A new review is now up of ‘The God of the Left Hemisphere’ by Roderick Tweedy. This is an often inspiring exploration of the work of eighteenth century poet and artist William Blake in relation to the recent insights into the roles of the brain hemispheres developed by Iain McGilchrist and others. Click here to read the review.
I’ve been asked from time to time about psychic energy, which is an underlying concept that can be used to help understand repression, and thus helps to explain how absolutizing beliefs can create repression. The principle of ‘conservation of psychic energy’ in Jung, which I mentioned in Migglism, has particularly raised a few doubtful questions, so I thought it was worth a fuller discussion.
Psychic energy can be seen from one point of view as just physical energy in the brain. All our mental activity has to be driven by energy, in the form of glucose. When we start running out of glucose in the brain we tend to feel what psychologists call ‘ego depletion’ – it becomes harder to do anything effortful, like breaking a habit or understanding a new concept. Energy in the brain obviously comes from food processed by the body, and is part of a wider system of energy. Obviously in those wider terms, energy is not ‘conserved’ within the brain: it could be used up by the brain and turn into heat or motion which go elsewhere, without necessarily being replenished.
What Jung meant by ‘psychic energy’, however, is a particular subset of that wider physical energy. It’s the energy of our desires for particular goals, whether actual or potential. Those desires may take a conscious and immediate form where physical energy seems to be motivating us. Thus, for example, we may feel sexual desire for someone else, which motivates us towards sexual behaviour. However we can also feel that desire without acting on it, being aware that it is socially inappropriate to do so. Or we may not even be aware of the ways that such a desire is influencing us.
Such desires can gradually change their focus (for example, I might sublimate sexual desire into art). Desire, after all, is just energy, and energy can power all sorts of different processes. What we can’t do, however much we may desire it, is to instantaneously block psychic energy. If we do try to block it, it is liable to take a different form and re-emerge, just as when you try to dam the energy of a stream. It may flow somewhere else, or it may eventually flow around the blockage towards its original destination. The key thing I take from Jung’s idea of the ‘conservation of psychic energy’ is just that insight: that energy cannot be removed from the psyche at will – it has to go somewhere. It doesn’t just disappear.
The attempt to block psychic energy could take two possible forms. In repression, we really believe that we can stop the flow of energy for ever just by blocking it, and we don’t even consider the question of where that energy is going to go. In suppression, however, we recognise that the energy is there, even if we don’t want it to flow in a particular direction at the moment. Thus, if we start feeling sexual desire towards someone inappropriate, that doesn’t mean we have to try to eliminate the desire. Rather we can block it temporarily, remain aware of it, and send it somewhere else in the longer term. Absolutisation creates repression here, taking the form of a belief that we assume can simply eliminate a desire: for example, the belief that the sexual desire is just ‘wrong’. So the practice of the Middle Way involves avoiding absolutisation by trying to maintain awareness of our energies when we find it necessary to block them.
When we repress a desire, of course we do stop being aware of it for the moment. In terms of energy, we can see this in terms of a conversion from actual to potential energy. The flow of energy in your brain has already created a synaptic channel, and that channel will still be there even if nothing is flowing down it for now. That channel will be reactivated in certain conditions that bring it back into use, and in those circumstances it will be much easier for the energy to flow down the old channel than to form a new one. The ‘potential’ energy of the repressed desire thus takes the form of greater ease for the flow of future actual energy. To be released it might just need a trickle to break through the dam of repression, but because of all that potential the trickle can become a torrent much more quickly than one would otherwise expect.
But how does physical energy relate to psychic energy? Well, I don’t think they’re ultimately distinct: they’re just different ways of experiencing and labelling the same phenomena. The psychic energy in our mental system depends on the condition of our bodies, so it could hardly be independent of the physical energy system. That’s just another respect in which ‘physical’ and ‘mental’ are not ultimate or metaphysical qualities, just different contexts for experience. The total amount of energy in the psychic system can obviously change depending on the surrounding conditions, but nevertheless, much less energy may be ‘lost’ from the psychic system than we generally expect at times when we feel depleted. Instead it’s just been ‘stored’ in potential form.
So, the ‘conservation of psychic energy’ cannot be an absolute rule, nor can it even be as clear and measurable a tendency as can be documented in the case of physical energy. I don’t think the psyche can be a completely closed system within which energy is eternally conserved. Rather than ‘conservation’ of psychic energy, perhaps it would be more precise to talk about how the psychic energy system can only change incrementally rather than suddenly or absolutely. Nevertheless, we should not underestimate the ways in which energy can take unexpected potential forms in the brain, just as it can in other matter. Before the development of nuclear physics, who would have guessed that potential energy in an atom could be released by splitting it? Similarly, how can an individual guess at the unexpected energy that might be released by engaging with archetypes through love, spirituality, or art, before we experience it? We can find forms of potential energy in ourselves that we previously thought lost or impossible, and perhaps ‘potential energy’ is just a slightly less problematic term for what is often referred to as ‘the unconscious’.
Picture: ‘Brain Power’ CCA2.0 by aboutmodafinil.com
The range of impressive developments in psychology and neuroscience in the last few decades is astonishing, and I’m personally excited to keep discovering new ones. It is a challenge to keep an overview of them, to see how they relate to each other, how they relate to various philosophical and religious assumptions, how they relate to morality, and how they relate to practice.
The more specialised work goes on and the more academic specialists artificially limit their horizons to make progress in one area, the harder it becomes for other people to keep up with them, to synthesise and to digest the implications. But we need to try – for the results are often potentially revolutionary, amounting to a third phase of scientific development (as I have put it before) – a phase where, for the first time, uncertainty is really taken into account. So that’s what I’ve made it my business to try and do, and where I think the Middle Way as a co-ordinating model can be valuable.
Let me list some of the potentially helpful psychological/ neuroscientific models that have excited me in recent years:
So how can all these fit together? I’ll try to be as brief as I can. For the sake of brevity I’ll refer to the psychological insights listed above by their numbers.
Let’s start with the Middle Way. The basic principle of the Middle Way is that our judgements are improved by avoiding absolute or metaphysical claims, whether these are positive or negative in form. That leaves us in a realm of uncertainty, provisionality, and incrementality, a messiness in the middle in which we stand a much better chance of developing more adequate beliefs and values.
Central to engaging with that messiness in the middle is the positive recognition that we are bodies, that our operation depends on brain connections (1), and that the whole meaning of the language we use depends on our bodies (6). Making this recognition is not in any way reductionist or materialist. On the contrary, it allows us to relate our theoretical models to our wider embodied experience, rather than allowing an over-dominant left hemisphere perspective (3) to maintain false certainties. The Middle Way is about understanding and changing the way we think, not finding a new total explanation.
All these psychological developments can be focused on the key point of recognising uncertainty and following through its implications. Our responses to uncertainty, and fruitless attempts to grasp certainty, are just as much emotional processes as rational ones (7). Our habitual beliefs are closely tied to our emotional needs and histories (2), and the extent of their entrenchment needs to be recognised, but there is always hope – they can also be changed (1).
The rigidification of our beliefs makes us less flexible in changing circumstances, that rigidity being associated with over-dominant left hemisphere goals and models (3). Our over-certainty makes us liable to all sorts of identifiable specific kinds of error (4), and can also make us ‘mindless’: acting automatically, alienated and demotivated (5). We remain unaware of the ways we do this (8), and the absolutised beliefs that maintain that repression can be socially maintained through unintegrated use of archetypes projected onto people, abstractions or supernatural entities (9).
But there is hope. Addicts and neurotics can and do recover, and meditation and associated practices allow us to use our soothing systems (2). We all have right hemispheres which are capable of taking a pivotal role in integrating the potentially discontinuous and absolutised beliefs of the over-dominant left hemisphere, allowing the left hemisphere to play its equally vital role with more open and balanced beliefs (3). Some aspects of cognitive biases are just part of the condition of being human, but there are also many aspects that can be worked with and improved on (4) – all the more effectively when they are not just seen as ‘irrationality’ but in a wider context. We can develop mindfulness both in Langer’s sense (5) and the more common sense through practice. Different kinds of integration can support and stimulate each other, and archetypes do not necessarily have to be used repressively (9): they can be separated from metaphysical beliefs and positively cultivated to support the integration of meaning.
You don’t necessarily have to have engaged with all these different psychological models to recognise this overall process, but each one helps to contribute to the gathering evidence. It really helps to have sampled one or two, though, and Ellen Langer and Iain McGilchrist are probably the two most impressive individual figures I’ve come across, whose work is both accessible and fascinating. Whatever psychological model you use, remember it’s not going to tell you the whole story, but it can contribute enormously. Psychology at the moment seems to me to be the leading discipline, some way ahead of any other in terms of engaging with the Middle Way, but traditional psychological assumptions can also get in the way (for example, the belief in value-neutrality in science). In the end, psychologists also need philosophers, artists, practitioners and others to provide a wider context. But nevertheless their work is providing the most exciting pointers towards the Middle Way in today’s world.
There’s now a new review up of Marc Lewis’s book
‘The Biology of Desire: Why addiction is not a disease’, which you can read here. Marc Lewis is a neuroscientist and ex-addict who challenges what he sees as the over-medicalisation of addiction, providing a detailed account of the brain processes and some moving stories of individuals along the way. Marc Lewis was also recently interviewed by Barry for his podcast.
Our guest today is Dr Marc Lewis, a developmental neuroscientist and currently a professor at the Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. For many years his work centred on dynamic systems approaches to understanding the development of emotions and personality but recently he has perhaps become most well known for his account of his own personal experience of drug addiction Memoirs of Addicted Brain and merging that with the neuroscience of addiction. In his latest book The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is not a Disease he argues that seeing addiction as a disease is not only incorrect but also harmful and this will be the topic of our discussion today
MWS Podcast 78: Marc Lewis as audio only:
Download audio: MWS_Podcast_78_Marc_Lewis