In the Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis

by Casey Schwartz

Overview

“Everywhere I looked it seemed that we were being defined by what our brains were doing . . . Everywhere, there were hucksters and geniuses, all trying to colonize the new world of the brain.”
 
“I’d never been a science person,” Casey Schwartz declares at the beginning of her far-reaching quest to understand how we define ourselves. Nevertheless, in her early twenties, she was drawn to the possibilities and insights emerging on the frontiers of brain research. Over the next decade she set out to meet the neuroscientists and psychoanalysts engaged with such questions as, How do we perceive the world, make decisions, or remember our childhoods? Are we using the brain? Or the mind? To what extent is it both?
 
Schwartz discovered that neuroscience and psychoanalysis are engaged in a conflict almost as old as the disciplines themselves. Many neuroscientists, if they think about psychoanalysis at all, view it as outdated, arbitrary, and subjective, while many psychoanalysts decry neuroscience as lacking the true texture of human experience. With passion and humor, Schwartz explores the surprising efforts to find common ground. Beginning among the tweedy Freudians of North London and proceeding to laboratories, consulting rooms, and hospital bedsides around the world, Schwartz introduces a cast of pioneering characters, from Mark Solms, a South African neuropsychoanalyst with an expertise in dreams, to David Silvers, a psychoanalyst practicing in New York, to Harry, a man who has lost his use of language in the wake of a stroke but who nevertheless benefits from Silvers’s analytic technique. In the Mind Fields is a riveting view of the convictions, obsessions, and struggles of those who dedicate themselves to the effort to understand the mysteries of inner life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307911537
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/25/2015
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	946 KB

About the Author

CASEY SCHWARTZ has worked as a staff writer at Newsweek/The Daily Beast, where she covered neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times and The New York Sun. She lives in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

The last thing we were assigned to read before Christmas was Freud’s evocative watershed paper “Mourning and Melancholia.” In this dense work, Freud puzzles over the question of depression, though he doesn’t call it that, and what makes melancholia different from mourning. I fell into the text, taking in Freud’s formulations. Both mourning and melancholia, Freud says, are, to begin with, states of withdrawal from the world, and both are prompted by some real, external loss.
 
The paper is short but it brims with ideas that changed the course of psychoanalytic theory in the years to follow. It is considered the work that led to the concept of the superego, the third and final layer of Freud’s so-called metapsychology. But in truth, it was not this breakthrough in the mapping of the mental structure that most grasped my interest. I was thinking of my father.
 
As I was reading Freud’s essay, my father, a novelist and radio personality, was mired in depression, debilitated almost beyond recognition, for what had then been nearly three years. I had last seen him on my twenty-fourth birthday, two weeks before I left for London, for graduate school. My mother and father had both flown from New York to California, where I lived at the time, to celebrate this birthday with me. It was a disaster. I saw that my father, off the plane, was unreachable, a person in another dimension.
 
That night, we went to a boxing match in downtown Los Angeles. David, the boyfriend I lived with, was an obsessive boxing fan and it seemed the natural way to spend the evening. David and my brother Adam and my chic mother in her black cashmere uniform and my walking corpse of a father and I all sat in a row and watched two heavyweight champions, Sam “The Nigerian Nightmare” Peter and James “Lights Out” Toney, throw their punches and dance the ring and fall into those intermittent embraces that boxers use for rest, as well as for moments of closeness, it always seemed to me.
 
No one was really able to watch the fight. That’s how it is when you’re sitting next to a zombie. It is not the case that the zombie recedes into invisibility, that his presence is forgotten. Anyone who has been around a person trapped in deep depression knows all about this. Your life, too, must shrink down to those tiny, miserable parameters.
 
My father murmured that he was going to get a hot dog and lurched to his feet. The rest of us looked at one another nervously. “Are you okay?” my mother asked him. Long divorced, they had always remained close friends. “Of course, of course,” he said, aiming for levity. I wasn’t sure that he would be able to make it back. The author of five books and a presence on American radio for forty years could not be relied upon to make a trip to the hot dog stand.
 
Well, he returned, with sauerkraut.
 
After the fight, we went for Korean barbecue. The restaurant was a favorite, but the atmosphere remained grim. I had the image of my father as an abused child, his presence a mere cobweb at the table. Do I need to explain that my father was not always like this? Do I need to say something here about how he was, for all the years I’d known him, wild, hilarious, colorful, eccentric, electric? Sometimes very black, too, but always, always a heavyweight. And yet, evidently, this was still my father, this person at the table whose uncomprehending eyes stared vaguely in my direction through the gusts of steam rising from our plates.
 
There had been clues. For a while now, he’d been doing this falling thing, this thing where suddenly, without warning, he would fall, extravagantly, onto the floor. He did it on the street, he did it in the elevator, he did it in lobbies and in restaurants. He never hurt himself, and it wasn’t neurological, doctors told him. Later, I would think of him when I was studying Freud’s hysterics, whose limbs were apt to give out at inexplicable moments.
 
There was another moment, too. I was home in New York for my brother’s high school graduation. We were all there, the stepparents and half siblings, and it was a happy occasion, watching Adam, the beloved punk, cross the stage to get his diploma while noticeably chewing gum.
 
Out on the street afterwards, my father turned to me.
 
“My God,” he said, “I can’t figure out where the car is.”
 
“Where’d you park it?”
 
“That’s not it,” he said, looking left towards Park Avenue and right towards Lexington. “I can’t figure out which is east and which is west.”
 
My father had lived almost his whole life in Manhattan, in most cases mere blocks from where we stood.
 
And then California. At the end of the gloomy evening, which I had largely spent in tears, we dropped my father off first, then drove my mother to her hotel on La Cienega. I got out of the car to hug her good night. I believed I had ruined the whole night that she’d tried so hard to infuse with festivity. Flying west, bearing presents, ordering cakes, and being, as ever, full of enthusiasm and brightness for the future. But my mother just grabbed me and said, “It’s awful, isn’t it?”
 
Through the first months in London, I still spoke to my father occasionally, but the calls were tedious and detached and I couldn’t wait to hang up. His availability had always been subject to change. Now it was simply gone.
 
In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud describes how the ego is born into the world prepared to attach itself to people around it. Cathexis is the word Freud used to denote this attachment. The ego, Freud says, sticks its cathexis onto love objects of its choosing. At first the ones that happen to be there; later, a more select group.
 
In melancholia, Freud says, what seems to be happening is that this love object, the one with the cathexis stuck onto it, gets lost, goes away, rejects you, disappoints you. You withdraw your cathexis back into the ego, now that there’s nothing there anymore for it to stick to. But what happens once the ego turns back in on itself is less straightforward. “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty,” Freud writes. “In melancholia, it is the ego itself.” There is, Freud says, the persistent sense that something is missing.
 
In my father’s case, I knew only too well who the lost object was that had sent him into his three-year coma. Her name was Liese, she was thirty-three to his sixty-five, and she’d finally ended things between them. He’d been involved with her for a decade, now, throughout much of his marriage to my stepmother. Why did I even know about this? Well, I did. My father had taken me into his confidence years before. Liese lived in a little studio apartment on West End Avenue, where she kept an embroidered cloth over her television when she wasn’t using it. “She thinks someone could see her through the screen,” my father told me. “What’s wrong with that?” I’d been to the apartment. I’d seen the cloth.
 
The situation played out in my mind as I read through Freud’s essay. I put it down. I picked it up. Read it again. Suddenly, my eyes focused on a short passage, near the beginning. It was one of those plot twists that stop the heart, that run throughout Freud’s whole forty years of writing. It is just a single observation:
 
One cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either. This, indeed, might be so even if the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him.
 
The loss is unknown. I scribbled it in the margin. The loss is unknown. Underlined it three times. I had never before considered that maybe my father didn’t know exactly what the loss was that had so capsized him. That maybe he was as hopelessly estranged from his own mind at that moment as I was from him. If that were true, then we were estranged together, a little bit closer than I’d thought.

Editorial Reviews

Ms. Schwartz…is skeptical where others are swooning and swooning where others are skeptical. These are wonderful qualities in a science writer…Ms. Schwartz writes with imagination and wit, whether she's parsing the rage of Kleinians or describing the phenomenon of memory reconsolidation.

The New York Times - Jennifer Senior

06/15/2015
More than just a survey of the fields of neuroscience and psychoanalysis, this compelling book presents readers with the stories behind the science. Schwartz depicts ongoing attempts to unite the seemingly disparate disciplines of neuroscience, in which she has a degree, and psychoanalysis—the former founded on proof, the latter sometimes criticized for its apparent absence. Yet both disciplines aim, in their varying ways, to understand the human mind. From their interdisciplinary merger comes a new term, neuropsychoanalysis. Schwarz also intends to uncover the emotional substance behind these two sciences, and accordingly emphasizes her personal connections to the research at hand. Even Freud is given an uncharacteristically human and relatable face, as are case studies typically encountered (in much less vivid form) in textbooks. Though clearly knowledgeable, Schwartz is honest about her moments of indecision, further humanizing the narrative—indeed, the book ends with more questions yet to be answered rather than with concrete conclusions. Schwartz demonstrates the value of embracing confusion and the limitations of one’s knowledge while exploring the vast expanses of the mind. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Fascinating. . . . Refreshingly honest. . . . Both a smart exploration of a complicated subject and an excellent read.” —Chicago Tribune
 
“Thoughtful. . . . A thorough review of key neuroscientific findings. . . . If brain researchers plan to conquer the scourge of mental illness, they will have to pay more attention to the mind.” —Los Angeles Times

“Schwartz is onto something. . . . [She] is skeptical where others are swooning and swooning where others are skeptical. These are wonderful qualities in a science writer. . . Schwartz writes with imagination and wit.” —The New York Times  

“Exciting. . . . The journey presented in this sharp narrative makes somewhat lofty topics accessible. . . . Schwartz engages the reader with humorous stories of the leading professionals she encounters, providing a thorough, thoughtful account.” —Library Journal

“A brilliant and enthralling exploration of a scientific and philosophical conundrum that has preoccupied thinkers from Descartes to Freud to Oliver Sacks: the relationship between brain and mind. Weaving together intellectual history, science reporting, bits of memoir, and a deep reservoir of humane sympathy, Schwartz brings readers along with her on a bracing quest. . . . A work of remarkable brio, wisdom, and wit, with gems of insight shimmering on nearly every page.” —Scott Stossel, editor of The Atlantic and author of My Age of Anxiety

“If psychoanalysis studies the brain as mind and neuroscience studies the mind as brain, can they somehow learn to work together to help us understand who we are? Casey Schwartz takes us on a charming, personal quest to reconcile hard-to-reconcile views—watching, fascinated, as the brain, maybe the most unfathomable thing in the universe, tries to fathom itself.” —Alan Alda 

“For too long, we’ve had to choose between the mind and the brain. . . . In this generous, insightful, witty book, Casey Schwartz looks at the steep cost of that dichotomous construct.  Her meticulous reporting and lucid reasoning resolve seemingly intractable dialectics with the sheer grace of common sense.” —Andrew Solomon, author of Far from the Tree

 “Skeptics beware. Casey Schwartz’s reports from the world of neuropsychoanalysis are anything but dull. Her nimble prose, mordant observations, penetrating comments, and unerring sense for the absurd as well as the poignant, make In the Mind Fields a deeply engaging book about a fascinating new discipline.” —Siri Hustvedt, author of The Shaking Woman 
 

From the Publisher

07/01/2015
Somewhere along her journey to discover the seemingly opposite worlds of neuroscience and psychoanalysis, a colleague asks Schwartz, "What exactly is your book about?" She is hesitant to answer in that moment, and yet the journalistic tour of her studies gives the reader a definitive picture of just how these disciplines are undeniably joined. Schwartz travels to the Anna Freud Centre in London, learning about the beginnings of Freudian psychoanalysis, before traveling to Africa, Canada, and landing in New Haven, CT, at Yale University to research the happenings in neuroscience. Her story acts almost as a brain travelog, oscillating between a search for understanding and meaning in ever-elusive ephemera and hard science. Her tireless quest results in the argument that moving forward, psychiatry will meld both psychoanalysis and neuroscience to better understand the brain. VERDICT The journey presented in this sharp narrative makes somewhat lofty topics accessible as seems to be a trend in modern science writing. Ultimately, the author's knowledge gives those interested in brain studies and the process of thought an exciting case study of sorts. Schwartz engages the reader with humorous stories of the leading professionals she encounters, providing a thorough, thoughtful account.—Kaitlin Connors, Virginia Beach P.L.

Library Journal

2015-05-13
Can psychoanalysis and neuroscience, each with its own distinct methods, one subjective, one objective, make peace with one another? Can the mind be understood by looking closely into the brain? Writing of the struggle to "bring some of the old ideas about the mind into the new landscape of the brain, journalist Schwartz has the background to explore these questions: a master's degree course combining psychoanalysis, taught the first year at the Anna Freud Centre in London, and neuroscience, taught the following year at Yale. After a bow to Freud and his followers, Schwartz focuses on two men: Mark Solms, both a psychoanalyst and a neurosurgeon, coiner of the term "neuropsychoanalysis," translator of Freud, and founder of the International Neuropsychoanalysis Society; and David Silvers, not a psychiatrist but a practicing analyst, who has as a patient an aphasic stroke victim—i.e., a man who has lost the ability to speak. Schwartz follows Solms' working and writing lives and includes some fascinating stories about his experiences and those of others working with brain-damaged men and women. She then connects with Silvers, who has been treating a man seemingly unreachable by psychoanalytic technique, a man whose case seems to offer the possibility of a bridge between psychoanalytic ideas and neuroscientific ones. Though the author did not meet the patient, Silvers allowed her to become familiar with him by reading the case notes and listening to his taped reports to colleagues. It is clear that Silvers and his patient connected in some way and that a relationship was established between them, but whether analysis took place is, in the end, debatable. Schwartz does not provide all the answers, but her highly readable report raises intriguing questions about the limitations and the futures of both psychoanalysis and neuroscience.

Kirkus Reviews