Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Mortimer Ostow
a
To cite this article: Mortimer Ostow (2001) Ongoing Discussion of Francis Crick and Christoph Koch (Vol. 2, No. 1)
Consciousness and Affect: Commentary, by Mortimer Ostow (New York), Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal
for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 3:2, 242-243, DOI: 10.1080/15294145.2001.10773358
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15294145.2001.10773358
242
Mortimer Ostow
When any mental event becomes conscious, it is accompanied by a conscious affect, which may be imposed upon or replace a mood. The experience of
affect accompanies the process of becoming conscious
of any of these premental contents. It is not my intention here to enumerate the full catalog of these nonreporting entities. But it is important to recognize that
this is the domain that psychoanalysis addresses.
Just as what we know of the outside world consists of a construct based upon sensory impressions
and secondary inferences from them, so our knowledge of the inner world is constructed upon the basis
of selected reports from an enormous collection of
literally preconscious potentially mental formations.
As the data from the external world become conscious,
they acquire "qualia"; as the information from the
inner world becomes conscious, it acquires affect.
We all reside in the very small space between
the constructed outer world and the constructed inner
world. Living in this space, having the illusion that we
know both worlds whereas we know neither, nevertheless we have feelings about these worlds determined
by the qualia in the first instance and the affects in
the second. However, our impulses, read wishes, that
involve the outer world, impose affect upon it. Similarly, the representations of the inner world acquire
the qualia of the outer world in which they reside. We
are awed by the intimations of the greater outer world
that we glimpse around the periphery of our narrow
horizons, and we are frightened by the intimations of
the inner world that penetrate into our consciousness
around its defensive perimeter. We are truly comfortable only within the limits of what Hartmann called
the average expectable environment of the outside
world, and of the equally average expectable environment of the inner world. Experiences of awe, spiritual
and mystical experiences create the illusion of penetrating beyond the combined confining boundaries creating feelings of an uncomfortable, strange kind of
comfort. The various religious mythologies create a
cosmos that purports to be of the outer world but is
actually no more than a projection of the inner world,
the virtual universe of residence. The phenomena associated with multiple personality, as well as with
rapid mood cycling, reveal how unfixed, and unsubstantial are the conscious constructions of both outer
and inner worlds.
243
This ability to "hallucinate" is particularly important because we must be able to create images from
memory, independent of immediate current perception
in order to engage in what we call thought. Without
it we would be reactive animals unable to remove ourselves from a situation to consider it. Even those who
do not accept Freud's model must acknowledge that
at some point in its early development, the infant acquires the ability to create imagery from memory independent of its immediate perceptions. It could be
argued that it is an inborn ability, but although infants