Ariane Bazan

Effect of age on β-receptors, Gsα- and Giα-proteins in rat heart

Abstract β-adrenoceptors, Gsα- and Giα-proteins were investigated in a crude plasma membrane preparation from ventricles of young (2–4 months) and senescent (22–24 months) Wistar rats. Receptor density, ligand affinity and β1/β2-receptor ratio were independent of the age of the rats. The percentage of βreceptors coupled to G-proteins increased with age. An age-related increase in the level of Gsα (124%) was paralleled by an increase in the ratio between the high and low molecular weight form of Gsα. The level of Giα-protein almost doubled (170%) upon aging. We conclude that the age-related differences are small at the level of the β-adrenoceptor molecule, but that the increase in Giα-proteins could be responsible for the age-related reduction in myocardial inotropic and chronotropic responses. Moreover, we suggest that the changes in degree of high affinity coupling between β-receptor and Gs-protein are possibly linked to alterations in the ratio between the Gs-molecular weight subtypes.

On the physiology of jouissance: interpreting the mesolimbic dopaminergic reward functions from a psychoanalytic perspective

Jouissance is a Lacanian concept, infamous for being impervious to understanding and which expresses the paradoxical satisfaction that a subject may derive from his symptom. On the basis of Freud’s “experience of satisfaction” we have proposed a first working definition of jouissance as the (benefit gained from) the motor tension underlying the action which was [once] adequate in bringing relief to the drive and, on the basis of their striking reciprocal resonances, we have proposed that central dopaminergic systems could embody the physiological architecture of Freud’s concept of the drive. We have then distinguished two constitutive axes to jouissance: one concerns the subject’s body and the other the subject’s history. Four distinctive aspects of these axes are discussed both from a metapsychological and from a neuroscience point of view. We conclude that jouissance could be described as an accumulation of body tension, fuelling for action, but continuously balancing between reward and anxiety, and both marking the physiology of the body with the history of its commemoration and arising from this inscription as a constant push to act and to repeat. Moreover, it seems that the mesolimbic accumbens dopaminergic pathway is a reasonable candidate for its underlying physiological architecture.

Phantoms in the Voice: A Neuropsychoanalytic Hypothesis on the Structure of the Unconscious

Several clinical case fragments show how a reading of the subject’s symptoms at the level of the signifier gives access to its underlying unconscious logic. Freud’s “splitting of consciousness” model is proposed to have a neurophysiologic counterpart in LeDoux’s model for the processing of emotional stimuli. The language fragments in these dynamics are considered as material phoneme vectors, corresponding to Freud’s word-presentation and to Lacan’s signifier. Accordingly, neurolinguistic research has uncovered a specific, well-organized lexical brain area in which the words are phonologically encoded. In line with Lacan, psycholinguistic research has shown how the linguistic train always has an ambiguous structure, transiently and unconsciously activating its different meanings, followed by inhibition of the contextually inappropriate meanings. Neurophysiologic research also shows how language is always a motor event. Imminent articulatory intentions that remain without effective execution will therefore give rise to articulatory or phonemic phantoms, searching for relief in substitutive signifiers. A neurophysiologic mechanism for Freudian repression is thus proposed, leading to the return of the repressed in symptoms with a similar phonemic structure though with a radically different meaning. The phonemic phantoms thereby organize the structure of the unconscious by functioning as attractors for the subject’s mental energy in its (linguistic) action space.

From Sensorimotor Inhibition to Freudian Repression: Insights from Psychosis Applied to Neurosis

First, three case studies are presented of psychotic patients having in common an inability to hold something down or out. In line with other theories on psychosis, we propose that a key change is at the efference copy system. Going back to Freud’s mental apparatus, we propose that the messages of discharge of the motor neurons, mobilized to direct perception, also called “indications of reality,” are equivalent to the modern efference copies. With this key, the reading of the cases is coherent with the psychodynamic understanding of psychosis, being a downplay of secondary processes, and consequently, a dominance of primary processes. Moreover, putting together the sensorimotor idea of a failure of efference copy-mediated inhibition with the psychoanalytic idea of a failing repression in psychosis, the hypothesis emerges that the attenuation enabled by the efference copy dynamics is, in some instances, the physiological instantiation of repression. Second, we applied this idea to the mental organization in neurosis. Indeed, the efference copy-mediated attenuation is thought to be the mechanism through which sustained activation of an intention, without reaching it – i.e., inhibition of an action – gives rise to mental imagery. Therefore, as inhibition is needed for any targeted action or for normal language understanding, acting in the world, or processing language, structurally induces mental imagery, constituting a subjective unconscious mental reality. Repression is a special instance of inhibition for emotionally threatening stimuli. These stimuli require stronger inhibition, leaving (the attenuation of) the motor intentions totally unanswered, in order to radically prevent execution which would lead to development of excess affect. This inhibition, then, yields a specific type of motor imagery, called “phantoms,” which induce mental preoccupation, as well as symptoms which, especially through their form, refer to the repressed motor fragments.

The grand challenge for psychoanalysis – and neuropsychoanalysis: taking on the game

As Ebbinghaus (1908) tells us in the opening words of his popular textbook of psychology, “psychology has a long past but only a short history.” In my opinion, there are three foundational moments in the history of psychology and, paradoxically, all three are moments of great advancement in biology. First, in the long past of psychology, psychology did not exist as such but was part of philosophy. It is extremely interesting to understand why it has been necessary, at one point of time in the sixteenth century, to invent this field and to create a signifier – namely “psychology” – separate from philosophy, which enabled the field to distinguish itself from philosophy (Mengal, 2000/2001). In this century of religious violence, bare corpses lay everywhere and progresses in anatomy are major. In 1540, the German religious reformer Philippe Melanchthon publishes a book which comments the De anima of Aristotle and he completes the Aristotelian text with a long treaty of anatomy (Mengal, 2000/2001). On the basis of this new knowledge, Melanchthon attributes functions to the body which were previously reserved for the soul. The brain becomes the principal organ of sensory functions and displaces the heart as the seat of emotional life and of thought. To the Aristotelian position that all living beings, whether plant, animal, or human, to varying degrees possess a soul which organizes the body, Melanchthon opposes a dualistic anthropology which divides the human in body and soul. The two-dimensional “anthropologia” is articulated in “anatomia,” science of body, and “psychologia,” science of the soul. It is this new anthropology that is diffused into the world of the Reformation (Mengal, 2000/2001). The Dutch reformer Snellius (1594), for example, defines the body and the soul by their respective essential property: “The rational soul of man is the thought that, coupled with the body, completes man. (…) The physical things closer to natural bodies that move naturally, have an extension and for that reason occupy a space. (…) The faculty of the rational soul is the mind or will. Thought is the faculty of the soul to discourse and think about things which are and which are not.”1 (Snellius, 1594, pp. 26–27). It is as a philosopher that Rene Descartes proposes his dualist vision much in line with the reformist opinions. Descartes dissects animals and human cadavers and is familiar with the research on the flow of blood (Fuchs, 2001). He comes to the conclusion that the body is a complex device that is capable of moving without the soul, thus contradicting the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul. The metaphysical order, which states that the body exists by the soul, is broken.

Subliminal unconscious conflict alpha power inhibits supraliminal conscious symptom experience

Our approach is based on a tri-partite method of integrating psychodynamic hypotheses, cognitive subliminal processes, and psychophysiological alpha power measures. We present ten social phobic subjects with three individually selected groups of words representing unconscious conflict, conscious symptom experience, and Osgood Semantic negative valence words used as a control word group. The unconscious conflict and conscious symptom words, presented subliminally and supraliminally, act as primes preceding the conscious symptom and control words presented as supraliminal targets. With alpha power as a marker of inhibitory brain activity, we show that unconscious conflict primes, only when presented subliminally, have a unique inhibitory effect on conscious symptom targets. This effect is absent when the unconscious conflict primes are presented supraliminally, or when the target is the control words. Unconscious conflict prime effects were found to correlate with a measure of repressiveness in a similar previous study (Shevrin et al., 1992, 1996). Conscious symptom primes have no inhibitory effect when presented subliminally. Inhibitory effects with conscious symptom primes are present, but only when the primes are supraliminal, and they did not correlate with repressiveness in a previous study (Shevrin et al., 1992, 1996). We conclude that while the inhibition following supraliminal conscious symptom primes is due to conscious threat bias, the inhibition following subliminal unconscious conflict primes provides a neurological blueprint for dynamic repression: it is only activated subliminally by an individuals unconscious conflict and has an inhibitory effect specific only to the conscious symptom. These novel findings constitute neuroscientific evidence for the psychoanalytic concepts of unconscious conflict and repression, while extending neuroscience theory and methods into the realm of personal, psychological meaning.

Testing Freud’s Hypothesis That Word Forms and Word Meaning Are Functionally Distinct: Subliminal Primary-Process Cognition and Its Link to Personality

One of Freud’s seminal hypotheses first appearing in his monograph On Aphasia (1891) posited that word meaning and word presentation (e.g., phonemic and graphemic properties) needed to be distinguished if aphasic symptoms were to be accurately understood. In his later psychoanalytic writing, this supposition was generalized to refer to the primary-process uses of language in dreams, symptom formation, and unconscious processes (1900, 1915). To test Freud’s hypothesis that word meaning and word presentation are functionally distinct when processed unconsciously (Freud, 1891, 1915), 50 participants were tested with a priming paradigm in which a “palindrome” prime, presented either subliminally or supraliminally, was followed by two target alternatives. In the forward condition, the prime (e.g. DOG) was followed with a semantic associate (e.g. CANINE) and a distractor. In the “palindrome” condition, the prime was followed with a semantic associate of the reversed word (e.g. ANGEL) and a distractor. The participants’ task was to choose the word they preferred. The supraliminal results confirm classical semantic priming, but only in the forward condition. Subliminally, however, while no main results emerged, there were interaction effects with self-rated personality factors and stimulus detectability. High trait anxiety induced priming facilitation, while in low anxiety there was inhibition, for both forward and palindrome conditions. On the other hand, high scores on the Hysteroid–Obsessoid Questionnaire, a measure of repressiveness, lead to inhibition of the priming effect while facilitation was observed with low scores—but only for forward priming. Consistently, these interaction effects were even stronger when stimulus detectability was low than at higher levels of detectability, ruling out any skeptical account that the measured effects might be due to residual conscious perception. Taken together, these findings support Freud’s hypothesis that the perceptual object dimension of a word, being functionally distinct from its meaning, can give rise to novel sequential processing, an effect that is more likely to occur unconsciously (i.e., d′ ≤ 0) and under conditions of anxiety.

Motivations and Emotions Contribute to A-Rational Unconscious Dynamics: Evidence and Conceptual Clarification

Turnbull and Solms call attention in their target article to several ways in which neuropsychological and psychoanalytic concepts throw light on each other. They conclude that emotion and motivation so central to psychoanalysis have been underinvestigated in neuroscience. We agree with this position, but believe there is more to psychoanalytic theory and its implications for neuroscience than the authors have discussed.

Use of elastase as an internal standard in immunoblotting techniques

A non-radioactive method for relative, semi-quantitative analysis of immunoblots, based on the use of elastase as internal standard and conventional peroxidase staining was devised and applied to the immunoassay of Gs-proteins in crude membrane preparations of rat kidneys. We found that the coefficients of variation of samples, run within the same experiment or run within different experiments, are reduced to half or a quarter of their original value respectively when corrected for elastase as an internal standard, allowing meaningful comparison of these samples.

Not to be Confused about Free Association

The effort to articulate key psychoanalytic concepts in terms of the neurophysiology of action is a promising undertaking that opens perspectives for a fruitful dialogue between psychoanalysis and modern sensorimotor neurosciences. For this to happen it is important to operationalize these psychoanalytic concepts more precisely. In this commentary, articulate distinctions are proposed between free association and, respectively, (1) unconscious processing, (2) a minimally constrained executive task, (3) spontaneity and intentionality, (4) primary-process mentation, and (5) ego function. In particular, the opposite understandings of “free” as either “free of defense” or “able to choose beyond unconscious inclinations” are discussed.