terms? Or, the question has been aptly put, "howcan technicolor phenomenology arise from soggy greymatter?" (McGinn, 1991, p. 1). Or, "how can thefiring of C fibers be understood as, necessarily, pain?"(Kripke, 1971). This basic oneness in nature becomes,we say, something , 'frightfully difficult" (Nagel,1986), or "the most vexing of all questions" (Da­masio, 1994), or "the most difficult problem there is,or ever was" (LeDoux, 1996), or "the ultimate mys­tery" (Edelman, 1992), only as we strive to apprehendit. The difficulty is posited to fall within us, in thelimited capacity of our present conceptual resources.We willingly take on this deficiency in order to pre­serve a belief in the unity of Being and sustain the hopeof a progressive unification of scientific knowledge.However, a deep defect in the theoretical frameworkafflicts our current conceptions with a recalcitrant du­alism, a tendency which has been noted by Kinsbourne

Barry Opatow, M.D., is a Training and Supervising Analyst, NewYork University Psychoanalytic Institute.

(1998). This dualism, often covert, is, when admitted,methodically regarded as epistemic, pertaining only toour theoretical knowledge. This distinction of episte­mology (dualism) and ontology (monism) marks ourdistance from the scientific goal.

Only very recently has the mind-body problemfallen from the precincts of philosophy and theologyinto the purview of standard empirical science. Thisscientific project is grounded axiomatically in a unitaryontology of mind and matter, and in the mandate thatthis unity be explicated progressively (e.g., in this newjournal). As there currently exists no overarchingframework that can conceptually connect the basicterms, the conceptual framework itself becomes anultimate goal of research. Short of that, our presentmethodology employs a provisional conceptual appa­ratus that, admittedly deficient (i.e., dualistic), will beused as the instrument for its own superseding.

This paper will explore the scientific and philo­sophical status of the question by juxtaposing what is,arguably, our deepest scientific account of mind (basicpsychoanalytic theory) and current theoretical neuro­science (represented here in the cutting-edge works ofDamasio [1994], Edelman [1989, 1992], and LeDoux[1996]). Recent developments in experimental andclinical neurology, neurosurgery, and neuropsychol­ogy have resulted in an explosion of information re­garding detailed correlations of neurophysiologicaland psychological-experiential activities and func­tions. My discussion of this research deals little withspecific findings. Rather, it follows the scientists' in­terpretive reflections in their individual quests to un­derstand how best to think about the relation of mindand brain. My focus in this paper is on consciousness;that is, on how consciousness is discussed in brainscience with regard to general theory construction and,further, on the concept of consciousness in psychoana­lytic theory.

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The representative authors concur that con­sciousness is (1) at the heart of the integration prob­lem, and (2) currently, and perhaps forever,inexplicable in physical (e.g., neurobiological) terms.According to our century's foremost scientific episte­mologist, "An analysis of the very concept of explana­tion would, naturally, begin and end with arenunciation as to explaining our own conscious activ­ity" (Bohr, 1932, p. 11). In the current dominant para­digm of neuroscience, brain activity is expressed asinformation processing, which, in principle, sufficesto give a causal explanation of all of psychology."The key question" then becomes, "why doesn't allthis information-processing go on in the dark, freeof any inner feel? Why is the performance of thesefunctions accompanied by experience? We know thatconscious experience does arise when these functionsare performed, but the very fact that it arises is thecentral mystery. There is an explanatory gap betweenthe functions and experience" (Chalmers, 1995, p.203). The term "explanatory gap" was coined at theinception of cognitive science (Levine, 1983), and hashad programmatic status for the field as a whole. Thisgap in our capacity to link function and phenomenon,or rather, the degree of current incapacity, is a measureof the nearness of science (dualism) to being(monism).

The neuroscientists agree that consciousnessfigures critically in attaining higher order processingand controls. At the same time, they realize that con­sciousness resists any reductive explanation in physi­cal-biological terms, and that the progress of sciencecannot wait for one. Remarkably, these researchershave devised a virtually identical methodology to dealwith this predicament. First, consciousness is assertedas necessary for higher order processing. Processesthat are conscious can modify and exert control overlower level, more automatic processes that are uncon­scious. Consciousness is, in this sense, causally activeand not epiphenomenal. (These hard scientists sharean intriguing aversion to epiphenomenalism, the clas­sic mind-body philosophy that consciousness, like anengine's hum, is causally superfluous to organismicfunctioning. Their attitude stems mainly from consid­erations that are both personal [feeling pain leads youto phone the dentist] and evolutionary [it would bevery odd if something as remarkable as consciousnessevolved and does not execute an organismic func­tion]). Second, "conscious causation" is formulatedspecifically to mean that processes that are accompa­nied by conscious experience (qualia) have causalpower in mental functioning. In contrast, the qualia

Barry Opatow

themselves (the strictly experiential qualities) are re­garded as merely passive outcomes or inconsequentialconcomitants of the truly causal events (viz. the pro­cessing). Thus, on this view, the phenomenology ofconscious experience does not (and cannot) conceptu­ally enter the causal chain of mental activity. Third, itis therefore possible to conclude that conscious pro­cessing is indeed causal, even though experience perse is not! In this functional analysis of consciousness,a split is performed between process and experienceso that, although process is systematically linked toexperience, only the processing is causal. It is in thislimited sense (with consciousness denuded of experi­ence) that "consciousness" is deemed causally effi­cacious. The "explanatory gap" seems here to yawnever more widely in the strain to avoid epiphenome­nalism.

If this strategy gives the impression of "passingthe buck" (as LeDoux [1996] acknowledges, p. 282),it is because any legitimate attribution of causality toconsciousness must entail that, in contrast to theabove, experience is not only a passive accompani­ment to conscious processing. Rather, experience mustactively enter into the processing and affect its course.There would therefore exist a high order mental activ­ity that necessarily involves experience and cannotoccur "in the dark." Cognitive science has in factidentified a candidate activity, focal attentive pro­cessing. This serial, slow, limited-capacity processingis found to be regularly accompanied by awareness(Velmans, 1991). Indeed, it possibly cannot occurwithout it! This curious concomitance prompts thequestion: Could there, then, be a way that consciousphenomenology is functionally involved in thinking?There are several researchers who believe that it is.Baars (1988) states that consciousness somehow facil­itates learning. Mandler (1985) thinks that there is anattentional activation of information which is medi­ated by consciousness. Keane (1991) believes con­sciousness is crucial for the drawing of certainanalogies. Schacter (1989) holds that phenomenal con­sciousness integrates the outputs of more specializedmodules, and, hence, plays a causal role in informationprocessing. The remarkable empirical discovery thatthe functional and phenomenal aspects of conscious­ness are intimately linked (e.g., in focal-attentive pro­cessing) would, then, no longer be inexplicable, andtake on true theoretical import. In an authentic rejec­tion of epiphenomenalism, consciousness has causalforce just because experience has intrinsic activity. Idiscuss this activity of consciousness below, as illumi­nated by psychoanalytic theory. I am wary of a theoret-

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ical advance in integration which "bridges" theconceptual gap between mind and brain by relocatingit in the center of consciousness.

Conscious and Unconscious in Neuroscience

It may well be that the relation of mind and body is an ultimate,unique and unanalyzable one.... Nor does it seem that newempirical information will serve as a decisive test for one the­ory over another. ... If so, philosophical wisdom would consistin giving up ... and accepting it as the anomaly it is" [Shaffer,Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967, p. 345].

In Joseph LeDoux's The Emotional Brain (1996), alaboratory procedure studies animal brains as they pro­cess stimuli and generate controlled, objectively mea­surable responses. This method, of course, leaves outthe subjective dimensions of emotional feelings. In­deed, even in humans, it is precisely the existence andfunctions of consciousness in its phenomenological as­pects which, resisting complete objectification, cannotfully, for experiment, be "represented in the brain"(Searle, 1992; Crick, 1994). Still, LeDoux claims (assubjective states are mere products of processing), ifwe don't require experience to explain emotional be­haviors in animals, then neither do we in people. Le­Doux's theory, in main outline, holds that theunconscious systems that detect danger comprise the"fundamental mechanism of fear." This is reinforcedby the idea that as emotional feelings are effects, notcauses (p. 18), their consciousness is epiphenomenal.It is clear throughout the book that the author is deeplyambivalent about this conclusion (not only in the exis­tential sense in which emotional feelings are desig­nated by LeDoux, "the core of who we are," but also,and scientifically more important, in the functionalsense as well). He describes a two-tier processing sys­tem for affects-aptly called the "low road and thehigh road" -that is analogous to many hierarchicalmodels in neuroscience and psychoanalytic theory(Freud, 1915c). In affective processing, the "lowroad" transports environmental input directly from thesensory thalamus to the amygdala, the "hub" of thefear system. This subcortical processing is automatic,instantaneous ("greased lighting") and, cognitively, 'dirty." It cannot make fine distinctions and treats,say, all red things as the same-as, for instance, dan­gerously hot. This peremptory, indiscriminate uncon­scious processing therefore exhibits the mainstructural features of the psychoanalytic primary pro­cess. Although it has survival value, enabling one to

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avoid (or shoot) first and ask questions later, it is toostupid to be really adaptive. It hence became evolu­tionarily equipped with an overriding control mecha­nism (like the "second system" in Freud [1900,chapter 7]) which loops through the cortex (thalamus­cortex-amygdala) and implicates conscious pro­cessing. With this, there comes a shift from reactingto acting.

For LeDoux, anxiety disorders result when theprimitive fear system breaks loose from these corticalcontrols, whereas treatment works, conversely, to en­hance the conscious control of emotion. In LeDoux'stheory, this higher level processing leans heavily onthe cognitive science concept of "working memory"(stressed also by Damasio). Working memory is de­scribed as an executive scanning mechanism involvedin the focusing of attention. Believed to occur neurallyin the lateral prefrontal cortex, it refers roughly towhat we are currently paying attention to. Althoughit furnishes a framework that, admittedly, does notexplain consciousness (p. 332), it "provides a work­space for consciousness to hold several pieces of infor­mation in mind at the same time where they can becompared, contrasted and otherwise interrelated." Itis, however, pivotal that such thought activity has beenknown, since Kant, to involve reflective conscious­ness, implicating consciousness in intrinsic activitiesof negation and synthesis. 1 Searle also identifies con­scious synthesis with this Kantian notion (1992, p.130). According to Gerald Edelman, the integral roleof consciousness in concept formation could accountfor its selectional advantage (1989, p. 146). Thus, theconcept of working memory has effectively allowedreflective consciousness to be implicitly introducedinto neurobiological theory.

In LeDoux's conception, working memory ismore than just short-term memory, but an active pro­cess that makes high level thinking and reasoning pos­sible. In addition, as working memory also enables, 'top-down processing,' , conscious reasoning hasfunctional effects and issues in "voluntary action."In this cognitivist model, consciousness is a unitarylimited-capacity serial processor sitting at the top ofthe cognitive hierarchy and performing symbolic ma­nipulations on the multiple subsymbolic parallel proc­essors. Working memory, a supervising functionachieving focused attention, is "the gateway to con-

1 Clinical evidence for the importance of this self-reflection comesfrom the study of "blindsight." Subjects with visual cortical damage areaware, but lack the ability to be aware that they are aware. They woulddie of thirst with water right in front of them (Campion, Latto, andSmith, 1986).

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sciousness" (p. 301), and permits reflective awarenessof the "here and now" (p. 278). Located at the corti­cal top of the 'low-road/high-road' hierarchy, "work­ing memory becomes actively focused on theamygdala-based arousal and tries to figure it out anddecide what to do about it" (p. 291). "Consciousnessis the awareness of what is in working memory" (p.278), and "elevates thinking to a new level" (p. 302).LeDoux means this conclusion to apply not only toconceptual level but to functional ability to adapt toreality. I have gone over LeDoux's formulationsclosely in light of his methodological postulate that itis not necessary to solve the problem of consciousnessbefore constructing a theory of how emotions work(p. 34, p. 282). As I indicated above, a fallacy loomshere-one which I think LeDoux senses keenly as hestrains in the coils of dualism. In fact, consciousnessis not best regarded as the mere appearing productof unconscious processing. Moreover, it is not to beidentified with content alone. As taught by the greatphenomenologists (Kant, Hegel), and echoing down tomodern cognitive and neuroscience, consciousness isan active construction of a dimensional manifoldwhere discrete objects can be synthesized, identified,and, through reflection, used as the raw material forreason, so that objects of thought can be linked by con­cepts.

The cognitive science concept of "workingmemory" tries to avoid epiphenomenalism and all du­alism while asserting that conscious thinking is crucialfor processing. It attempts this by making conscious­ness per se a superfluous (but clinging) concomitantof a wholly unconscious causation. Unwittingly, how­ever, the theory makes subjective experience integralto brain functioning. In my view, LeDoux's hierarchi­cal theory is, in fact, a version of dualist interac­tionism. Under conceptual cover of "workingmemory," neurology and consciousness are recipro­cally linked by an untheorized causation. As these for­mulations are paradigmatic for current neuroscience,it is understandable why some (Penrose, 1989; Stapp,1993) argue that the real way out of this dilemma isto find a physical theory of the brain which, by goingdeeper than physiology (i.e., quantum mechanics),could achieve a physical explanation of conscious­ness, and, thus overcoming dualism, establish the sci­entific monism of mind and brain.

Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error (1994) rep­resents a stunning endorsement of basic Freudian the­ory from the frontier of neuroscience. I will examinethis aspect of the book later in my discussion of psy­choanalysis. Here, I will focus solely on its pertinence

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for the mind-brain integration problem. Damasio, aclinical neurologist, evolves a theory of mind to ex­plain clinical data accrued from extensive neuropsy­chological studies of brain-damaged patients. Thispermits him to relate cognitive operations to specificneural systems and their components. As in LeDoux'sconception, if more tacitly, a two-tier model of brainfunctioning is proposed. The brain, and all its func­tions, evolved to deal with the basic drives and sur­vival needs of the organism. Therefore, bodily states,represented by emotions, pervade cognition at everylevel of its operation. Most remarkable for my currentpurpose is that Damasio brings consciousness to thecore definition of mind (as does Searle, 1992). Hepoints out that even single cell organisms can initiatereflex responses to environmental stimuli; they can"produce behavior." As in anencephalic infants (ornormal ones, for that matter), a distinction should bedrawn between behavioral responses and truly mentalones. There can be "behavior" without mind. Da­masio states that, in addition to reactive external re­sponses (behavior), complex organisms generateinternal responses that constitute "the basis of mind. ' ,In particular, at the' 'center of neurobiology" (p. 90),there occurs a generative process whereby neural rep­resentations of somatic states and their associated ob­jects give rise to "experiential images." "The abilityto display these images internally and to order themin the process called thought [is the] essential condi­tion of mind" (p. 89). Mind is therefore a cognitiveprocess involving body-based images "over whichyou reason" (p. 196). As in LeDoux, Damasio's for­mulation rests on the concept of working mem­ory-the ability to hold information in mind(including images of absent objects) and operate onit mentally. This is achieved neurally by unexplained"time-binding" (cf. Crick, 1994) that performs largescale integrations which, via global attention andworking memory, permit images to be "held longenough in consciousness to play a role in the appro­priate reasoning strategy" (p. 218). Attention andworking memory are required in order to keep theimages over which you reason "before your mind'seye." Merely having an integrated representation inthe cerebral cortex is not sufficient for the conscious­ness of it (p. 103). Innate survival patterns do notgenerate images and, thus, are not mental. Mind re­quires the experience-driven generation of images.

Furthermore, suprainstinctual survival strategiesmust, first, be conscious (p. 122). For instance, con­sciousness of dangerous objects enables anticipatorysignal anxiety and fine discrimination, permitting

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flexibility of response rather than an automatic one.Primary emotions (limbic), reactive to immediatestimuli, work up to secondary (cortical) emotions thatconnect emotions with object images. Novel adapta­tions originate in consciousness, and only then be­come automatic; strategic decisions among optionsrequire consciousness (p. 118). "Developing a mind,which really means developing representations ofwhich one can be made conscious as images, gaveorganisms a new way to adapt to circumstances in theenvironment that could not have been foreseen in thegenome" (p. 299). Nevertheless, states Damasio, "thequestion of how we feel rests on our understanding ofconsciousness, something about which it pays to bemodest, and that is not the subject of this book" (p.160).

Gerald Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire(1992) summarizes his neurobiological theory of con­sciousness. He is quick to acknowledge that con­sciousness cannot be explained in neural terms, andthat "cartesian dualism is likely to be dispelled onlywhen we understand the relationship between con­sciousness and physics" (p. 4). He indicates that' 'thefundamental problem in neuroscience" (p. 28) in­volves the construction of the universal concept, "ob­ject," and the associated functions of objectrecognition, generalization, and categorization. Sci­ence can explain the properties that are correlated inobjective consciousness, but not the fact of its exis­tence. (This means, I would add, that consciousnessis not a psychological process but a precondition forempirical psychology.) The problem of object integra­tion threatens, states Edelman, a "homunculus cri­sis." "Mind depends on consciousness for itsexistence and functioning. . .. Consciousness arisesfrom a special set of relationships between perception,concept formation and memory" (p. 149). Later, I tryto show that these relations are set up in the psychoan­alytic concept of the wish. Further, that the conceivingof objects occurs originally as an act of consciouswishing. This fits with the evolutionary idea, endorsedby Edelman, that consciousness is a causal activity.As I stressed earlier, this assertion should not be con­fined to experiential qualia, which, Edelman agrees,are underivable from any physical theory. To ascribecausal efficacy to consciousness is to attribute to sub­jective experience certain intrinsic activities. These, Ibelieve, are elucidated by psychoanalytic theory.

As is well known, Edelman regards brain devel­opment as a selectional (rather than an informationbased) mechanism that eliminates some "neuronalgroups" while strengthening others. Processes of "re-

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entry" amongst neural assemblies and ensuing"global mappings" permit the perceptual integrationof unified objects and categorizations of them. In thetwo-tier tradition, Edelman distinguishes primary con­sciousness (having imagery) and secondary ("higherorder' ') consciousness (which includes self-con­sciousness and language). Primary consciousness re­quires systems of concept formation, and, mostimportant, a set of reentrant connections that link af­fective, value-laden memories of past events with cur­rent perceptual categorizations. The functional activityof these reentrant mappings is what gives rise to con­scious experience. Edelman realizes that, accordingto his model, the reentrant processes which developcategories are somehow (but inexplicably) the sameevents that generate phenomenal experience. For Edel­man, "primary consciousness" involves the construc­tion of a scene with causal links between events,allowing for value-laden (i.e., affective) events to beinserted into an ongoing scene. The categorizationsthat constitute the scene occur in unconscious percep­tual systems based on evolutionary determined criteriaof survival value. The synthesis of this phenomenalscene confers additional survival value on the organ­ism. This is due to the fact that concepts, requiringconsciousness, further operate on these perceptual cat­egories, and apprehend abstract relations between thecategorized items within the scenes.

Higher order consciousness entails the special ca­pacity to symbolize the "self/non-self" distinction,which, according to Edelman, conditions the develop­ment of semantics, syntax, and internal time-con­sciousness. These concepts can connect previouslyunrelated categorizations, thus creating new scenes inthe absence of external stimuli. In this process, thebrain is effectively mapping its own activity. This"higher order mapping" is strikingly isomorphic to anact of reflective consciousness which, again, appearsintegral to concept formation. Conceptual/higher or­der consciousness acts to free the mind from the "tyr­anny of the present" (Edelman, 1989, p. 187). Suchsymbolic reference means that mind can now operateon an inner world, bringing forth a veritable' 'ontolog­ical revolution" (1992, p. 150). By this, I understandthat in the act of self-consciousness, the mind breaksfree of self-identity. Each act of self-reflection is, also,a self-negation (Hegel). The mind becomes reflec­tively aware of experience instead of being passivelyimmersed in it. In conscious reflection, an act of nega­tion creates an inner distance from experiential imme­diacy. What was simply lived out becomes new rawmaterial for further mediation of thought. Experience

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objectified to this increased degree can be reorganizedat a higher conceptual level. We see here an instanceof conscious activity "entering into" cognitive pro­cessing in a truly causal way.

Affect and Thought in the PsychoanalyticTheory of Consciousness

Those philosophers who have become aware that rational[thoughts] are possible without consciousness ... have founddifficulty in assigning any function to consciousness; it hasseemed to them that it can be no more than a superfluous re­flected picture of the completed psychical process. We, on theother hand, are rescued from this embarrassment ..." [Freud,1900, p. 616].

Desire is the essence of man [Spinoza, Ethics III, Prop. 59].

David Rapaport, perhaps, after Freud, the greatestpsychoanalytic theorist of thinking, called the psycho­analytic wish, "the cradle of conscious experience"(1951, p. 690). It is fitting that psychoanalysis mayhave something unique and important to contribute tothe mind-body integration problem. Freud's notion ofthe "instinctual drive," the basic concept of his entiremetapsychology (Ricoeur, 1970), functions preciselyto conceptualize the mind-body "frontier" for a the­ory of mind (Freud, 1915a). This is in keeping withFreud's steadfast and rigorous attempt to ground men­tal existence in organismic life. Psychoanalytic theoryhad to give primacy to the mind-body relation becausepsychoanalytic practice disclosed the full extent towhich this relation defines our psychological exis­tence. It is an intriguing scientific predicament that itmay prove impossible theoretically to solve the veryproblem (mind-body) that mind emerged to cope within practice.

Freud's theory of mental origin is given its first(except for the aborted 1895 Project [1950]) and stillmost trenchant expression in the theoretical chapter ofThe Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In this part ofmy paper, I give an explication of the Freudian meta­psychology to address the issues already discussed thatare attracting theoretical neuroscience. Particular im­portance is given to the relation of mental functioningto organismic survival (i.e., to its vital needs) and,consequently, the deep-rooted functional connectionof affect and thought in the human mind. Moreover,as throughout, I continue to pay special attention tothe scientific accounts of the nature and function ofhuman consciousness. In this psychoanalytic section,I try to exhibit consciousness as an active medium in

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which affect and thought are interfused aspects of aunitary organismic activity.

In a special issue of a major psychoanalytic jour­nal on the "rapprochement between psychoanalysisand neurobiology," the neuroscientist Allan Schorewrites, "Recent psychobiological and neurobiologicalstudies thus strongly indicate that the concept of thedrive, devalued over the last twenty years, must bereintroduced as a central construct ofpsychoanalytictheory" (1997, p. 827, italics in original). Schore citesDamasio's research in this connection. Indeed, Da­masio repeatedly makes the point that neuropsycho­logical findings from brain-damaged patients showthat emotions interpenetrate with reason from the low­est to highest levels (neurally, in the amygdala andventromedial prefrontal cortex). In agreement withEdelman and Changeux (1985), Damasio holds thatfeelings are powerful manifestations of basic regula­tory survival instincts and drives. Subcortical (hypo­thalamic and brain stem) drive processes infuse thecortical mechanisms of rationality. Emotions functioncognitively to furnish "a glimpse of the organism"that serves for mapping bodily signals into the struc­ture of thought. The mind had to be first about thebody, and the body representation is the brain's per­manent "ground reference" for the mutual structuringof the object world and the brain itself. "The ego isfirst and foremost a bodily ego" (Freud, 1923, p. 26).Even rudimentary perception involves an "acting onthe environment" with regulatory aims. It is notable(and somewhat ironic) that neuroscience appears toconfirm basic drive theory against important biologi­cally inspired ego psychological revisions (Hart­mann's [1964] concept of "primary autonomous egoapparatuses ' ,).

The "primacy of the body" also has develop­mental significance in neurobiology. Innate circuits inthe brain whose function is to regulate body functionsand to ensure the organism's survival, determine onto­genesis by influencing the design of neuronal circuitsrepresenting the evolving body and its interaction withthe world. Individual "experience," pertaining espe­cially to vital needs, therefore shapes brain develop­ment (Damasio, 1994). Moreover, this circuit designis repeatedly pliable and modifiable by continued ex­periences. The integral connection of emotion and rea­son is given its most explicit formulation in Damasio's"somatic marker hypothesis," which I discuss below.

Returning to psychoanalysis: One of Freud's fun­damental discoveries about human (particularly, child­hood) sexuality concerns its "anaclitic origin." Onthis hypothesis, sexuality arises in the individual as a

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concomitant effect during the experience and satisfac­tion of vital, organismic needs, and only graduallybreaks out as an identifiable separate (viz. sexual) ac­tivity. For Freud (1905), sexuality, in its genesis,"leans upon" the "vital" instincts. We see that forDamasio (and Edelman, among others), the entiremind is postulated to have such anaclitic origin, withbrain development deriving primarily from the livingout of vital needs. Freud has been criticized for in­sisting on an ultimate sexual reference for even themost operational functions (eating, seeing, moving,etc.). In light of Damasio's radical thesis, one mightsay that Freud establishes that human sexuality (forinstance, narcissism) mediates this global connectionof all mental functioning to purely somatic, nonmentalobjectives (e.g, homeostasis). Psychoanalytic theory,in effect, interpolates a theoretical stratum of sexuality(the psychophysical entity par excellence) between thelevels of body and mind.

The Phenomenology of Wishing

Freud's theory of the mechanism of wishing is foundin the seventh chapter of The Interpretation ofDreams. To further discuss consciousness, I will sum­marize a phenomenological account of this theorywhich I have developed in several papers (Opatow,1989, 1993, 1997). In Freud's basic metapsychology,the primitive psyche, concerned with keeping itselffree of stimulus (thus enacting the constancy principle,a precursor of homeostasis) is forced to develop be­yond reflex discharge. This occurs when the stimulus,rather than be environmental, arises, inescapably,from within the somatic substrate of the psyche. Theseinner stimuli constitute the major somatic needs (withthe prototype, hunger). The event (i.e., feeding) thatbrings the extinction of this inner source of excitationis called by Freud, an "experience of satisfaction."The memory trace of the perceptual image that accom­panies "satisfaction" becomes, in consequence,something psychically valued. This is true for Damasioas well. Objects acquire affective importance (as"good" or "bad") only through their association withfeelings of pleasure and pain. As Schore indicated andDamasio affirms, neuroscience supports "drive the­ory," right down to its implications for the standingof the object. Object investments are not pregiven.They become psychically important in order to pro­vide a perceptual mediation for need satisfaction. Theparticular object is circumstantially contingent on theexperience of need. For instance, in feeding, the asso-

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ciated perceptual mnemic trace may be that of themother's hand, hair, clothing, etc., which becomes,henceforth, the "object of the drive." In the historyof psychoanalysis, this view contrasts sharply withschools of "object relations theory," where the valua­tion of specific objects is postulated as developmen­tally a priori (hard-wired).

Freud asserts that the next time the vital needoccurs a mental impulse will emerge to recontact theassociated mnemic percept. As this contact is made,the conscious experience of this memory must be, atfirst, phenomenologically indistinguishable from itsperception. The mnemic image is therefore affirmedas present and is, thus, hallucinated. This is the cele­brated Freudian notion of "hallucinatory wish ful­fillment,' , a mental activity that was originallyinferred from dreams.

This fulfillment is dashed by the' 'bitter experi­ence of life": Satisfaction (real milk) cannot be hallu­cinated. "Satisfaction does not follow; the needpersists" (Freud, 1900, p. 566). The "object" of de­sire, in bringing not pleasure, but pain, will, hence, berejected. Phenomenologically, this repudiation is aninner distancing that converts the hallucinatory itmne­diacy of sense into an explicit experiential memory("in the past"). Furthermore, this withdrawal (or re­coil) of consciousness "makes room," in awareness,for syncretic images to take on determinate definitionas distinct objects. In the rejection of the hallucinatedimage, consciousness negates sensations by attributingthem to objects (as properties), rather than be merelyassailed by them (as in hallucination). The first object,hence, crystallizes as "the breast as absent" (past,lost, etc.).2

For a theory of thinking, we note a hierarchy ofnegation-a hierarchy that starts with pain. Instinctualpain of mounting need is, like a toothache, simultane­ously mental and physical. Theoretically, marking anoriginal identity of psyche and soma, it serves also toindicate an incipient mental emergence. Organismicdistress becomes the experiential consciousness ofpain. The one way that the mind can become active inrelation to this pain, an experience of being passivelyoverwhelmed, is to institute a negation. This act ofnegation, although mental, is not merely syntactical orlogical. It pertains, rather, to the negativity of con­sciousness. This refers to the act of reflection in which

2 Regarding the wish as the genesis of consciousness, compare Edel­man: "It is the discriminative comparison between a value-dominatedmemory . .. and the current ongoing perceptual categorization that gener­ates primary consciousness of objects and events" (1989, p. 155; empha­sis added).

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consciousness rejects the immediacy of experience tobecome aware of awareness. This conscious reflectionhas momentous importance for the development ofthought. I discuss this below. For now, I expresslystate that the primary organismic distress (for instance,hunger) is, theoretically, a negation-one occurring onthe level of brute existence, and linked, biologically,to death. This discord connotes, therefore, not so mucha negation by the organism as one of the organism.As the hierarchy of negations (that leads to thought)begins to assemble, this organismic negation is firstexperienced passively, and simply undergone. Thedistress is then taken up by consciousness (as feltpain), ascribed to a percept (the syncretic hallucina­tion), and rejected forthwith. In this affective repudia­tion, consciousness reflects out of the hallucinatedimmediacy of sense, and, in becoming aware of aware­ness (a distinction within consciousness), faces a deter­minate object, one that can bear specific properties.Thus, reflection generates the empirical object.

Kant demonstrates in the Critique ofPure Reason(1781) that the experience of objects involves a mentalprocess in which the influx of sense is met by a powerof intelligence and bound to conceptual categories.This binding involves "transcendental apperception,"the primordial self-consciousness that generates con­ceptual (i.e., objective) experience. I mentioned that,according to Edelman, it may be just this concept­forming function of consciousness that accounts for itsselectional advantage (1989, p. 146). Searle explicitlyrelates this Kantian doctrine to the' 'binding problem"in neuroscience-the problem of how the brainachieves the unified awareness of diverse features ofexperienced objects (1992, p. 130).3 For Kant, thisgenerative process concerns activities of synthesis andnegation that proceed on a level called "transcenden­tal logic." Transcendental refers to the deep mentalconditions for the possibility for worldly objects to beexperienced at all. Formal logic, in contrast, operatesmore superficially, and designates the relational rulesthat obtain for these objects once they exist. TheseKantian conceptions (with differing terminology) areprevalent in contemporary cognitive science.Schweiger, for instance, writes, "consciousness impli­cates the ability to construct a three-dimensional real­ity with individual objects in it. Such reality permitsmanipulation of objects, even in their absence, ... asin abstract thinking" (1998, p. 109).

3 Brouwer (1949), the post-Kantian mathematical logician, held thatreflective consciousness generates the basic concept of identity in differ­ence, which he calls "two-icity."

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In the psychoanalytic theory of thinking, thesegenerative processes are embedded within the desireof a living being-"the cradle of conscious experi­ence." The affective rejection of hallucination is anegation within consciousness that, as describedabove, gives rise to empirical objects. Furthermore,such acts of repudiation, which begin by targeting onehallucination at a time, issue in a structured inhibitionof the entire modality of hallucinatory wish fulfill­ment. This structured inhibition marks the "primalrepression" of a whole primitive form of mental func­tioning and experience (Opatow, 1993). The structur­alization of objective experience therefore arises froman act of repression. Primal repression, hence, indi­cates the next step in the hierarchy of negation. Itfurnishes a standing negation that constitutes (on thelevel of transcendental logic) not merely individualempirical objects but a whole experiential objectworld. It is, moreover, worth noting that, for psychoan­alytic theory, these objects are conceived first andforemost in the experience of desire (their' 'cradle' '),and that desired objects continue to provide the tem­plate for all objects as intended in perception andknowledge.

Further implications follow for the theory ofthinking. I described how the conditions of satisfactioninsure that the first object originates as "the breast asabsent." Indeed, cognition properly (that is, symboli­cally) begins when the pain of instinctual need be­comes experienced as lack, a negation that constitutesthe wish, an awareness that something could be absent.In the negative hierarchy, conceptual negation is whatthe mind does with instinctual pain. The failed halluci­nation, as rejected, is hence, convertible to a represen­tation-something standing for an absence-and,thus, becomes available for symbolic processing. Fur­thermore, this structured, sustained inhibition of hallu­cination upholds the unified level of representationwhich is required for symbolic thought (Kitcher,1990). Cognitive operations of logical negation, andsyntax in general, can now be applied to the elementsof the object world.4 It follows that the entire hierarchyof negation is unconsciously operative in the logicalnegations in consciousness. 5 We are therefore affordeda view of how affects are hierarchically lifted intothe structures of thought. This accords with, but goes

4 Accordingly, recent cognitive studies find symbolic capacities in thefirst weeks of life (Spelke, 1988; Mandler, 1990).

5 This fits with Freud's (1925) derivation of intellectual judgmentsfrom instinctual processes. It is illustrated, also, in his phenomenologicaldeduction of basic experiential categories, such as, internal-external, fromthe primal opposition of pleasure and pain (1915a).

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beyond, Damasio' s ' 'somatic marker hypothesis,"which holds that certain aspects of emotion ("gut feel­ings' ') are indispensable for rationality, especially forpractical decision making. I have tried to show that,for psychoanalytic theory, affect and thought are evenmore deeply linked: Affects are integral to the verypossibility of thought.

It should now be clear what I mean by the claimthat, for consciousness to be truly nonepiphenomenal(that is, have causal effects in mental functioning),consciousness must exhibit certain intrinsic activities(for instance, self-reflection). Consciousness is morethan just phenomenal content. This view would appearto be unconventional. It is not so much that the asser­tion that phenomenology is intrinsically dynamic is aposition that is actually argued against-the matterdoesn't come up. Either it must seem to many authorsto be obviously wrong or, for some reason, just isn'tthought of. Naturally, I suspect the latter.

An "intrinsic activity" view is, however, sup­ported by some eminent researchers, such as BenjaminLibet (neurosurgery) and Howard Shevrin (experi­mental psychology). Libet, for instance, makes the re­markable assertion that, to explain the consciouscontrol of unconscious intentions, "it would indeedseem necessary to postulate that conscious controlfunctions can appear without prior initiation by un­conscious cerebral processes" (1985, p. 538; emphasisadded). On this formulation, consciousness acts, insome circumstances, as a pure spontaneity! Moreover,in a recent panel discussion, Libet agreed when I sug­gested that his theory of an experiential "backwardreferral in time" implies a mental act that has no neu­ral concomitant (Panel, 1998, p. 913). From anothersector of cognitive science, Shevrin (1998), elegantlycombining experimental neurophysiology with psy­choanalysis, hypothesizes that the function of con­sciousness is to fix a particular content in theintentional category in which it was first experienced(e.g., as a perception or a memory, or as a desire or abelief), a categorization which is retained in the furthermental processing of the content. Shevrin's viewstrongly echoes Kant's functional connection of con­sciousness to experiential concepts. It also confirmsFreud's idea (1917) that consciousness permits dis­criminative access to reality.

David Chalmers (1996), a philosophical leader ofthe exuberant "consciousness studies" movement incognitive science, also focuses on the relations be­tween the psychological (viz. the standard causal) andphenomenological aspects of mind. He agrees withSearle that physical science can explain only the ob-

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jective correlates of consciousness, and that they alonecan be represented in brain studies. Certain conceptsstraddle the fence between phenomenology and psy­chology. Pain, for example, is both unpleasant andaversive (Le., experiential and functional); perceptionis both experiential and informational. If, however, aphenomenological element were required for a mentalfunction (e.g., for certain kinds of learning), then thatfunction would be, in Chalmers' view, inexplicableby physical science. Chalmers posits as a relationalprinciple that experiential consciousness is a correlateto information that is "globally accessible" inmind-brain functioning. He believes that this correla­tion between conscious experience and cognitive"awareness," in which psychology and phenomenol­ogy "do not float free from each other" but are sys­tematically (though inexplicably) linked, stronglysuggests the existence of phenomenal causation. Heformulates a principle of "structural coherence" inwhich the "difference structure" of subjective experi­ence is mirrored isomorphically in the informationalstructure of psychological awareness. This leads himspeculatively to the familiar supposition that the causalrole of experience bears on the formation of concepts.Indeed, he avers, perhaps phenomenology furnishes anecessary substrate in which to ground the difference­structure of information (pp. 304-305). He realizeswhere this leads: "I have resisted mind-body dualismfor a long time, but I have come to the pointwhere ... I think that dualism is very likely true" (p.357). The Cambridge psychologist, Anthony Marcel(1988), largely concurs with these views regarding thecausal effects of consciousness, the role of conceptformation, and the implied suggestion of some formof dualism. This disturbing (yet, it appears, inevitable)conclusion seems the likely reason why the possibilityof a phenomenological dynamism usually doesn'tcome up in psychological explorations of the role ofconsciousness.

Furthermore, how one views consciousness has,in this regard, important bearing on the concept of theunconscious, as well. This link is illustrated in thework of the prominent philosopher of mind, JohnSearle. Searle believes that, as consciousness has asubjective "first person" ontology, it is forever irre­ducible to any objective events "representable in thebrain. ' , Furthermore, "the ontology of the uncon­scious consists in objective features of the brain capa­ble of causing subjective conscious thoughts" (1992,p. 160). "The concept of unconscious intentionalityis that of a latency relative to its manifestation in con­sciousness" (p. 161). Searle refers to his view as a

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"dispositional" analysis of the unconscious. The un­conscious consists in a disposition to cause consciousmental states. However, unlike consciousness, the un­conscious exists in its own right in certain neural fea­tures of the brain, namely, those causing consciousintentional states. Ontologically, "there are brute,blind neurophysiological processes and there is con­sciousness, but there is nothing else" (1992, p. 228).For Searle, there is simply no place for a mental levelof unconscious activity. Searle seems not to considerthat consciousness could have a real, inner dynamicstructure. That is, possess a mental dynamism that op­erates outside of awareness to generate and sustainconscious phenomenology.

As I argued above, psychoanalysis postulates thatour experiential world of spatiotemporal, differenti­ated objects arises from a continuous negation (firstinvolving conscious reflection) of a syncretic, primi­tive mode of experience. The organizational principlesof objective awareness are sustained by this repres­sion. Repression, then, is constitutive for the humansubject. Ordinary experience must therefore endureunder permanent strain. It is upheld through mentalwork and effort, and is always tending to release thisstrain and fall back to its ground-structure (hallucina­tion). As a compromise between the two experientialtrends (viz. the reality and pleasure principles [Freud,1911]), all "objective perception" is infused with hal­lucinatory remnants. This structuring of experiencecan be psychoanalytically studied under the basic con­ception that the "transference" illusions pervadingexperience are dynamically caused by unconsciousfantasies.

Conclusion: Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience

The interdisciplinary project to which this journal isdedicated rests on the capacity to formulate "bridgingprinciples" linking vastly distinct sciences. Accordingto Marshall Edelson, a psychoanalyst who has thoughtdeeply about this task, "the objective of every scienceis to discover patterns or regularities in the interrela­tions among abstracted aspects of phenomena, to lo­cate events in some causal nexus" (1988, p. 129).Edelson remarks that for bridging concepts betweensciences to be possible, both sciences must haveachieved a sufficient degree of abstraction to admit ofexplanatory generalizations of comparable scope. Thisis because we are seeking to bridge a steep empiricaldivide by finding connections between theoreticalconcepts on either side. An impressive example of this

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methodology is found in the research of Mark Solms,as influenced by Luria. As Solms points out, "psycho­logical faculties are complicated things, which havetheir own complex internal structures, and these struc­tures break down according to the logic of their owninternal construction, not according to the laws of ce­rebral anatomy" (1993, p. 8). Solms believes thatpsychoanalysis can contribute uniquely to conceptual­izing these mental structures. He proposes to investi­gate psychoanalytically the mental aspects ofneurological disease with the aim of correlating under­lying mental structure with the observable details ofneurological damage. "In this way, [we] graduallyidentify the cerebral representation of ... the humanmental apparatus" (p. 17). This method "enables usto reduce complex psychological functions down tothe elementary component parts which do correspondisomorphically with the language and concepts ofanatomy" (p. 15). This structural-eorrelation methodindeed holds considerable promise for advancementof knowledge in both fields. However, I believe thereawaits a particularly serious challenge-one involvingconsciousness-facing those who endeavor to work"on the bridge."

It is true, of course, that science cannot await thesolution to the problem of consciousness. However,the time must come when this insolubility must makeitself felt. Consciousness is too important to be leftout for long. For instance, I have tried to show thatconscious activities are crucially involved in the originof thought. Furthermore, that the psychoanalytic un­conscious and objective, empirical consciousnessemerge conjointly, and remain structurally intercon­nected. Unconscious and conscious do not exist inde­pendently in the mind but, rather, are mutually definedby their relation (Opatow, 1993). This conception ofthe psychoanalytic unconscious accords with Searle's(1992) "connection principle" for all of cognitive sci­ence: Searle contends that there is an intrinsic relationbetween consciousness and intentionality (that is,mental representation, or "aboutness"); only a con­scious being could have intentional states at all; un­conscious intentionality is defined in terms of potentialaccessibility [connection] to consciousness. (Ofcourse, I strongly disagree with Searle's denial of areal mental unconscious.) A vital tie therefore existsbetween the unconscious and consciousness. The re­search method of bracketing consciousness in order tostudy the unconscious can only be justified (and trulyproductive) as a provisional strategy.

The bridging project must contend with criticaldifferences in the conditions that prevail on either

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side. In the physical sciences, there is one fundamentalprocess for the generation of events: the process ofcausation, expressible in causal laws. These causallaws can be isomorphically mapped onto laws in othersciences and, in this way, conceptual bridges areformed. Perhaps the best known example of this inter­theoretic correlation is the one linking thermodynam­ics (e.g., the concept of temperature) and statisticalmechanics (e.g., molecular energy). Neuroscience issuch a physical science and, therefore, admits of beingmapped onto an array of sciences that rest on the lawof cause and effect (neurochemical, computational,etc.). On the other hand, in psychoanalysis, as a sci­ence of subjective experience, something else is goingon in addition to causal events. There is a second kindof fundamental generative process. This formative ac­tivity is best seen not as causal, but constitutive. Thus,for example, conscious and unconscious are mutuallyconstitutive. The unconscious constitutes the con­sciousness which it, at the same time, perturbs. It isproblematic how these constitutive events involvingconsciousness can be represented in a physical science(i.e., "in the brain").

I mentioned earlier the crucial psychoanalyticidea that experiential events, such as transference illu­sions, can be conceived as causal effects of uncon­scious fantasies. This basic conception informs theclinical understanding of symptoms, traits, dreams,parapraxes-in short, all of the disruptions in the co­herent experience of consciousness. Causal laws aretherefore clearly important in clinical psychoanalytictheory (Opatow, 1998). Indeed, Shevrin, Bond,Brakel, Hertel, and Williams (1996) have convinc­ingly demonstrated the existence of the psychoanalyticunconscious by mapping its effects onto neural eventsby a method of causal correlations. However, in dis­cussing the "hierarchy of negations," I emphasizedanother process of generation, one that is paramountin the structuring of experience. This process is consti­tutive, not causal.

One main strategy for comprising the mental andphysical in a unitary conception utilizes the idea ofcomplementarity. On this view, first-person (subjec­tive) and third-person (objective) descriptions ofmind-brain events are mutually irreducible perspec­tives on a single underlying substrate. "A completepsychology requires both" (Velmans, 1991, p. 667).This complementary principle is, in fact, a version ofdual-aspect' 'identity" theory associated most promi­nently with Spinoza (1677; Wartofsky 1973). Ac­cording to this doctrine, reality is ontologically one,although known to our minds under distinct attributes

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of extension (physics) and thought (psychology). Gen­erative processes run isomorphically within each do­main, and never cross between them. There is nocausal interaction of body and mind. However, as eachattribute has identical basic organizational structure,our knowledge of one can inform the other. This prin­ciple therefore validates the method of structural cor­relations. However, an important feature of thiscomplementary principle is that structural identity ob­tains completely only at the level of the most basicprocesses. Notwithstanding the enormous progress inneuroscience, there is no reason to believe that thisfundamental epistemic level (which may differ fromthe current level of the synapse) has yet to be reached(cf. Penrose [1989] and Stapp [1993], above). Thus,even accepting the complementary principle as ulti­mately true, a question remains as to when to invokeit. For instance, as discussed above, cognitive sciencehas, as yet, not explained the close connection betweenfocal attentive processing and conscious awareness.There is a strong voice in neuroscience saying thatconsciousness, in its experiential aspects, is not epi­phenomenal. This means that according to the besttheories of the mind and the brain now available, expe­riential events can "cross over," and have causal ef­fects in neural functioning (Gottlieb, 1991). Evenwithin psychoanalysis, consider that the function ofall defense is to allay conscious unpleasure. Consciousunpleasure provides the motive for the mechanisms ofdefense (Freud, 1915b; Brenner, 1982). Thus, I believethat productive research is best served by maintaininga position of interactionism between the domains.

Consider, for example, the neurological findingthat "stress" from whatever cause, by releasing corti­sol, impairs the "high road" hippocampal control ofthe amygdala and thus increases general susceptibilityto symptomatic anxiety (Pally, 1998). Here, a psycho­logical vulnerability is being explained on the basis ofa purely neurochemical process. Now, juxtapose thisformulation with the corresponding psychoanalytichypothesis that "stress" (from whatever cause) actsto confirm the reality of certain unconscious dangers,and would thus have a destabilizing (anxiety releasing)effect on drive~efense configurations in general. Itseems to me that, in this example, each perspectivenot only complements the other, but informs it in away that furthers integration.

I agree with Libet when he states, "to adopt[complementarity] in a rigid form would tend to in­hibit further experimental exploration of the possibili­ties of causal interaction between neural and consciousstates" (1991, p. 686). To assert as definitive the con-

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ventional view that "there is no frontier between mindand body.... Mind is an aspect of cerebral function­ing" (Brenner 1982, p. 20), prematurely reduces therole of the mental, and risks foreclosing further empir­ical and conceptual research.

I will conclude this paper by considering what isperhaps the current "interactive" frontier in theoreti­cal neuroscience: the issue of the "binding problem."As Llinas and Pare put it, "the essence of brain func­tioning seems, to us, to be that of generating the func­tional scaffolding required to create an internal imageconsistent with external reality [note: an essentialfunction identical to that assigned to the 'psychicalapparatus' in The Interpretation of Dreams]. Andmore importantly, such a consistent image of reality,requires that inputs from different sensory modalitiescoalesce into a singular perceptual event. Interest­ingly ... the connectivity [involved in the brain]allows a cognitive capacity to be truly a priori" (1991,p. 525; emphasis added). I have already discussed therelation between consciousness, empirical categories,and the structuring of objective experience. Eitherconsciousness is epiphenomenal, or phenomenology isnecessary to reflection and synthesis. If we assumethat conscious reflection is involved in the formationof experiential concepts, how would this process im­pact on what can be represented in the brain?

In reflective awareness, what was merely livedthrough is set out and objectified (Sartre, 1937). Con­scious reflection produces the intentional object. I hy­pothesize that this object-pole of consciousness wouldhave an identifiable (objective) neural counterpart,even if the reflective activity itself has none. Be itphysical or phenomenological, object is commensuratewith object. According to the present conception, theobject synthesis is first effected in consciousness, onthe level of the phenomenal object.6 Once this bindingoccurs, a neural correlate is concomitantly formed,which then can act as a physical cause, and producefurther neural effects. The integration problem of mindand brain can, therefore, be uniquely advanced byhoming in on the deep physical mechanism of this

6 This fits with Merleau-Ponty's findings on clinical data from diplo­pia and synesthesia: "The sight of one single object is not the outcome offocusing the eyes, [rather the object] is anticipated in the very act offocusing. The focusing of the gaze is a prospective activity ... The unityof the object is intentional" (1945, p. 232). Therefore, the intentional actbrings about the unification of the object, and only then the unity of thesenses. The intentional object unifies the senses and not the other wayaround. Compare with Crick's homologous formulation: "The main func­tion of the attention mechanism would be to select an object for attention['controlling a spotlight of attention'] and then help to synchronize thecoalition of all the relevant neurons that correspond [in the brain]" (1994,p. 245; emphasis added).

Barry Opatow

binding. Currently, the leading candidate hypothesisinvolves intrinsic membrane properties generatingsynchronous oscillations globally across the cortex (anenigma, according to Crick, 1994). Other possibilitiesare forms of neural holography (Pribram, 1971;O'Keefe, 1985), and quantum coherences in nonneu­ronal brain elements (Hameroff, 1994). The actualmechanism has not yet been identified. Somethingphysical in the brain represents object integration. Set­tling this issue would seem a straightforward matterof diligent empirical research. But, whatever it mayturn out to be, its inception corresponds to a constitu­tive act of consciousness.

Science advances by solving problems until it en­counters a phenomenon which, after persistent effort,remains not only puzzling, but conceptually incongru­ous-a logical singularity in the science. The study ofconsciousness, however, places one in special circum­stances. In consciousness, we have something whichwe already know to be a true anomaly. Elucidating itsphysical mechanism would, then, either bring us to thelimits of knowledge, or, as did black-body radiation acentury ago, point the way to a whole new paradigmfor science.

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Barry Opatow27 West 95th StreetNew York, NY 10025e-mail: opatow@erols.com

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