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Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal

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Ongoing Discussion of Francis Crick and Christoph

Koch (Vol. 2, No. 1) Consciousness and Affect:
Commentary, by Mortimer Ostow (New York)
a

Mortimer Ostow
a

4421 Douglas Avenue, Riverdale, NY 10471, e-mail:

Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

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

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Mortimer Ostow

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Ongoing Discussion of Francis Crick and Christoph Koch (Vol. 2, No.1)

Consciousness and Affect: Commentary, by Mortimer Ostow (New York)

It is generally understood among neuroscientists that

we cannot fully know the world in which we live. Our
consciousness constructs an image by combining and
organizing reports from our various senses as they
have been processed by the brain. First, even in the
realms that these senses report, they detect only a segment of the full visible and audible spectra; they are
sensitive to only a small number of the ambient chemicals in the air and in the substances introduced into
the mouth; of the physical substances of the environment they are sensitive only to those that stimulate the
tactile receptors of the skin and the tension sensitive
receptors in the muscles. Second, we know, by inference, that the environment contains things for which
we have no sense organs. There is a clock mechanism
in the brain but we cannot directly perceive time. We
can only infer its passage from observations of
changes in those things that we can directly perceive.
Science has made us aware of components of the external world that we cannot directly know, and of
many things that we find it impossible even to conceptualize, such as the multiple dimensions of the cosmic
"strings" that cosmologists speak of. The world in
which we live is one that is constructed by our consciousness and all of the perceptive and apperceptive
processes that report to it.
I propose that the conscious image of the inner
world is constructed in an analogous way. We have
evidence that only a small fraction of those brain processes that could, under the right conditions, become
mental contents are actually available to consciousness at anyone time. The nonconscious premental
contents include representations of instinctual impulses, inhibiting influences against these impulses,
certain memories, false memories and myths, anticipations and apprehensions, or rather dispositions that
would be expressed as expectations and fears if they
became conscious. Only those impulses that do not
seem to invite danger are permitted to become conscious wishes. Expectations of danger or injury can
become conscious if they are realistic, or if they are
the consequences of moods, such as depressive moods.
Mortimer Ostow, M.D., is a Charter Member of the Westchester Psychoanalytic Society, and President of the Psychoanalytic Research and
Development Fund.

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.

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Ongoing Discussion Vol. 1, No.2

When an object of the constructed outer world
becomes of instinctual interest to an impulse wish of
the constructed inner world, the quale of the former
combines with the affect of the latter to create an intense experience of almost consummatory quality.
Think of the experience of falling in love, of responding emotionally to a moving piece of music, to
laughing heartily at a good joke. The last is a particularly instructive example. The humor generally has two
parts. One is an intellectual exercise; the violation of
boundary creates a quale experience. The second component is the violation of a social norm, deriding a
third person, making a prohibited sexual allusion, even
belittling oneself. These experiences and the wishes
they betray generate affect. It is a combination of quale
and affect that creates the consummatory laughter. So

243

psychoanalysis consists not only of taking cognizance

of unreporting protomental activity and associated
protoaffect, but also disentangling quale and affect,
distinguishing between inner and outer, between affects precipitated by external events and mood generated by inner mood regulatory processes.
It is this synthetic function of the ego and the
need for causality that are responsible for many of the
well-known defensive activities of the ego and that are
responsible for almost all of the illusions that have to
be undone in analysis.
Mortimer Ostow
4421 Douglas Avenue
Riverdale, NY 10471
e-mail: MOstow1234@aol.com

Ongoing Discussion of J. Allan Hobson (Vol. 1, No.2)

Commentary by Herbert Stein (New York)

As a sidebar to the ongoing discussion of dreams, I

should like to propose an idea concerning the relationship of dreams to the very early development of mental
processes in the hopes that others will find it of interest. My hypothesis is that the infant develops its first
"hallucinatory image," its first image that is not directly related to current perception, as its first dream
during REM sleep. Freud gave us a model in chapter
7 of The Interpretation ofDreams in which the hungry,
unsatisfied infant hallucinates an image, taken from
memory, of taking in milk from the breast.
A hungry baby screams or kicks helplessly. But the
situation remains unaltered, for the excitations arising
from an internal need is not due to a force producing
a momentary impact but to one which is in continuous
operation. A change can only come about if in some
way or other (in the case of the baby through outside
help) an "experience of satisfaction" can be achieved
which puts an end to the internal stimulus. An essential component of this experience of satisfaction is
a particular perception (that of nourishment in our
example) the mnemic image of which remains associated thenceforward with the memory trace of the exci-

Herbert Stein is a member of the New York University Psychoanalytic Institute.

tation produced by the need. As a result of the link

that has thus been established, next time this need
arises a psychical impulse will at once emerge which
will seek to re-cathect the mnemic image of the perception and to re-evoke the perception itself, that is
to say, to re-establish the situation of the original
satisfaction. An impulse of this kind is what we call
a wish; the reappearance of the perception is the fulfillment of the wish; and the shortest path to the fulfilment of the wish is a path leading direct from the
excitation produced by the need to a complete cathexis of the perception. Nothing prevents us from
assuming that there was a primitive state of the psychical apparatus in which this path was actually traversed, that is, in which wishing ended in
hallucinating.... [Freud, 1900, pp. 565-566].

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