Affects and Their Effects

Psychological theories tend to dwell on unconscious mental contents and the reasons they are kept from the conscious level. Yet, as far as we can tell, consciousness is the oddity, in that the degree of consciousness we humans enjoy is possibly without precedent in nature. This fact calls for an explanation of what consciousness consists and the roles it plays in our lives.

Mind-numbing tomes have droned on in seeming perpetuity about the perplexities involved in understanding consciousness in its entirety. So obviously a full explanation will not be attempted here. In fact, I will not stray far from the obvious. To get down to cases, affects, for example, are conscious entities having the appearance of being experienced in a literal sense, whether those affects are described as feelings, emotions, images, thoughts, or neurotic attacks. They all are inner events, and my claim is that they all are experienced in a literal sense, unlike unconscious mental events, which are not.

In terms of neural networks, this claim takes the form of assuming that certain networks can be enlisted in outputting mental contents to other neural nets in such a way that those nets are led to react to them much as they would to an external experience.

The most immediate implication of this assumption is that conscious mental contents should have the power to compete with external experiences for the person’s attention. We of course know that this is true, that some people can become so absorbed with inner experiences that they virtually lose contact with the outside.

The second implication is that mental contents when raised to the conscious level must have an effect on our behavior, because otherwise there would be no point to the elevation to consciousness. From this it follows that it should be possible to at least sometimes infer an unconscious motive in the appearance of an affect.

A good example of this sort of thing, I believe, is an instance of neurotic attack. These attacks do not merely panic a person for the few moments they last, they have other effects as well. They may drive a thought from the mind, induce a person to come to a decision more quickly, or cause a person to retreat from taking a growth path, to name only a few. What I am saying is that when questioning a patient about a neurotic attack, one should ask about what effect this had in the person’s life. My claim is that the answer will reveal an unconscious motive, more often than not.

A beautiful example of both of these implications in action can be found in Weiss’s writings. A further benefit of this example is that it relates also to what was previously said about dreaming and sleep. Weiss’s example pertains to a study of five soldiers who had been prisoners of war in Vietnam.

"During prolonged internment in which they were treated badly, the soldiers produced blissful dreams of gratification, power, and serenity. By producing these dreams, the soldiers helped themselves to adapt to their situation. They defied their tormentors and offered themselves a measure of hope. They also helped themselves sleep deeply, and thus restored themselves. These blissful dreams were important to the soldiers; they remembered them vividly long afterward, and during waking hours they would console themselves by dwelling on them.

"In everyday life blissful dreams are rare. A person does not permit them, lest he lull himself into a false sense of security and so fail to prepare himself for the problems he must face upon awakening. However, a captured soldier was unable to affect his fate, and so had nothing to lose by denying his painful reality; his turning from reality in his dreams did not make his situation more dangerous."

These soldiers hit upon a strategy of using inner experiences as a way of adapting to an unpleasant life situation, as a way of shutting out the unpleasantness of the situation to the extent possible. I am talking about two sets of inner experiences, those of their actual REM dreams and the seeming remembrances of those dreams they used to while away their waking hours.

I doubt that they remembered the 4-6 REM dreams they had each night, although I have no trouble believing that the last dream of the night was possibly recalled in part as far as manifest content is concerned. So what was it that they remembered and by what route was that able to help them?

Implicit in my and Weiss’s view of dreaming is the contention that our dreams program us to meet the demands of the next day. I have likened that programming as being similar to a post hypnotic suggestion. I believe that the relationship between the two is not metaphorical, that in both cases experienced "commands" while in an unconscious state are carried out in the waking state with there being no conscious recollection of the relationship between the two.

What I am saying is that the REM dreams of these soldiers programmed them to remember a "dream" perhaps each night and programmed them also to perceive that dream as being beautiful and a comfort during the day whenever it was brought to mind.

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