OVERVIEW
In this book, I will propose a way to understand how and when consciousness could be constructed from a type of activation of the brain, how maturation of sensory systems of the brain would assist cognitive reorganizations, and how certain organizations of cognition are related to character structure formation. Along the way, I will discuss where memories are stored and how they are retrieved — that is, reconstructed — and how maturation of the sensory systems are related to a new understanding of language.
Knowledge of mind and brain, of social and physical cognition, of normal and abnormal psychology — all of these must obviously be interrelated. Nonetheless, they remain for the most part isolated islands of knowledge. Past efforts to relate an investigator’ findings in one domain to a second domain sometimes fail to recognize established understandings of the second domain. For example, studies of fear in rats have been postulated to explain the origins of irrational fears — that is, phobias — in humans. Such studies may help us to understand basic organic components of fears. They fail, however, to take into account the symbolism that is involved in ordinary phobias.
One person’s phobia of crossing a bridge symbolized the temptations of the life that she lived when she lived on the other side of the bridge. She was now the respectable wife of a professor. When she lived on the other side of the bridge, she had been a prostitute and a drug addict. Another person’s phobia of crossing the bridge symbolized being isolated — that is, cut off from others. His phobia represented the dreaded state that he had experienced when he was a child. He had been a latchkey child — home alone and frightened.
A rat may become fearful of a container where it was shocked. No symbolization is involved. Unlike a phobia, the rat’s fear is not irrational. A person’s phobia is seldom simply based on having had a frightening experience when in a particular situation — for example, a bridge phobia is seldom traced to having had a bad experience when crossing a bridge.
Direct translation from the clinical domain to brain function is equally problematic. For example, some clinical theoreticians have tried to locate the ego, the id, or the superego — psychoanalytic theoretical structures — in specific parts of the brain. To my mind, although the clinical domain must connect to brain function, the effort to connect these particular theoretical structures to function of a particular part of the brain has little chance of success.
This book offers ways to travel between islands of knowledge — ideally — without damaging established structures and landscape of each island. This is an ambitious undertaking. Many people who know their way around their own knowledge island would say that a journey to the other islands is premature. I think some routes are navigable now. The routes to the different islands that I propose are necessarily provisional, and, although the routes are narrow, they are passable. For those who do not know any of the islands very well, I will provide sufficiently detailed maps to enable them to find their way around each island. For those who know their way around their own island better than I, I offer ways of getting to the other islands.
To bridge these islands, I take a developmental approach. I draw substantially on the work of Jean Piaget, who was the preeminent student of the development of children’ cognition — that is, the ways that children think.
The purpose of this book is twofold: One purpose is to present some ideas that integrate knowledge of cognitive development, of character formation, and of neuroscience, including brain development. The other purpose is to present Ahern’s and my theory of character formation and the empirical findings that support it.
The integration of cognitive development, neuroscience, and character formation is made possible by exploitation of Jean Piaget’ ideas and findings. His ideas and findings are not currently fashionable in psychological circles. Many psychologists see his work as irrelevant, and see new understandings of brain development as having replaced his contributions. His work has never been fashionable in psychiatric circles. I, however, see that a somewhat modified form of his work provides an overarching psychological theory — one that can help synthesize neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology.
Ahern and I developed our ideas about the formation of character types as we practiced and taught diagnosis and treatment of psychiatric patients at the University of California San Francisco. Freud’s work and that of his followers — psychoanalysts — were central to our understanding of our character types. Freud and psychoanalysis, like the work of Piaget, are largely out of fashion. In my opinion, much of Freud’s theory — his metapsychology — is more poetry than science. I don’t think that his metapsychology can be bridged to brain function, something he had hoped could be done. However, Freud opened up the field of psychotherapy. And many of his clinical findings are lasting contributions to understanding the mind — such as his characterization of the obsessive compulsive personality, his formulation of defense mechanisms, his clarification of the organization of unconscious processing, and even his recognition that some children, though probably not all, subscribe to the idea that castration accounts for sexual differences.
We could not have formulated our character types, if we had not used psychoanalytic technique to understand our patients, and if we had no knowledge of psychodynamic formulations. One patient complained about her date’s having criticized her. She, then, reported her use of a scissors to cut a pattern. The contiguity of the two reports suggests the intensity of her unconscious reaction to the criticism — that it was possible that she had an unconscious impulse to use the scissors to retaliate against her date. Similarly, understanding representation by opposites and the defense mechanism denial allows one to use unconscious intentions to predict behavior. In an initial interview, a patient repeatedly stated, "Don’t worry about your bill, Doc." From what he said, I understood that it was improbable that I would be paid.
I am a conservationist — some might say an obsessive compulsive. I hate to throw things away; I am concerned that I might lose something that is valuable. Of course, when I salvage something — such as an article of old clothing — I may have to alter it a bit. So it is with earlier ideas, you usually have to rehabilitate them — make them so that they may be used now, taking into account knowledge that was unavailable when they were first formulated. In my opinion, no theory unifies psychological findings as well as Piagetian theory, provided it is altered a bit.
Like other psychotherapists who were influenced by psychoanalytic theory, I thought that adult personality, including character types, formed in response to types of caregiving experiences in the first one or two years of life. Later when I encountered Piaget’s findings, which demonstrated that certain kinds of cognition — kinds of cognition that defined our character types — were still in flux during the period between age 8 and 11, I was surprised. This encounter caused me to recognize that our character types were not determined until much later than proposed by psychoanalytic theory. Ahern and I then proposed that a child’s adoption of a particular character type was influenced by his or her caregiving experience sometime between age 8 and 11 — that is, not between 0 and 4 or 5. At the same time, to understand the development of our character types, it was necessary to view certain of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development as offering different developmental options. This view altered Piaget’s theory that these stages marked a linear sequence of stepping stones that a child, if unimpeded, takes to develop a more balanced cognitive style.
Our theory of character structure formation is in jeopardy of being lost, not because it is old-fashioned, but because it is not widely known. So, I will present a brief overview of the theory and of the findings that support it. To my knowledge, the findings that support a theory such as ours are unusual. They are is unusual in that empirical support for clinically-derived theories of character structure formation is uncommon. Moreover, successful prediction of character structure types is, till now, nonexistent. Our theory affects approaches and goals of psychiatric treatment in fundamental ways.
For more complete presentations see the References at the back of the book: For theory see Malerstein & Ahern, 1997; 1982. For its impact on treatment see Ahern & Malerstein, 1989. And for the empirical testing of the theory see Gibson, Malerstein, Ahern, & Jones, 1989; Malerstein, Ahern, Pulos, & Arasteh, 1995; Malerstein, Ahern, Pulos, 2001.
In chapter 1, I propose that Piaget’s scheme 1 — his building block for understanding cognitive development — can be interpreted as activation of a set of neuronal circuits of the brain. This interpretation connects cognitive processes with understandings of how the brain works. Fully understanding Piaget’ scheme is essential to understanding the construction of objects, including the construction of the self as an object.
In chapters 2 through 5, I review Piaget’s early stages of cognitive development to explain two things. One: how the maturation of certain sensory (vision and touch) tracts could be expected to influence cognitive reorganizations. Two: how the neurophysiology of the waking state may be understood as the basis for consciousness — for the phenomenon of awareness. To relate the waking state to consciousness is not unusual. To take a developmental approach to explain the relationship, however, is unusual. Taking this approach provides a way to answer two questions involving the relationship of brain to mind — that is, to conscious cognition, or thinking, and conscious emotions, or feelings. The first question is: how is it possible for activity of matter — the brain — to be consciousness? And the second question is: how is it possible for conscious processing — thoughts and desires — to influence matter — that is, how can something as non-material as a thought or a desire influence the brain?
In chapter 6, I describe the cognitive changes that take place in Piaget’s later stages of cognitive development. In doing so, I provide the basis for understanding how maturation of another sensory (auditory) tract would assist a second cognitive reorganization. This reorganization is explained in chapter 7. In chapter 8, I address the interrelationship between conscious and unconscious function, and two potential problems encountered by my theory of the development of consciousness.
In the chapter 9, I describe our theory of character structure formation and, in chapter 10, the empirical testing of our theory. Although we first observed our three character types in psychiatric patients, we proposed that these types could also be found in the general population. Further, the type of social cognition that characterized each of our adult character types was also the type of cognition that characterized one of three of Piaget’ stages of cognitive development in children.
Our theory of character structure formation bridges abnormal and normal psychology, and social and physical cognitive development, as well as child-rearing patterns and adult social cognition. We propose that social cognition may take one of three different normal developmental paths. Most other theorists assume that cognitive development in both the social and the physical domain takes a linear path, beginning with abnormal and primitive cognition and ending with normal and sophisticated cognition. Our theory that there are three different normal social cognitive developmental paths has implications for understanding cognitive development in the physical domain. More importantly, our theory calls for therapeutic approaches and goals to be keyed to a person’s character type. 2 Chapter 11 outlines how Mary Ahern and I think our theory of character formation should be applied to help persons when they are troubled.
We are all alike and we are all different. Although we all have grossly similar equipment, our individual differences are profound. Since I am not one of a pair of identical twins, who have the same genes, the chance of finding someone else who has exactly the same genes as I have is less than one in millions. And if I did find such a person, there is no possibility that each of us would have experienced exactly the same social and physical environment. The content we use to construct our worlds is remarkably varied, although we may come from the same family and culture, although we all have to work against the pull of gravity, and although we all experience that most light comes from above — that is, from the sun. Even identical twins cannot have absolutely identical experiences.
Nevertheless, we all have much the same anatomy and physiology, and we all live in much the same physical world. Indeed, recent genetic studies have shown how similar we are even to the other life forms on this planet. Genetically we are almost identical to the great apes, and we share most of our DNA with lower animals as well. However, an ape is equipped to construct a somewhat distinct representation of a self, and a mouse probably is not. An ape and a mouse interact with different kinds of environment — different kinds of family relationships, and different physical settings. Each, necessarily, constructs different kinds of psychological worlds. Ultimately, because of shared endowments, and variations in our endowments and because of our shared planet and differences in parts of the planet, life forms reflect both our similarities and our differences.
Jean Piaget, a dedicated constructivist, whose work is pivotal to much of what I will present here, was seminal in the study of cognitive development in children. His work fostered much of the growth in investigations of how children come to understand themselves and the world they live in. Piaget acknowledged that maturation and environment significantly influenced cognitive development. Mostly, however, he assumed that, if left to their own devices, children would construct sophisticated cognitive structures — sophisticated understandings of themselves and their world — through interacting with it. He particularly opposed the notion that the child was stamped out by the environment, that the child was passive.
My less dedicated constructivist view does not assume that the child has to do all of the work to build his self and his world — that is, that the child must do this work without some help from maturation, from family members, or from the community. Of what there is — the external world and the child within it — each child builds what that child is biologically equipped to construct. Each child constructs his or her individual sense of the world and his or her individual sense of self. However, over time, the child’ equipment — the brain and the sensory and motor systems through which the child’ brain interacts with the environment — matures; and as the systems mature, they affect the organizations of the child’ constructs. I will propose how certain maturational factors assist changes that Piaget proposed were constructed by the child solely by interacting with the world.
Had I not clearly grasped Piaget’s explanation that the child, beginning in an undifferentiated cognitive state, in steps constructs his or her world and his or her self within that world, I would not have been able to propose my theory of consciousness. I will propose that theory in chapter 4.
Our brain and its sensory and motor systems, which interact with the world, developed over evolutionary time to work for us in the world — in an external world that includes other biological forms (including other humans) and the planet earth. Yet each of us, exploiting genetically determined maturational changes, must construct a self and a world anew. Particularly, we must construct our social self and our social world — that is, their attributes. If we were not designed to construct ourselves and our own world to fit the idiosyncrasies of the external physical and social worlds that we are born into, we might run out of the theater, as some of our grandparents did, when for the first time they saw a moving picture of a train coming toward them. The illusions of the movies were not part of their world when they constructed it. Although constructing our selves and our worlds anew is an inefficient process, it allows for remarkable ability to adapt.
I begin our journey by showing how Piaget’s scheme can be interpreted as activation of neuronal circuits in the brain. But first, the reader must understand Piaget’s concept of the scheme.
1 Early English translations of Piaget’s work use the term schema.
2 In an earlier version of my Webpage, I had a link to a treatment paper written by Ahern and myself. That paper is chapter 11. The reason for including it in the book is because if it is read alone — that is, without a complete understanding our theory of character formation, as outlined in Chapter 9 or in our earlier publications, the different ways that two patients are treated will not be fully appreciated.
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