Siri Hustvedt - The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves

On the other hand, perhaps free will is not something that has to be fully conscious. Our body schema, after all, is mostly unconscious. When I open the refrigerator to get a drink, the gesture is so automatic I barely think about it, and am I not doing it because I’m thirsty? Am I conscious of the thirst in the sense that I have to announce to myself, “I am now conscious of my thirst” before I go for the drink? No, but I have to be aware of thirst somehow, even though it’s not acknowledged in a full-blown self-reflexive sentence that bears the pronoun “I.” And I certainly don’t have to see myself from the outside as the hero of my life to get the bottle of water. The neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp has identified various emotional systems in the brains of all mammals, including what he calls “the SEEKING system.” “This system,” he writes, “makes animals intensely interested in exploring their world and leads them to become excited when they are about to get what they desire.” 89We all look for what we need and want, including taking out the water from the refrigerator. Because some part of my unconscious self prepares in advance for my water-getting gesture, does it mean that I don’t want it, that I am a machine of automatic motions?

Perhaps it would be useful to describe degrees of consciousness. After all, even when I’m writing, much is generated unconsciously. I feel beneath my words a preconscious world from which I draw them, thoughts not yet articulated but potentially there, and when I find them, I believe in their rightness or wrongness. Yes, that’s what I wanted to say. Against what do I measure this? It is not outside me. I don’t have some externalized notion of the perfect sentence that best expresses what I want to say. The knowledge lives inside me, and yet, isn’t that verbal interior made from the exterior, from all the books I’ve read, the conversations I’ve had and their mnemic traces? I like the expressions “in the back of my mind” and “on the tip of my tongue,” which indicate that half-remembered underground. What actually happens when I write the symbols that together make up the words I remember ?

Subjectivity is not the story of a stable, absolute “I” that marches through life making one conscious decision after another. It is not a disembodied brain machine either, genetically preprogrammed to act in specified and predictable ways. The once popular model of the brain as a computer hard drive that is fed software has grown weaker over time. The computer became a cognitive model with the advent of the technology, and I find it rather odd that scientists and a good many philosophers should decide that a machine is an adequate model for the human mind. For one thing, machines aren’t emotional, and without affective values, human beings can’t make decisions. They lose rather than gain good judgment. In his book Descartes’ Error, Antonio Damasio gives neurological evidence for what many people know intuitively, that emotion is crucial to reasoning well. 90People with frontal lobe injuries have blunted emotions, and this affects their ability to act for their own welfare. Furthermore, our subjectivity is not closed but open to the outside world. This is indisputable, but strangely, it’s often forgotten, and the scientific fetish for brain function sometimes treats these processes as if they took place in an isolated, bodiless organ — a bunch of neurons in a vat going about its business alone. “All action,” William James wrote, “is thus re-action upon the outer world; and the middle stage of consideration or contemplation or thinking is only a place of transit, the bottom of a loop, both whose ends have their point of application in the outer world. .. The current of life which runs in at our eyes or ears is meant to run out at our hands, feet or lips.” 91James’s model of subjective experience is dynamic, and it includes the perceived world, with all that means — sights, sounds, smells, sensations, emotions, other people, thought, and language. These are in us . We are inhabited, occupied, plural, and always live in relation to that perceived external world as corporeal beings, not just brains.

Edmund Husserl, whose phenomenology was influenced by his reading of James, made a distinction between two senses of the body: Körper and Leib . 92 Körper is our physical body, a thing, the one that can be seen from a third-person point of view in medicine and science as an inert object or “it.” Körper is what can be dissected. Leib is the lived body, the animated first-person psychobiological experiencing being. We can find Körper in Gray’s Anatomy . We find Leib in ourselves, the embodied “I.”

THE SUBJECTIVE WORLD is also an intersubjective world, the world of “I” and “you,” and drawing a line between the two isn’t easy because others are of us . It is now known that infants as young as a few hours old will actively imitate the expressions of an adult looking at them. This appears to be an inborn trait. It is not that newborn babies have a body image of their own faces moving to mimic the faces of others. They are not self-conscious. They are not yet the heroes of their own lives, but they have a powerful response to faces. After my daughter was born, I spent hours just looking at her, and she looked at me. I couldn’t get enough of that child’s face and her large, attentive eyes that locked into mine. My mother once said about me and my sisters, “When you were children, I feasted on your faces.” This phrase is a good summary of the emotion communicated by the maternal gaze because it focuses on the pleasure of looking, on the need to do it. Very small babies, only weeks old, will also answer you. I have experimented with this many times. If you speak to an infant and wait (you have to give her time), she will make talking sounds in response. The beginnings of language are in imitation. We are mirrors of one another.

D. W. Winnicott writes, “In emotional development the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face.” 93He mentions the importance of Lacan’s essay “Le Stade de Miroir,” but points out that Lacan does not make the same connection between the maternal and the mirror: “What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother’s face? I am suggesting that ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself. In other words the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there .” 94I am reflected in your eyes. In the same essay, Winnicott makes this formulation:

When I look I am seen, so I exist

I can now afford to look and see

I now look creatively and what I apperceive I also perceive

In fact, I take care not to see what is not there to be seen (unless I am tired). 95

Our eyes are directly connected to our brains, which helps explain why we are always looking into the eyes of other people to discover what they mean. As E. H. Hess wrote, the eye is “anatomically an extension of the brain; it is almost as if a portion of the brain were in plain sight.” 96Neurobiologists know that these visual exchanges between mother and child facilitate brain development in the infant. Allan Schore calls the back-and-forth between mother and child “psychobiological attunement” and, following others, refers to mother and baby with the single noun dyad —a loop, two in one. “The mother’s emotionally expressive face is the most potent source of visuoaffective information,” he notes, “and in face to face interactions it serves as a visual imprinting stimulus for the infant’s developing nervous system.” 97Our lives begin as a wordless dialogue, and without it we won’t grow.