Analogue

Analogue

Ideas about the unconscious unfolded over centuries through Shakespeare to William James and Schopenhauer climactically taking root in human consciousness through Freud in the early twentieth century. The idea was brilliant albeit deeply flawed. 

The idea is simple; that there is more to us humans and the self than meets the eye, more than we can ordinarily apprehend or know in the ordinary course of our daily lives and that the unknown dimensions off the self, find their way to the surface and into the daily life of the person in all kinds of strange and devious ways. 

It is hard not to think that this is not simply another Christian ‘good and evil’ story dressed up in different Emperors clothes. 

 They took a simple and perfectly understandable idea, there is more to the human self than meets the eye and cast into an inflexible dualistic form and gave it an inflexible name, the unconscious, and then gave it some astonishing descriptors cast in metaphors that took on remarkable truth likenesses to the point where entire populations of people came to believe they were true. For example, comparing the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious to that of the body of an iceberg and the 10% of the iceberg that protrudes from the water. The name is not literally true. The name is an analogue. An analogue says that the name of the thing we are discussing is like something else. 

It’s interesting looking at ‘how to suicide’ sites which talk about shooting as a way of dying and a particular technique that destroys that part of the brain that harbours the self. Ideas about the unconscious predate developments in neuroscience that tell us that the self is located in a particular part of the brain.  

All a digression. Freud’s great discovery was not the unconscious, it was the creation of an analogue of the self that completely dominated the twentieth century and that was a spatial analogue-surface and deep that he cast into a non-spatial analogue-conscious and unconscious-and then recast it into another, superego, ego and id. A brilliant idea to use these analogues almost interchangeably and then lock them into position so that they became ‘literally’ true in the minds of so many people. 

 

The ‘Inside-Outside’ Metaphor

The ‘inside’ is the ‘outside’ and the ‘outside’ is the ‘inside’. The ‘inside-outside’ metaphor sits at the heart of the Bower Place Method. This refers to the neural loops and pathways ‘inside’ a person’s head and the relational world ‘outside’ a person’s head. This describes the totality of a person’s experience, the experience of their attached relational world or family and their experience of that relational world. The idea that the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’ are recursively contiguous, connected and coincidental is the central proposition around which this methodology is organised. The ‘outside’ shapes the ‘inside’ and the ‘inside’ comes to be a mirror of the ‘outside’. The ‘inside’ is our individual mind and cognition; the ‘outside’ is the mind and cognition of the relational world about us.  

Cognition is the way we think, reason, and understand the world. It is the way we perceive, intuit and become aware of ourselves. It is the way we make meaning out of our day to day experience of ourselves, relationships, events and the world about us.  

What is the distinction between cognition, brain, relationships and mind? 

Cognition is on the ‘inside’ of a person and on the ‘outside’ of a person. The recursive loops of interaction in the person’s attached relational world have the characteristics of mind as do the recursive neural loops of the brain.  

Mind is the link. 

What is the distinction between mind and brain? 

Cognition is social. Cognition is located ‘outside’ the person in the recursive loops of interaction that make up that person’s social and relational world. Cognition is individual. Cognition is located ‘inside’ in the recursive neural loops and pathways ‘inside’ a person’s brain. Individual cognition and social cognition are intimately connected with individual cognition contextualised by social cognition.  

The structure and differentiation of the human brain reflects this distinction. The generic ‘village’ of the individual is reflected in the structure and differentiation of the human brain. The structured and differentiated human brain is in response the generic village humans were required to live in and survive. Fragment the village and the brain and mind will almost certainly fracture in response. It is the rare individual who can survive protracted isolation and exile. Fracture the village and the mind will fracture with it.  

 

Tropes

A trope is the turning our neurobiology designs us for, to turn and twist, this way and that, with such dexterity that it is hard to imagine that tropism is not central to neural plasticity and this thing we call cognition. A trope is a figure in poetry, that harbour of the figure and figurative language, procreator of meaning. 

Kenneth Burke* distinguished metaphor, irony, synecdote (symbol) and metonymy as the four fundamental tropes, the figures, the turnings we engage in and with.  

Trope is not on the outside but of course it always is. Equally, trope is neurally arranged within, inside our brain, this brain we share with others.  

What is so significant about poetry? It captures ‘trope’, the turnings, in their purest form, allowing us to see. 

What do I believe in?  Beyond the superficial lays the deep and the deep. Much to the dismay of the many, it is perhaps no different in texture and taste to the surface, no more profound, with no more meaning except in the meaning associated with inaccessibility and the word ‘deep’, a turning, a trope. And of course, the deep that this trope offers is largely located in the past which of course is associated with depth and inaccessibility. But of course, the deep was once the superficial and that which is superficial in this moment is deep in the next; just as that which is present in this moment is a monument in the past in the next or another moment.  We are also neuro-biologically arranged for time and the metaphor, the symbol of time. 

What do I believe in? I believe in perfection; in the sheer beauty of all things; in Blake’s words, perhaps Blake. In the spontaneous beauty that life offers, love, happiness, peace, contentment and so on and so forth. 

I believe that love, happiness, peace, contentment and so on and so forth, the great virtues, are not possible in the present except in memory or fantasy or delusional form, unless we manage the downside of who we are, a simple duality maybe, a trope, a figure worth exploring for the moment before we turn and believe in it.   

 

Analogy

• Humans are uniquely neuro–biologically and socio-relationally arranged & organised for analogy 
• Analogy may be a fundamental characteristic of mind, an integral part of the human brain  along with the gut and the rest of the human nervous system 
• It is unlikely that we are the only species with this characteristic. I imagine most species, especially mammals, will have this arranged in some way 
•  We as humans are able to recognise and say that this something is like that something else 

• This something and that something else maybe literal or remembered, imagined or dreamt and do not need to be similar in form except in the imagination of the beholder 
• This is probably the primary function of the prefrontal cortex 
• Perhaps the most common likeness is between a literal something in the present tense compared with something remembered the past tense. 
• Everything literal is, in the next moment, analogy and this is the nature of memory 
• The literal and the analogy are recursively arranged each informing the other and possibly each inventing the other. It may be possible that the literal invents its own analogy and even more possible that the analogy invents the literal, that we can only see what we see through the lens of analogy 

• There is ample evidence that memory does exist, that it transcends the temporal, that it exists as some form of trans- figuration of the past tense into the present tense returning to the past tense, recursively. That memory itself is subject to transformation 
• This probably means that there is no unconscious, and that the idea of the unconscious is entirely analogic just as the idea of God may be an analogy. 
• In the interests of parsimony all that needs to be said about this subject is that we as humans do it, we compare one thing to another across time and space and we tend to confuse the things we are comparing as if they are literally true. Of course they are not. 
• Analogy is central to human cognition, analogy is how we think. Stripped of analogy we are unable to think 
• Analogy is collective and individual as is cognition 

• Mathematics, music and stories are all analogies 
• A chair can be written as a set of numbers in some form of functional equation. Those numbers are not the chair they are an analogy of or for the chair. You can sit in the chair but you cannot sit in the numbers as far as we know at this point in our development although this may change 
• Why is this important? Everything we translate and transact in therapy is premised upon our extraordinary ability to straddle the literal and the analogic in one moment and remain in command of the distinction and to work that distinction in a way that is flexible and fertile for the client(s). It is fair to say that people possessed by problems collapse the literal and the analogic into each other in some form of fatal conflation. The therapist must be in full command of the analogic nature of the therapeutic process and the content of therapy.