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Led by Eileen Dunn, a seasoned clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, The Art of Listening explores the transformative power within the space between speaker and listener. Join us and our guests on this collective journey of self-discovery, as we navigate the depths of human connection and the power of listening.
Mark: [00:00:02] This business of conveying what's on my mind to another mind, and of trying to ascertain what's going on in another mind, is not something that requires words. We need to recognize that verbal communication is something that overlays these other ways of communicating. Listening is not only about cerebral, intellectual, logical, grammatical things, but also about much more basic things.
Eileen: [00:00:39] I'm Eileen Dunn, and this is the Art of listening, a podcast that delves into the incomparable power of human connection and the magic of good depth talk therapy. Joining us today is Mark Somse. What do words do for us? It's a simple question, yet one I have revisited many times in many ways while making this series. Because in podcasting, as in the practice of psychotherapy, our work is all about language. Its ideas aligned minute after minute to tangled in conversation. Words rolling off the tongue. Hesitant or bold. Striking and foreign at first and then settling in as they are registered. Language is how we express ourselves, precisely communicating who we are with nuance. It's how we connect with others and piece together the truth. But then there's the other side of the coin. Our words can take on a life of their own. They can obscure what lies behind them, drown us in detail, confuse us dressed in costume, and keep us wondering, if not completely lost, what the heck is really going on here? Listening well means listening with and beyond the words to recognize what drives us. My guest today has taught me how to think differently about the power and the limits of our words alone, with a clarity of mind, an unfettered commitment, and a child like sense of daring that I so admire. He has cut through the complexities of consciousness to show what lies beneath our language, and it's really something simple.
Mark: [00:02:48] For me, the first person perspective is literally constituted by feelings, by which I mean the parts of the brain that generate raw feeling. If they are damaged, then the lights go out, all the lights go out from the bottom to the top. So I think feelings bring subjects about.
Eileen: [00:03:09] You may have already recognized Mark Somse. Really? He needs no introduction. And I'm thrilled, privileged and honored to speak with him today. As a psychoanalyst and a neuropsychologist, Mark has accomplished something rare. He has reconciled the study of the brain with the study of the psyche going beyond party lines. He has brought together two opposing disciplines and built a new approach neuro psychoanalysis. This has made him a force to be reckoned with. Over the last 40 years, Mark has become a true inspiration of mine and for our field on both sides of the divide. His work reveals how we know who we are. He has investigated the inner workings of the brain. From the study of dreams to the hard question of consciousness. His most recent book, The Hidden Spring, recounts his journey personally and intellectually from the existential catastrophe he experienced as a four year old, to the kindred thinkers he discovered along the way, and his unmistakable findings as a pioneering contributor. Our conversation today begins with a personal moment. Where Mark shares how he lost his brother. And came face to face with the fragility of personhood. Then we tap into the power of neuropsychoanalysis. We find out how a better understanding of the brain can enhance therapeutic practice, and learn to place the objective and the subjective side by side. Joining the dots between the physicality of the brain and the peculiar feeling of being alive.
Eileen: [00:05:08] In other words, we discuss the strange experience of consciousness and Mark shows us that listening has everything to do with it. So while you listen, I would love for you to consider the following questions. In your experience, what is the quality that defines your conscious life? Is it the monologue like always on thinking that narrates your day to day? Is it the feelings you carry with you in new situations? What makes you you in this way that only your mind can know. Think about it. And once you know, please share it with us. And now let us welcome Mark Solms. He is a psychoanalyst, a neuroscientist, a consciousness researcher, and a professor at the University of Cape Town. He co-founded the Neuropsychoanalysis Association in 1999, and has been a leading voice in the field ever since. He has authored several important books like The Hidden Spring A journey to the Source of Consciousness. In more ways than one. Mark is a master of his craft, the perfect guest with whom to conclude this series, if I dare say it myself. His contribution is truly special. And I know you'll enjoy it. So I want to ask you first, if I may. I know you've told it plenty of times, but could you tell the experience that you had with your brother Lee?
Mark: [00:06:53] We were very good friends, my brother and I. He was a couple of years older than me, and one day we were at a yacht club. Our parents were yachting, and my brother clambered up onto a roof of the clubhouse, which was quite a steep slope. So he climbed on at the back and then climbed up the slope of the roof, and then tripped on the other side and fell down roughly three floors onto his head on the concrete paving below. And the result of that was a fractured skull and a bleed inside of his skull, which required emergency intervention. We lived in a small town. So he was flown to Cape Town. Bizarrely, he was flown to the very hospital that I now work in, in the very building that I now work in, which is where the neurosurgery department was housed. Wow. And there he was treated, and he stayed for quite a while while they stabilized him. And of course, it saved his life. But when he came back, although he looked like the same guy, apart from the fact that he had to wear a helmet to protect his skull. This was my brother. Lee was his name, but he was not the same person he had regressed in terms of his developmental milestones. I mean, even in terms of, for example, continents. But he just was noticeably, you know, not the same person. It was very disturbing to me because, of course, although you and I can easily understand, you know, you suffer brain damage, it's going to affect your personality and your intelligence. A four year old doesn't understand that.
Mark: [00:08:39] And the thing I emphasize, although again, it's perfectly from an adult point of view, perfectly understandable. The thing that I found so incomprehensible was how could he look the same? In other words, outwardly he is clearly Lee, but in terms of his personality and his behavior, his way of being, his way of relating, he was like another person. And I found that sort of uncanny. And initially I think I was just confused. It must have been explained to me, I suppose. But gradually I came to understand that this was because his brain was damaged. That's why he was a different person. And, um, that made me realize that somehow this thing inside your head called your brain, you know, is you, that an organ in your body is somehow what makes you the person that you are. And rather than being fascinated by that, I was horrified by that, because I remember even looking at an encyclopaedia of my parents and looking at a sort of a plate, an anatomical internal anatomy of the human body, and thinking inside my head is a thing like that, too. And if mine were to be damaged, I would not be me. I would be a different person. And then somehow that generalized to an understanding of mortality that somehow, if you are your body and your body can be damaged and ultimately it dies, then you disappear with with your body. And that I found deeply alarming and ultimately just depressing, because I was left with the thought that if that's going to happen, that there's no point in doing anything because you know you're going to die, you're going to disappear.
Mark: [00:10:24] So it went from the initial despair and confusion about what had happened to my brother, to thoughts also about generalizing from him to myself. So the depression was was twofold. It was the loss of my brother and also this kind of nihilism that it engendered in me. Ultimately, um, I have no doubt that that incident is what ultimately motivated me. Not as if I decided there and then, but I'm sure it's what motivated me to do what I did, not only to become interested in the brain scientifically, but also to become interested in it clinically. Because I was left with a I mean, I'm now fast forwarding over the years, and my brother did very badly at school, for obvious reasons. I did well, you know, I was a clever kid. And, you know, you try to do well and you expect when you come home that you will get praise for it. But it was in my family, a very fraught situation. Every time I did well, it caused my brother pain, caused tension in the family, and I started to understand that and started to feel guilty. And I think that that conflict between, on the one hand, my own ambition to do well and on the other hand, a desire not to hurt my brother. The way that I resolved that was by taking. Exactly the path that I did, that if I did well in a field that helped people like my brother, then it wasn't such a bad thing to do. Well.
Eileen: [00:11:52] There's so much in that ambition and also guilt. You're answering the question, what made you pursue both science and psychology? What made that combo so compelling that even when you got into your neuropsych studies, at that time in our world that was leaning toward the objective, the science, and away from subjectivity, what made it so compelling for you to pursue a path that insisted on privileging the subjectivity and not just the objectivity?
Mark: [00:12:28] Yeah, that uncanny fact that my brother as a person somehow was also this organ, this bodily organ. That's the obvious starting point. The personhood of the body and the relationship between these two, the subjective being of the mind and the objective thing that is the body. And ultimately, it's not the whole body, it's the brain. It's the the brain that represents the rest of the body in its various ways. So the brain is, you know, the most interesting thing imaginable, quite apart from what had prompted me to to be interested in that relationship, I think it just is really interesting and really important to fathom how these two things relate to each other. However, when I got to graduate school, it quickly became apparent to me that despite the fact that this is the most interesting thing about the brain, my professors were not interested in talking about that. It was not proper science to speak about the being of the brain and, and subjectivity and and why do we actually feel like anything at all? You know, I was learning about memory and language and all of the things that neuropsychologists learn about and the mechanisms underlying those different aspects of cognition.
Mark: [00:13:47] But questions like, but why does one have a memory? Not in the sense of the function called memory, but the actual having of a reminiscence, the actual conjuring up in your mind of a reliving of an experience? Why does that happen, and how does that happen? Those kinds of questions. I was literally told not to ask questions like that. And in so many words, it's bad for your career to ask questions like that. So I was being I don't think I'm alone in having been interested in the brain for for the reasons of the mysteries that I'm talking about. But I think what was different about me from most of my peers is that I wasn't willing to have that sense of wonder beaten out of me. And, you know, turning myself into a cognitive neuroscientist who's interested only in these cognitive mechanisms rather than the subjective experience of being a mind. That was not only why I wanted to, it was also why I needed to. I needed to understand those things because of my childhood experiences.
Eileen: [00:14:55] What is the fabric of our conscious experience? How do we explain what it's like to really be us, really be there? And crucially, can it change? These are the questions that resonated with Mark throughout his childhood and early studies. In neuroscience alone. He couldn't find the answers, so he left the beaten path. He continued his research and started investigating consciousness, which brought him to the study of dreams. And that's how he started to hover closer and closer. To psychoanalysis.
Mark: [00:15:48] To the absolute horror of my professors and colleagues. After graduating, I decided to to train in psychoanalysis. The reason I did that was twofold. The one was that my first research that I did was on brain mechanisms of sleep and dreaming, and why I did that was because it was the only aspect of consciousness that was considered a respectable subject those days. In other words, the sleep waking cycle, that kind of quantitative level of consciousness as opposed to its contents was a respectable topic, and I managed to sneak dreaming in because of the fact that it's rather extraordinary that in the unconsciousness of sleep, there are these moments of conscious experience that intrude. But in doing that research, my first research in the late 80s and early 90s, I came upon a discovery, just by good fortune, that the brain mechanisms of dreaming are different from those for REM sleep. And although dreaming and REM sleep happen simultaneously, they actually have two separate mechanisms and the mechanism that drives the dream. It's a dopamine circuit that the name of which says it all. It's widely known as the brain reward system. It's also known as the wanting system or the seeking system. It's the kind of system that you might expect would be involved in dreams if you were Sigmund Freud, because this was Freud's big idea. You know that behind dreams, despite appearances, there seems to be a powerful, positive motivational urge, a sort of a desire.
Mark: [00:17:21] And that seemed so counterintuitive to stumble upon. This accidentally in my own research, made me take a second look at Freud and Freud's dream theory. But the other reason was because Freud tried to bring subjective experience into science. That was the whole idea for Freud experience. What he called psychical reality was just another part of nature. And there must be some way in which natural science can study, experience and can analyze it to get to the name psychoanalysis. That was the whole idea. It must be possible to reduce experience to to some sort of regularities. There must be some sort of order behind all of this that explains why we are the way we are. So that seemed to me the very opposite of what I'd learned from my neuroscience professors. And so I thought, well, let me jump to that side and then bring into neuroscience what psychoanalysis might be able to teach us about that aspect of of our being. And that's exactly what I did. Although once you build a bridge like that between those two disciplines, it's a two way street. And so it also meant that I would be able to bring into psychoanalysis what we've been able to learn from the neuroscience point of view. And so that's what I've ended up doing the next, uh, 35 years or whatever it was.
Eileen: [00:18:47] And, you know, just to touch on that, is there any way that you could share a little a moment of aha that you had on the analytic experience side of that fence, like what it was like to be an analysis?
Mark: [00:19:02] It is an extraordinary experience to be in analysis. I was in analysis five times a week for nine years, so I really got to know myself inside out. It's impossible to even begin to enumerate the many, many major things that I learned. But I suppose the first and obvious one is to learn how much of yourself is not transparent to yourself. You know, to to really discover by personal experience how much of what determines your way of being and way of acting, your personality, your relationships, your choices? How much of that is outside of your conscious knowledge and outside of your conscious control is a real shocker to recognize the truth of that. The other thing, again, I'm saying things which are very obvious, but to realize how long are the shadows that are cast by childhood experience, to discover this truism in your own case, to see how, to what extent early experiences made you the way that you are and the extent to which you're living in your present adult world on the model of that past childhood world, you know that you're transferring your childhood solutions and overgeneralizing them. You keep on rediscovering the same scenarios as shaped you in childhood, and to not only recognize that, but then to be freed of that. It's this is a major reason why psychoanalysis is so helpful, is that you don't realize how much you're doing on autopilot, and that therefore you have no voluntary control over to to gain control over your own mental house is a wonderful thing. But of course, what one realizes most of. In psychoanalysis is how everything that you do is governed ultimately by feelings that the whole of mental life is trying to make things go better for yourself emotionally and trying to avoid unpleasant emotions. And I know that that's again, something completely obvious. But when you've been trained as a cognitive neuroscientist to learn, gosh, all of this cognition is in the service of regulating your emotional life is an important piece of knowledge, especially if gained by insight. In other words, the conviction is so much deeper when you recognize the truth of it in your own life.
Eileen: [00:21:28] I mean, just to say the word listening again. When I think of my experience in analysis, it was something of. That's why I guess the title of this podcast comes from that experience, like, whoa, wait a minute, I'm hearing myself differently because I feel like I'm being listened to differently. Is that a way to say what you experienced as well?
Mark: [00:21:48] Yes, absolutely. I also want to just say that I really love the title. This is a great title that you've come up with, the Art of listening. Fantastic. But of course, the beginnings of my analysis were a little bit difficult because I really tried to take seriously this fundamental rule that you must say everything without reservation that occurs to you. And of course, you know, if you really do do that, you quickly start saying things that get you into muddy waters. You start feeling very awkward and very embarrassed and sort of apologizing for what you're saying and reminding your analyst that you had been instructed. And I don't really mean it. Well, actually, of course I do mean it. But I mean, I wouldn't have said it, you know, and so on. And so I was rapidly thrown into all of the ambivalences that I had toward my father were rapidly relived with my analyst, who was a wonderful man. But, you know, I couldn't help myself.
Eileen: [00:22:56] I love Mark's take on free association because it's true. Speaking freely without censoring ourselves can unveil new sides of who we are. But more than anything, it's a device for experimentation and play. A device for a discovery. As Mark was saying, psychoanalysis shows us that we are not fully transparent to ourselves. We can sense who we are, but we don't always know what we feel and why. So speaking without inhibition, it's a way to try. Expressing our thoughts and feelings for the very first time is like like learning a new language. In the beginning, you don't put words in the correct order. Pronunciation is a minefield. You get most things wrong. But when you give things a go, you can feel what works and what isn't a good fit. And with time you learn to say what you mean with accuracy. All it takes is a willingness to try and to believe. This intent to experiment is the cornerstone of Mark's career. It's what led him head first into a new type of clinical practice at the very junction of neuroscience and psychoanalysis. I love how you said your experiences on both sides of the fence, the neuro and the psychoanalysis came to feel vital and you worked to make a connection between the two. So much to make a new discipline, I want to call it right.
Mark: [00:24:44] So I told you why I started, first of all, studying brain mechanisms of sleep and dreaming. But obviously that is also one of the foundation stones of psychoanalysis. So if you're studying the brain mechanisms of dreaming, you're studying the brain mechanisms that correlate with the most fundamental aspects of psychoanalytic theory. And what I did next was to take into psychoanalytic therapy neurological patients, patients with damage to different parts of their brain. And you can see the link between this and my brother, of course, I wanted to study the way in which personality is changed by damage to different parts of the brain, but I didn't want to study it behaviorally or, you know, come up with some sort of listing of objective symptoms and signs and so on, or some kind of typology of personality factors. I wanted to capture this. What is it like to be somebody who has no hippocampi, or who has lost a significant part of their right hemisphere, or their frontal lobes or whatever? So that's the sort of thing that I was doing in the 1990s. And I trained in London, and most British psychoanalysts were as wary of neuroscience as my neuroscientific professors had been wary of psychoanalysis. So I couldn't really talk to my British peers about these things that I was observing in my clinical work with the neurological patients. But I found a more receptive ear in America, and I think this probably was a carry over from the old.
Mark: [00:26:27] The situation in America used to be that only psychiatrists, only medically qualified professionals, were allowed to train in psychoanalysis. So I think there was a little bit less unfamiliarity with things neurological in America than there was in Britain. And so I went regularly to New York once a month to talk with like minded colleagues. There we started having intensive and fascinating discussions about the cases that I was presenting to them. And then we started realizing that there were people outside of New York who were interested in this and people outside of the United States. And so we decided we'd start a journal to be able to communicate with each other. And that journal needed a title. And so that's where the word neuropsychoanalysis occurred to me. I thought, you know, there's neuropsychology, but what we're doing here is not neuropsychology, because psychology meant cognition and psychology meant behavior and cognition. And I wanted to make clear that what we were doing was about the inner world of the mind. And so so that's why we called it neuropsychoanalysis. So the word was invented in 1998. The journal came out in 1999. In 2000, we had our first Congress and we started a an international Neuropsychoanalysis society. We called it Neuropsychoanalysis. It was the name of a journal, but it ended up becoming the name of a sort of interdisciplinary endeavor altogether.
Eileen: [00:27:55] That lives on.
Mark: [00:27:57] Yes, yes. The first Congress was in London at the Royal College of Surgeons. The keynote speakers were Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio and Jaak Panksepp, who became a very dear friend of mine and close collaborator. And we've had it in a different city around the world every year.
Eileen: [00:28:17] Ever since you've had good playmates, I'm thinking I appreciated the dedication of Hidden Spring to Jaak Panksepp. Yes, yes, his name and the way you said Oliver Sacks. What did Oliver Sacks, uh, made a statement about the psyche.
Mark: [00:28:33] Yes it was. He wrote a book in 1984 called A Leg. To stand on that book really impressed me. And one particular passage in it, he said neuropsychology is admirable, but it excludes the psyche. And I thought that's exactly how, because remember, this was 1984 when I was training, and it was exactly what I was experiencing, he said. It excludes the subjective living eye, you know, the me, the subject of the mind, the essence of what we mean by the psyche. And to say that neuropsychology excludes the psyche, you know, is quite a statement. So I started a correspondence with him and, uh, he too, of course, is no longer with us. I miss him and York.
Eileen: [00:29:18] Well, there's something very mischievous and dedicated and something about the refusal to go with. The program that, you know, gives you the courage and the determination. I know you've said it was your own emotional need, really, to make sense of your life in a way to reconcile things within you. But it's really something to stand out of the pack and to say, listen, this question really matters. Yeah. And so much so that I'm going to make it my leader and to to stay on that path.
Mark: [00:29:49] I don't regret it for a moment. I don't know why anybody does anything else.
Eileen: [00:29:54] I really appreciate it. Let me ask you this. How does reconciling neuroscience and psychoanalysis put us in a better position to listen to our patients and ourselves and understand them, really understand them?
Mark: [00:30:09] Well, there are many ways in which it does. Starting with the most rudimentary. Let's take the example of dreams. You know, as I discovered from a neuroscientific point of view, dreams really are motivated mental states. They really do tell us something about what matters to the dreamer. It made me more confident about listening to dreams with the assumption that they were revealing something important about the emotional life and motives of the patient. Now, I can generalize from that and say that as I have grounded psychoanalytical theory in neuroscience, so I have come to have more confidence in the theoretical assumptions that underlie my clinical practice. And of course, it's not just been a matter of confirming psychoanalytical theoretical notions. It's also been a matter of correcting some of them. And clinical practice is, after all, just the application of theoretical knowledge. It's the turning of what you've learned as a scientist into interventions, as a practitioner. And then I could go further and tell you that understanding the basic mechanisms of motivation and and emotion, what we've learned in affective neuroscience, I think, is of fundamental importance to the practice of psychoanalysis. You know, Freud had what he called drive theory, in which he so emphasized what he called the libidinal drives. You know, the sexual drives in his very broadened conception of what that word denotes. But we've learned a hell of a lot more about what the fundamental emotional forces of the mind are from the viewpoint of affective neuroscience. And so I listen to the feelings of my psychoanalytical patients through a very different lens from that of Freudian drive theory, or Freudian ways of understanding what the fundamental motive forces are.
Eileen: [00:32:19] The thing with Mark is he is unafraid to step in and contradict the masters. You hear it, right? He questions Freud. He also respects him, and the best he could do with the tools of his day. But. But he questions Freud. He refuses to ignore what makes things hard. Instead, he tests out the theories without judgement or self-righteousness. It's a posture I so admire. In this sense, Marx research stems from an appreciation for what came before. In cognitive science and psychoanalysis, he acknowledges his foundations so as to continue building on and on. What struck me was thinking about how did you say it? First order. Second order, third order. Consciousness from brain stem up to self-reflection. I was thinking, it seems to me like we've lived in the world, starting with self-reflection or the third person point of view, and that you've taken us back to what reversed the order. Is that a way to say it?
Mark: [00:33:39] Yes. I think that when neuroscience finally did start taking seriously consciousness, and that was only in the 1990s, I mean, it's really very recent. Let me mention, for example, the book by Francis Crick, which was entitled The Astonishing Hypothesis. That was 1994. And the astonishing hypothesis was, you know, that your consciousness can be reduced to, to brains, to the functions of the brain. And, um, when we started, we took as our kind of model example of what we mean by consciousness, um, the most complex form of it that there is, which is human cognitive consciousness, because that's what we experience. But humans are by no means the only creatures that are conscious. And the most basic form of consciousness in human beings, which we share with many other animals, is not this higher order, self-reflective cognitive awareness, but rather something far more basic, namely raw feelings? Uh, just feeling pain, feeling hunger, feeling rage, feeling sleepiness. You know, this is the simplest form of consciousness. And so if you want to make scientific progress, uh, in terms of understanding what consciousness is and how it works, then why not start with its simplest form? So. So that's what I've done. But it's not only because it's the simplest form and the most ancient form. It's also because the way that consciousness is organized in the brain. Actually, all of these higher order types of consciousness are predicated upon they are contingent upon the more basic felt affective consciousness, by which I mean the parts of the brain that generate raw feeling.
Mark: [00:35:29] If they are damaged, then the lights go out, all the lights go out and from the bottom to the top. Um, so I think it's for that reason also that we should start with feeling. So to come to the three level taxonomy that you just mentioned, I think that at the lowest level there is just feeling and in other words, an animal that just feels doesn't have to know I am an animal that is feeling and these feelings are mine and they mean the following. That's just feeling. Feeling just just compels the animal to behave in a certain way as it does us. Except we've got more built on top of that. Secondly, there's I feel like this about that. And so the feelings are are related to objects. They're objects then also become contents of consciousness. So it's feelings about percepts. And that's the second level. And then the third level is reflecting back upon this. It is me who is having this feeling about that. And I think that that maps in a kind of rough way onto third person, second person and first person perspectives. For me, the first person perspective is literally constituted by feelings. Feelings bring subjects about.
Eileen: [00:36:49] So, Mark, what is the danger of practicing psychoanalysis with insufficient understanding of or respect for that three level way of understanding?
Mark: [00:37:02] I think I would put it like this. First of all, I think psychoanalysts respect the primitive nature of the mind more than most other schools of psychotherapy do. It's not as if we psychoanalysts are free of that of that problem, but I think that we are less besotted with higher order cognition than many other psychotherapies and branches of psychology are. But, um, I also want to say that neuropsychoanalysis builds upon not only everything we've learned in the neurosciences, but also on everything we've learned in psychoanalysis. So it doesn't replace it, it builds upon it. It's a development of psychoanalysis. So, um, I don't want to give the impression that unless you're a neuro psychoanalyst, you're no good. I think there are many brilliant psychoanalysts who know nothing about the brain. But I do think, and I have to say this, even if it upsets some people, that I think that we would be better psychoanalysts if we knew more about the brain. I think it should be part of the training of psychoanalysts to know what the fundamental drivers. Forces are of the emotional life of human beings is pretty valuable knowledge. I say to my students, if you're young and you drink wine, it just tastes like wine. If you drink Chardonnay or Sauvignon blanc, they both taste like wine. They taste the same. Once you acquire a knowledge that these are the characteristics of Sauvignon blanc and these are the characteristics of Chardonnay, then you can't miss them. You would never confuse the two with each other. And it's the same with acquiring a better knowledge of what the component parts of mental life are, and how different mental constituents differ from each other. If you don't have an education about these things, then you know you might not notice the difference between the emotional equivalence of Chardonnay and Sauvignon blanc. You don't know what you don't know.
Eileen: [00:38:59] I was just going to say you don't know what you don't know. And you know what you've got me thinking is that there's just really a, I want to say, a properly creative tension between the objective and the subjective. You know, it's not just one or the other. It's about living with both and the tension between them and being in the learning and the growing together, and how to respect all sides of that equation. I love how you put it.
Mark: [00:39:23] I want to supplement.
Mark: [00:39:25] It by saying it's not only a matter of what do we gain in psychoanalysis by learning more about the objective side of things. It's also what is gained in the neurosciences by learning more about the subject of side of things. I think Neuropsychoanalysis has also made great efforts to educate neuroscientists about what we've learned in psychoanalysis and why it matters, and why it's important, important for neuroscience. And I like to believe that I have, um, persuaded a good many of my neuroscientific colleagues that psychoanalysis is something to be taken more seriously than it was previously by them.
Eileen: [00:40:10] So you see, psychoanalysis feeds neuroscience and neuroscience feeds psychoanalysis. This reciprocity, this learning from each other. This is what makes us better practitioners in our fields. Cognitive research invites us to revisit how we engage with patients in the space between understanding that emotions are at the wheel of our brain, driving us, actually, that we are rational only to make sense of how we feel. It means the words are a layer. They coat our psyche. They give meaning to what springs from that hidden place within us. And well, that brings us back to listening in a big way. In your view, what's going on within us and between us when we're speaking and listening? What is that, first of all, emotionally and the complexity of that? And what is it that helps us, that makes something happen in a unique way.
Mark: [00:41:28] Bearing in mind everything I've said about animals. Rather, we must remember that human consciousness is just one form of consciousness, and it's a highly complex development of consciousness. But it all starts with much more basic raw feelings, and these are not uniquely human things at all. So looking at our fellow mammals, the nonverbal ones, and seeing how they interact with each other without language, how do they come to know each other's minds? How do they read each other's minds? How do they outwit each other or seduce each other? You know, form alliances with each other? They're communicating without words. That's a very important starting point. It's to recognize that this business of conveying what's on my mind to another mind, and of trying to ascertain what's going on in another mind, so that I can relate to it in whatever way or form I need to, is not something that requires words. I think that we need to recognize that verbal communication is something that overlays these other ways of communicating. It doesn't replace them, it overlays them. It makes our ability to convey what's on our minds and to hear or to discern what is on the minds of others. I think it makes it far more precise than nuances and abstractions that become possible, that that are unimaginable without language. So this is the first thing I'm saying. We must remember that we don't only communicate by language, we don't only get to know each other by language, but language renders it all much more precise. But that said, the second thing I want to say is that words can also take on a life of their own, and we can get lost in the words and lost in the abstractions, and lose sight of the fact that ultimately these are elaborations of something much more basic, something much more personal, something much more heartfelt.
Mark: [00:43:36] And words can obscure what lies behind them and beneath them and beyond them. I think this is a very important part of psychoanalytic communication that the free association technique, for example, that we recognize, you know, it's not what's on the surface, it's what underpins all of that. What what is it that gives shape to the thoughts? What is it that's driving this particular line of thinking and speaking? And, you know, let us not forget that the human baby is a nonverbal animal, that we relate to babies and them to us, not through words. And that what we learned about our place in the world and our connection to each other when we were very, very little, is not encoded in words. And as I said earlier, the the long shadows that are cast over our lives by earliest experiences applies here too. And this is another thing that I think is so important that we take seriously in psychoanalysis. The connection between the verbal and the nonverbal is not just a matter of here and now. It's also a matter of the connection between our adult selves and our much more primitive selves that that didn't think in such a logical and conceptually precise way. We are very good at reintegrating the words with the feelings and not losing sight of the fact that communication and relationships listening is not only about cerebral, intellectual, logical, grammatical things, but also about much more basic things.
Eileen: [00:45:20] It's a thing of wonder, of magic. And yet it's simple all the same, to think that we emote and communicate with each other before we even know to do it. That the nature of us, what we're wired to do is to be together in interaction, playing well, and foraging, as Mark calls it, to take care of ourselves and make our way in the world. As our conversation comes to a close, I am reminded once more of the value of listening in this sense. It is the most essential thing, always at our fingertips. Mark Somse unveils this truth and so much more. He enlightens us on the strange reality of our own conscious experience. From brain to mind stem to psyche. From looking at the object to understanding the subject. Mark hops between neuroscience and psychoanalysis to show their common roots. Being conscious means feeling, being alive and experiencing emotions. It's about engaging with our environment. Feeling the bonds that tie us to our peers. Seeing the beauty in the world we call our own. Without it. As Mark says, all the lights go out. Consciousness is feelings. That's a biological fact and a lived experience. What a powerful conclusion. I am dazzled by Mark's ability to connect opposite views. I so appreciate his life work. It helps me with my own. I am moved by his bond with his peers, who also favored boldness to take on the creation of neuropsychoanalysis, and I am reminded above all, that the most eminent voices in our fields are those who dare to question, to follow their instinct, answer their lifelong calling, and push back to dig deeper.
Eileen: [00:47:42] I want to thank Mark for his achievement and for his generosity again today. The interviews he has given online are many. Yet I never tire of contemplating his thought. Mark's contribution was a perfect way to tie this collection together. I'll continue to draw on his wisdom long after this podcast series ends, and I trust you will too. This has been the art of listening. I'm your host, Eileen Dunn. And now it's my turn to ask and to answer the questions I have so enjoyed discussing with my guests. In the next and final episode, I will share with you my story from how I came into the field to the inspiration found along the way, and I will reflect on the lessons that were gifted to me in experience. Learning the art of listening. So please join us for our series finale. It's going to be something different, but very special to. I hope you'll love it. As you know, you can follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And remember, we'd love to read your thoughts on the show. So if you have a minute, leave us a review and let us know what you think it means more than you know and we'll see you next time.