A couple of weeks after my meeting with LeDoux, I go to Washington for the weekend. On the train down I skim back issues of "Shadow of the Bat," a spinoff of the original Batman comic book series. In them, a mad scientist called Jonathan Crane (aka "Scarecrow") experiments on people's fear reactions, turning them, with the help of Pavlovian fear-conditioning methods, into puppets ready to carry out his scheme to take over the city of Gotham. By releasing fear-gas in the city, he intends to turn its inhabitants into a population of wildly hallucinating, panic-stricken people ready to worship him as the "God of Fear." It's an entertaining read, reminding me a bit of the paranoid scenarios Rudy Giuliani likes to peddle to the citizens of New York City.
It also reminds me of the reasons for my interest in LeDoux's work. Having just ended six years of psychotherapy, I'm intrigued by his theories for a number of reasons. The central conflict between my therapist and me concerned my resistance to her efforts to get me to verbalize my feelings. We talked about dreams, but my abysmal failure to free associate, my doubts about the existence of my unconscious, weighed heavily on me. I invented emotions just to cut short the awkward silences that ensued when she'd ask me, for the millionth time, "Do you remember how you felt when your mother insisted that your whole family sleep in one bed in that B&B in Ireland?" I felt like a failure as a patient and wished for a simpler explanation of my "blocked" relation to my feelings.
In this respect, the notion of the amygdala has a lot to recommend it. It provides a simple, tidy model of the brain's primitive, reptilian core, very different from the old Freudian unconscious, which has a certain messy, amorphous quality. Unlike the idea of amygdala, the idea of the unconscious also provides a social theory about how humans interact. It oozes over its boundaries, showing up like an uninvited guest at the dinner table or in more programmed ways in comic books. It helps explain who we are culturally as well as psychically.
While in Washington I check out the Freud exhibit at the Library of Congress. I'm particularly interested in Freud's favorite images of the unconscious: a print of an excavation site in Rome; a popular child's toy called the mystic writing-pad (waxy paper from which written words were erased while traces were left in the soft tablet underneath); a small, exquisite statue of Athena, goddess of wisdom and warfare. It's obvious why Freud treasured this last piece. It speaks to one of his strongest beliefs, if one that, later in life, he seems to have harbored doubts about: that self-knowledge frees us from the grip of archaic impulses.
Freud's "talking cure", as he conceived of it, released patients from their traumatic memories, creating insight and awareness where previously there had only been darkness. But Freud's work rests on certain postulates now widely under attack. Does psychoanalysis still have anything to teach us about the obstinate irrationality of our minds? Can it truly help us gain insight into our feelings? Are we better off looking elsewhere?
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Back in New York, I ask LeDoux about his views on Freud. "My work is quite compatible with Freud's," he claims. Both drugs and the talking cure, he suggests, are equally valid ways of "rewiring the brain." On the other hand, LeDoux feels that Freud's concepts of repression and the unconscious don't stand up to scientific scrutiny. Unconscious processes do dominate mental life, though not for the reasons Freud believed: "They're unconscious not because they're repressed, but simply because they're not conscious." Consciousness -- that 10 percent slice of the psychic pie -- is, in a word, "un-unconsciousness."
LeDoux's model places powerful biological forces at the center of mental life. Indeed, his book makes it sound as though consciousness is little more than an appendage to these forces. It's somewhat incongruous, therefore, that he frequently illustrates his views with references -- as though this were unusual -- to the problems of the "neurotic" who suffers from "poor insight" into his feelings; to the poor soul who has a difficult time verbalizing his emotions, or who finds himself in a condition of emotional arousal without knowing why. These references seem ironic, given the powerful role he ascribes to the amygdala. A further incongruity comes in the closing pages of his book when he optimistically depicts a future of greater cortical control over amygdala-driven behavior. Hints of what this might mean come when he cites research suggesting that using drugs to block the production of adrenalin might help prevent the creation of traumatic memories among soldiers.
The therapeutic implications of LeDoux's work have already been explored by David Goldman, a Manhattan psychiatrist. Told that I'm writing an article for Salon, he enthusiastically endorses it as the "magazine of cortically active-amygdala-modifying progressives." Goldman has recommended LeDoux's book to some of his patients. Learning about the amygdala seems to help them objectify their anxieties and fears. By clueing patients in to the automatic nature of much of their mental life, it allows them to think about their problems in physical terms rather than as products of a runaway mind. Paradoxically, this discovery seems to ease their sense of hopelessness and guilt. "It helps them to think of automatic behavior in a more relative way," he explains. This is the first step toward insight.
All this makes sense to me. By physicalizing our mental life, LeDoux's work lifts some of the stigma of personal responsibility often associated with debilitating fears. Yet I can't help wondering about another aspect of LeDoux's work: its appeal to my desire for easier, simpler explanations. The danger of a certain reductivism seems to lurk within his model, especially insofar as it provides support for the new psycho-pharmaceutical contract between us and our feelings: We let medication take care of the dirty work, meanwhile cultivating that 10 percent of the mind accessible to consciousness.
Moreover, how realistic are the possibilities he envisions? It's nice to think of a world in which amygdala-driven behavior is controlled. But in a book otherwise dedicated to a hard-nosed view of the ineradicable forces dominating mental life, LeDoux's optimism seems like a false note, a sop to human vanity. If Freud has taught us nothing else, it's that our mental life is stubbornly irrational. The evidence of this is all around us, in the fear-gas scenarios of "Shadow of the Bat" and in the increasingly whacked out rhetoric of New York's mayor, to cite just two examples.
William James, that great 19th century spokesman for the civilizing process, probably never envisioned the possibilities of "Shadow of the Bat." This is where Freud comes in. For there can be no doubt about it, fear has become a strange thing in our modern world, severed from any simple evolutionary narrative. If evolution has freed most of us from an existence filled with real danger, it's delivered us into a world in which primitive impulses are kept on permanent overdrive by the fear-programming of mass culture or by fear-mongering politicians. We may well have more fears than we know what to do with, and medication may indeed help to control fear on an individual level. But fear proliferates in the cultural and political landscape; it's become ubiquitous, with entire industries devoted both to controlling it and to therapeutically detonating it.
Strangely, while I went to LeDoux looking for some sort of reassurance that my alienation from my feelings was not at all a sign of failure but rather perfectly normal, I now find myself worrying about what is lost and what gained in the paradigm shift from the unconscious to the amygdala. Ultimately, the price seems to be a kind of flattened mental landscape, in which fear is either the pathology of maladapted individuals or a condition that civilized society subjects to increasingly precise forms of prediction, control and exploitation. In either case, there seems to me to be little ground for optimism. On the other hand, I have to admit that I still like the idea of a pill that would make it possible for me to ask my mother for the salt without fear of interruption from my unconscious.
About the writer
Andreas Killen is a happily underemployed historian and new father living in New York. Any job offers should be forwarded to him care of Salon.
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