Jerry Adler, "Erasing Painful Memories," in Scientific American, May, 2012, at p. 56.
Benedict Carey, "Paralyzed, Moving a Robot With Their Minds," in The New York Times, May 17, 2012, at p. A17.
Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984).
Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
This essay was posted several times at Google Groups in an effort to protect the text from inserted "errors" and other attempts to destroy it. It is not my intention to embarass "Jerry Adler" who may also be "Larissa MacFarquhar" and/or "Jim Holt." Nevertheless, the assumptions made in this essay in Scientific American are deeply mistaken and, with all due respect, offensive to basic human dignity. I feel an obligation to respond to this author. ("The Mind/Body Problem and Freedom" and "Incoherence in The New Yorker.")
No italics or bold script are available to me after the alterations of my blogger dashboard. It is a small miracle that I am able to post this essay here -- if I succeed in doing so. Cybercrime and alterations of texts are always expected. Interruptions in my writing efforts are also anticipated. I have chosen not to place titles in quotation marks despite lacking italics. I regret the circumstances under which this work is written. I will try to make corrections of "errors" that continue to be inserted in the text.
I.
Among the errors committed by purported brain scientists is "category mistakes" (Gilbert Ryle) concerning the nature of memory. Deleting or removing painful memories is probably an impossible or absurd goal for scientists to pursue. Worse, it may be idiotic, psychologically and morally, even to attempt such a thing. (See my forthcoming essay "'Total Recall': A Movie Review" and "'Unknown': A Movie Review.")
Memory altreration is likely to be a harmful practice for persons to attempt or engage in, particularly for those lacking a sophisticated understanding of the workings of memory or the mind, consciousness, or the development of identity as an unfolding or interpretation of memories over time. To remove a hurtful memory -- a memory which may be meaningful or happy at the same time! -- is to damage or diminish identity. ("Is it Art?" and "Bernard Williams and Identity.")
Reacting to the latest bundle of confusions on this issue, I am struck by three objections to this project of removing painful memories: Several assumptions are shared by those engaged in the effort to "alter minds." For the sake of brevity I will ignore technical distinctions in philosophy or social theory relevant to this analysis. I will assume, for the purposes of this discussion, that readers are familiar with the necessary distinctions among humanists as well as scientists. (See my forthcoming essay "What is Memory?" and "John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness" then, again, "The Mind/Body Problem and Freedom.")
The first objection focuses on the conceptual confusions surrounding memory and memories. The concept of memory is not defined in Mr. Adler's discussion and analysis, nor is any effort made to accomodate the literature on the role of memory in mental life from Wittgenstein and Freud to Anscombe and Gardner, Bergson and Ricoeur.
Tensions in psychological, neurological, philosophical understandings of memory relevant to what, allegedly, can be removed from recollection -- to say nothing about how we should go about doing so -- are ignored by Mr. Adler. Perhaps Mr. Adler's assumed name was inspired by Alfred Adler who would have been horrified at the suggestion that ANY painful memory should be "removed."
Psychoanalysis seeks not the removal of painful memories, but exactly the opposite: Where there is suppression, the analysand and analyst struggle to bring the light of conscious AWARENESS to what is denied conscious existence in order to begin healing. This process can never take place with an analyst serving a mixed agenda or, say, the state rather than the subject of analysis.
The pain associated with traumatic recollections must be, simultaneously, accepted and rejected in the effort of "transcendence through archetypal displacement" recommended by Carl Jung and R.D. Laing. Hence, the importance of art and the shadow puppetry of cinema, for example, as a means of redeeming repressed memories. ("'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
A single painful memory cannot, as a practical matter, be isolated from other memories (painful or not), good or bad, nor from the values and shaping influences that determine or create character as a product of our choices within constraints. Indeed, we are often forced to choose within insurmountable and tragic constraints in order to remember so as to become the persons we are. (See William Styron's "Sophie's Choice" and John Fowles' "The Magus.")
Existentialist psychologists (Karl Jaspers, Rollo May) and Jungians (Judith Singer, Marie Luise Von Franz) will be helpful on these issues. ("Derek Parfit's Ethics" and "What is Enlightenment?")
The mind is like a system. Memory is akin to an eternal process in that system. A single memory may impact on the entirety of the psychic system or self, especially when it is traumatic or important -- sometimes for joyful reasons -- setting in motion a network of associations that are affective and temporal. A crucial memory cannot be isolated -- like a marble -- in a specific corner of the non-material entity that is the mind as distinct from the brain making that mind possible. ("Consciousness and Computers" and "Mind and Machine.")
This is NOT to deny in any way, the necessity of the brain working properly to the mind's healthy existence and functioning, as I readily acknowledge -- including cerebral or biochemical processes to the powers of recollection -- but it is to insist that the brain is not alone sufficient to UNDERSTAND memory, nor is the mind or memory reducible to cerebral chemical functions. Language and social-cultural functions -- for example, boundary questions -- are crucial to both mind and memory. ("The Entanglements Are Primary" and, again, see my forthcoming essay: "What is Memory?" Specifically, the discussion of "representational theories" of memory is recommended.)
Removal of a painful memory, therefore, may result in severe and unexpected harm to all aspects of the affected psyche, notably to the formulation of an integrated or unified identity or self. The personality of a victim of such an invasion may disintegrate. ("'The Adjustment Bureau': A Movie Review" and "'Unknown': A Movie Review.")
Blunders and lack of clarity concerning what is at issue in the attempt to biochemically (drugs) or, insanely, SURGICALLY (yes, this has been suggested quite seriously!), worse is behavioristically, to remove memories of traumatic events in a person's life result from an archaic, if persistent, logical atomism or positivism and reductivism as well as materialism among some alleged brain scientists unable to transition to a new scientific paradigm in biology and elsewhere. For example, a scientific paradigm emerging in chemistry and physics, also linguistics and hermeneutic theory, brain science, too -- sees cerebral functioning and mental life even more so -- as "integrative and holistic" systems that are mutually dependent. In other words, "narratives." ("Ted Hondereich Says: 'You Are Not Free!'")
Current scientific thinking in terms of networks and holograms sees memory as INTEGRATIVE in identity-formation and -preservation. This connective essence of memory suggests that removal of memories may be like pulling on a thread that unravels a fine cloth -- until there is nothing left of the cloth. The "cloth" being the delicate matter of the self. ("'Dark Shadows': A Movie Review.")
Each memory is colored with affect or meaning -- again, this is especially true of traumatic memory -- impacting on all other recollections and powers of the psyche, or on the future capacity to recall anything in the afflicted person. Memory preservation and INTERPRETATION is always a present action (now) that is reactive to changing conditions as core elements of the self are conveyed into the future. The contrast between realist, critical realist, constructivist and hermeneutic theories of memory is unrecognized by Mr. Adler who simply fails to display expert knowledge on the subject of memory. (Martin Gardner and Howard Gardner should be quoted, Mr. Adler.)
I cannot explain how or why "Mr. Adler" has managed to place this essay in Scientific American. What is more, Mr. Adler seems to assume, unknowingly, CONFLICTING theories of memory in his discussion. ("The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem" then "Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
Richard Wollheim's "The Thread of Life" -- also Charles Rycroft and R.D. Laing -- may prove to be very helpful on these issues. I call the reader's attention to the early work of Dr. Laing in British army hospitals with victims of severe trauma and memory loss. The novels of Pat Barker are also highly recommended, especially "The Eye in the Door" and the works of Aldous Huxley. Much recent scholarship in the archives of neurology and psychology has focused on this issue of memory loss and recovery through "form" or narrativity. (Please see my short stories "The Soldier and the Ballerina" and "God is Texting Me!")
Sadly, I am unable to quote much of this scholarship due to space limitations and the usual harassments. I was unable to write at all yesterday due to obstructions. I suggest to therapists that they make use of cinema and literature in their efforts to assist persons seeking to recover memories after traumatic experiences. By discussing the actions of characters on stage or screen, in novels or drama, issues afflicting individual sufferers can be examined or modelled. In this way workable solutions to personal dilemmas can be found. ("R.D. Laing and Evil" then "Behaviorism is Evil.")
II.
A second objection to Mr. Adler's argument concerns the issue of respect for persons, autonomy rights and ethical constraints on experimentation which are treated disdainfully by this author.
Persons are not "rats on a carousel" whose minds may be violated without their consent as part of some ill-advised effort to remove or rearrange memories to test a crackpot theory of mind/brain identity. Persons are entitled to respect and privacy under the law and applicable ethical standards. ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System" and "Dehumanization.")
The most likely result of the sort of chemical brain alteration discussed by this author is severe HARM to victims. Perhaps this is what persons proposing such hideous experiments desire -- to damage persons for life. Psychoanalysis and psychology must not be used as "weapons" to harm persons.
Although this issue has been recognized by the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA), which condemns any and all cooperation by psychotherapists in torture or forced interrogation, American psychologists have deployed causistic methods and distinctions to make it very vague indeed whether or when a psychologist may assist government in torturing persons. Many American psychologists have assisted in such atrocities, both at home and elsewhere. ("American Doctors and Torture" and "Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?" then "An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli.")
Victimized persons may be destroyed, as persons, through alterations of brain chemistry. There are profound and pervasive effects from even well-intentioned (if badly understood) interventions in neurological networks. Mumia Abu-Jamal writes of witnessing the chemical lobotomization of inmates as a means of inmate control in America's prisons. "Behavioristic lobotomization" is also attempted in prisons and elsewhere. ("Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal" and "Justice for Mumia Abu-Jamal.")
The brain's ability to compensate in unsuspected ways for traumatic injury indicates that social-therapeutic, linguistic, and other factors -- physical and non-physical -- are involved in cerebral/mental life. It is also abundantly clear that physicians are still learning about the brain and hardly in a position to declare certainties about the consequences of experimental procedures. Under such circumstances, using human beings to learn "what will happen" is barbaric and evil. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "Behaviorism is Evil" then "Brian Greene and The Science of Memory.")
What we remember has much to do with our linguistic capacities, including the image-based and syntax-like connections between events recalled and meanings or interpretations associated with those events. A useful contrast for philosophers is provided by A.J. Ayer and Elizabeth Anscombe as against Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur as well as R.D. Laing and Jean-Paul Sartre. ("Out of the Past.")
Affect colors all memories and is related to the brain's healing powers that redefine the meanings of memories all the time, every day, through every act of recollection. ("'The English Patient': A Movie Review" and "'Unknown': A Movie Review.")
A reduction of memory to a single neurochemical state or process in a small region of the brain is ludricous as well as bad science. The suggestion is also philosophically incoherent and bad psychology. Compare Henri Bergson and Edmund Husserl with Ludwig Bingswanger and Michel Foucault for a different understanding of what is meant by "bioethics" in the context of therapeutic relations. (See Foucault's interest in the case of Ellen West as analyzed in James Miller's biography of Foucault.)
III.
A third objection to Mr. Adler's argument is the "psychological continuity" problem which suggests that painful memories -- whether desired or not -- may be essential to preserving relationships which are fundamental to survival for a person. Again: a memory may be both painful and happy or desired. For example, recalling the birth of a child by her mother or that same child's departure for college as remembered by her father.
To remove a painful memory from the mind -- something which may be impossible, even in theory -- would be like dimantling or interrupting the narrative of the self in time, as a "project of self-realization." ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")
The so-called "virtues" of character emerge from dialectical evolutions or interpretations in a moral direction that are only possible for individuals who decide on the meanings of their memories. All selfhood is about the realization of identity in time through form. By "form" is meant art or some other expressive endeavor -- like philosophy or science, law or medicine. (''In Time': A Movie Review" then "Shakespeare's Black Prince.")
Removal of memories may produce false consciousness or distorted recollections of the past leading to deformations of the psyche making any kind of self-realization or survival, for that matter, impossible. What we remember doing and how we judge our actions will determine possible developments of character:
"Any experience modifies consciousness. Be it subliminal or traumatic, there is no psychic or physical happening which does not alter the complex of our identity. [Hypnosis?] In the flux of the instantaneous, the impact, like that of the charged particles streaming through our planet, is infinitesimal and unperceived. But personal being is process; it is in perpetual change. ..." (Steiner, p. 25.)
Memory was described by the ancients as the "mother of the muses." The creation of art drawing on memories provides for the articulation of the ego. Accordingly, memory is the only possible mother of the self. By memory here is meant all recollections of what constitutes a life -- painful memories very much included. Perhaps painful memories are especially crucial to the making of art as well as identities. The fashioning of a self may be a work of art. (Nietzsche, Bradley, Kierkegaard.)
It is the things and persons whose recollection are most entangled in affective relations that we must treasure if we are to learn the meaning of the "stories that we are." (Gadamer, Ricoeur.)
No doubt the effort to prevent me from writing or speaking is about denying me the use of form for survival or self-realization in a "high-tech" torture chamber. ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "How censorship works in America.")
To prevent any human being from writing or creating art is to seek to destroy that person's inner meanings or expressive contents. Censorship negates the humanity of persons. Torture destroys that humanity. ("Censorship, Again?" then "How censorship works in America" and "Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")
The price in terms of emotional suffering for recollection of traumatic or painful memories may be very high, but we must choose the suffering in order to earn the meanings we desire for ourselves and our loved-ones, so that we may become the persons we are. ("Bernard Williams and Identity" then "Friedrich Nietzsche on Self-Realization.")
The pain from loss of persons we love, or from sharing in their sufferings, is part of the joy and intimacy we derive by loving them -- against the world if necessary. Evelyn Waugh suggests that to know and love one other human being is the beginning of all wisdom. ("The Allegory of the Cave" then "'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review" and "What is it like to be plagiarized?" and see "Shadowlands.")
For Plato -- and his admirer, St. Augustine -- memory is the repository of that fundamental emotional wisdom of humanity associated with the process of individual recollection, as when a baby "remembers" that the smiling face before her belongs to her parent, and social recollection, as in the writing of history. In this "fountain of recollections" at the center of the self we discover what Augustine called: "the divine in ourselves." ('''The Fountain': A Movie Review.")
I recall a Holocaust survivor and scholar making a similar point in urging students to "remember" the events of the Holocaust. As a college professor, he showed a film of the Holocaust that was very graphic because it depicted events in his own difficult life. The tears in his eyes were overcome by a sense of the importance of discussing and sharing his impressions of the historical events in which all of our lives are implicated. I believe that this is one of Tolstoy's most important lessons to his readers concerning the meaning of history and (for him) religious faith: "We must remember to remember."
Suffering "recalls" us to our humanity and to the deeper or shared sources of that humanity in culture or language. Far from wishing to forget the traumatic memory of his imprisonment, for example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn thanked God for the clarity of his remembered pain:
"All the writers who wrote about prison but did not themselves serve time there considered it their duty to express sympathy for prisoners and to curse prison. I ... have served time there. I nourished my soul there, [Nelson Mandela?] and I say without hesitation: BLESS YOU PRISON, for having been in my life."
The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper & Row, 1973-75), Vol. II, p. 615.
