Mode & behavior 4: Affective Technology

While this is the fourth in a series of posts about behavioral mode, it can be read independently of the first three, which you will find here, here, and here. This post is a somewhat revised excerpt from a long and detailed analysis of Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” which I published originally in PsyArt, online here, downloadable here. You’ll find more detailed citations there.

Let us begin with the passage from Augustine’s The City of God which served as an epigraph for the first post in this series (Book 14, Chapter 17):

Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called "shameful." Their condition was different before sin. . . . because not yet did lust move those members without the will's consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against the disobedience of man. For they were not created blind, as the unenlightened vulgar fancy; . . . Their eyes, therefore were open, but were not open to this, that is to say, were not observant so as to recognize what was conferred upon them by the garment of grace, for they had no consciousness of their members warring against their will. But when they were stripped of this grace, that their disobedience might be punished by fit retribution, there began in the movement of their bodily members a shameless novelty which made nakedness indecent.

Augustine is here complaining about sexuality, and offering the interesting speculation that, before humankind’s fall from grace, sexuality was under the control of the will but that afterward, alas, such control was lost.

Augustine was thus complaining, in different terms, about the modal system, that the sexual mode was not subject to the will. One cannot become aroused at will, nor can one quell arousal simply be willing it to be gone. The ‘members’ in question cannot be raised and lowered as readily as one raises and lowers one’s arm.

The problem is hardly confined to sexuality. One cannot become hungry at will, nor curious, affectionate, playful, angry, and so forth. One can fake many of these things, and more, and sometimes one can fake it until it becomes real, after a fashion. But faking it is not so easy as simply raising or lowering one’s arm. It is a more elaborate activity.

And literature is one of its more elaborate products. Through literature we manipulate the modal system. Reading a text (or watching a film) is certainly an act of will. It is something we can choose to do. And once started, we can also choose to stop – though that may sometimes be difficult. I find it particularly interesting that, at least in our culture, we will use story-telling as a way of easing young children off to sleep. Sleep is, of course, a modal behavior, and entering into it can sometimes be difficult — for adults as well as for children. Why is it that an appropriate story can help easy the transition? Is it the kinship between dreams and fiction?

Literature itself is modal behavior, one of the uniquely human modes. It is a mode that seems ‘designed’ to evoke the reticular or lower modes (see the second post in this series) by presenting the mind-brain with cues that will trigger those modes. In the classic formulation of Ernst Kris (Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art 1952), the creation and understanding of art involves a regression to earlier modes of experience, but a regression that is in service of the ego. In the more recent formulation of Norman Holland (2003), such regression involves an overall pattern of brain activity that is quite different from those obtaining when we engage the real world. The brain is not in reality mode, it is in a different mode. Thus Holland tells us (2003):

In psychoanalytic terms, Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief is a regression to an oral merger of infant and nurturing other in a potential space. In neurological terms, we could say that regression means shutting down some "higher" system that modulates "lower" systems. In the case of the willing suspension of disbelief, the prefrontal cortex inhibits action and the planning of actions so that we no longer are aware of the unreality of the fictions we are dealing with, but it does not - cannot - inhibit the corticolimbic systems that give rise to our emotions. They run freely on, busily prompting us to actions, to approaches and avoidances, we never perform, but the psychological feelings and the physical signs of emotion persist.

Thus it is that in the comfort and security of that mode we can allow ourselves to explore other modes.

Let us consider some examples. First I want to look at the preface Coleridge wrote for “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” Then we’ll detour through Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, and a bit of my childhood, and return to Coleridge.

In the garden-bower

When Coleridge published “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” he presented it with a short preface:

In the June of 1797 some long-expected friends paid a visit to the author's cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole time of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the following lines in the garden-bower.

In a general way, it tells much the same story he'd told years before in a verse letter to his friend Robert Southey three. The central point remains the same: Coleridge was separated from his friends by an accident. They were able to go walking about in Nature while Coleridge was not. He wrote the poem while his friends were out and about and he was confined to the garden.

The poem itself simply reports the poet's thoughts and feelings of an evening. In contrast, the preface talks about the poem to which it is affixed. By saying that Coleridge himself, like the person who speaks the poem, was alone one evening while his friends went for a walk, the preface indicates to us that the act of writing the poem played some role in the process that brought about a change in his mood. In brief, Coleridge is telling as that poetry is affective technology, a mind-altering activity.

Coleridge’s theme, loss, is, of course, a major theme in our imaginative life. It pervades much of our literature. It crops up in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer in a way that’s particularly meaningful to me, as Twain presents an incident that mirrors a strategy that I had used to deal with parental rejection.

Theatrical gorgeousness

When I was young my parents would punish me by sending me to my room. Not only was I thus unable to continue doing whatever it was that I had been doing, but I was also separated from the world in general and, of course, separated from my parents in particular. While confined to my room I would feel aggrieved and brood for a bit and sooner or later imagine a scenario in which I had died somehow. I would continue the story by imagining my parents grieving for me, and saying how they had wronged me, but it's too late now because I'm dead. By then I would start feeling better.

This, of course, is a form of play (another modal activity), though it is not the sort of thing that typically comes to mind when we think of childhood play. But play it is, for it required me to imagine myself in a role quite different from my actual situation. It also required that I imagine a situation in which my parents were as bereft as I felt, thereby making me superior to them.

I have no idea how common this particular mood-altering play scenario is, but something like it seems to have informed Chapters 13 through 15 of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. While the incidents in those chapters may have been based on Twain's childhood experience, those chapters are themselves works of fiction. We can read them in an hour or so, but they depict fictional events that transpired over a course of days.

As Chapter 13 opens, Tom is feeling aggrieved. His aunt had recently punished him for a prank he had played on the family cat and Miss Becky Thatcher was ignoring his romantic overtures.

Tom's mind was made up now. He was gloomy and desperate. He was a forsaken, friendless boy, he said; nobody loved him; when they found out what they had driven him to, perhaps they would be sorry; he had tried to do right and get along, but they would not let him; since nothing would do them but to be rid of him, let it be so; and let them blame him for the consequences -- why shouldn't they? What right had the friendless to complain? Yes, they had forced him to it at last: he would lead a life of crime.

Tom encounters his friend Joe Harper, who is of a similar mind, and they join up with Huck Finn and run away to Jackson's Island, where they intend to live a fine life as pirates.

Late in their second day they hear canon shot over the water. Tom concludes that the townsfolk suspected the boys had drowned and so were trying to bring their bodies to the surface. That night—we are now in Chapter 15—Tom slips back to town and sneaks into his house. There he listens to his Aunt Polly and to Joe's mother commiserating over their loss, affirming that, though a bit devilish, their boys were good at heart. These words had a powerful effect on Tom:

Tom was snuffling, now, himself — and more in pity of himself than anybody else. He could hear Mary crying, and putting in a kindly word for him from time to time. He began to have a nobler opinion of himself than ever before. Still, he was sufficiently touched by his aunt's grief to long to rush out from under the bed and overwhelm her with joy — and the theatrical gorgeousness of the thing appealed strongly to his nature, too, but he resisted and lay still.

Tom then returned to the island in time for breakfast and “recounted (and adorned) his adventures. They were a vain and boastful company of heroes when the tale was done.”

Though I do not recall the details of any of the childhood fantasies I employed to restore my sense of well-being, I rather suspect that Twain's three chapters are more richly realized than anything I managed to conjure up. The most interesting aspect of Twain's story is that the boys ran away to become pirates. That is, within the means available to them, they did their best to become free and autonomous actors rather than being bound to adults in the role of a child. It was from within that bit of adventuresome pretense that Tom overheard the heart-warming conversation. Though sorely tempted, he did not immediately break from his pretended autonomy. Rather he returned to the island and thus afforded Twain the pleasure of extending this theme through four more chapters worth of variations.

The care-taker’s role

Let us now return to “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” (henceforth LTB). As I mentioned above, we know from Coleridge's own hand that the first text of the poem was occasioned by an incident which prevented him from going on a nature walk with his friends, Dorothy and William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb. So it is possible that the writing of the poem was occasioned by a bout of melancholy and that, by the time a text had been drafted, the melancholy was gone. I take Coleridge's account of the poem's origins, however, as nothing more than a clue to its supporting affective dynamic. Yet it is a clue that was important enough to Coleridge that, when he published the poem, he provided it with a preface indicating roughly, though not exactly, what he had said in the letter to Southey.

We should, nonetheless, remind ourselves to honor the distinction between that real occasion and the poem itself regardless of how well the events in the moment mimic the real events of the evening. The events of the evening took place over some hours, but one can read the poem itself in a few minutes. And you do not need to know anything about Coleridge's life or the topography of the Lake District to understand and appreciate the poem.

With these various experiences in mind, the real and fictional, I want to turn to the work of John Bowlby (Attachment and Loss, Volumes 1, 2, and 3, Basic Books, 1969, 1973, and 1980, respectively), who has revised traditional psychoanalytic understanding of the psychology of attachment, loss and separation. Trained as a psychoanalyst, Bowlby came to doubt the classical psychoanalytic belief that the child's attachment to her mother was rooted in the mother's provision of nutrition. He came to believe, instead, that it was the mother's caring presence itself that was significant to the infant and undertook an extensive cross-disciplinary conceptual program to argue his case. One of Bowlby's signal moves was to ground his study of human attachment in the ethological literature about attachment among animals, including imprinting in birds. To this I would add more recent neurobiological work that has identified many of the neural circuits mediating infant-parent bonding. This behavior has a long phylogenetic history and is mediated by specific neural circuits.

It is those circuits, I am suggesting, that are active in the various real and fictional cases of loss or separation we have been considering. In the case of the real events — my childhood affective maneuver, Coleridge's experience one evening in 1797 — the circuits are those in my brain and in Coleridge's. In the case of the fictional events — Tom Sawyer's fictional activity, and the events in LTB — the circuits are those in the brains of those who read those fictions. In these latter cases the readers may be reading those texts to sooth some sense of real loss in their lives, but not necessarily so. They may just be reading for pleasure.

Let us remind ourselves that attachment is a relationship and, as such, involves two parties, the infant or Child and the Caretaker—terms I will use when talking about these roles. Discussions of attachment tend to focus on the infant, on her need for attachment, her strategies of maintaining it, her response to loss, and so forth. But the infant's activities would be fruitless if the Caretaker were not highly motivated, not only to respond to the infant's actions, but to anticipate the infant's needs and actively to arrange the world for the infant's benefit. While the relationship is very intense for both Caretaker and Child, they play very different roles in that relationship.

This leads to a suggestion about the mechanism of the particular psychological strategy I have been examining: at the point where the child is imagining his parents in grief over the child's death, that child has, in his imagination, assumed the Caretaker role in the attachment relation. The child can thus reinterpret his own sense of loss as empathy with or response to his parent's grief over the child's imaginary death. Further, as the child imaginatively enacts the Caretaker role he can project the Child role onto his parents. Thus the child can master his own sense of separation and loss by employing his identification with his parents to engineer an imaginative transformation of that loss. That, more or less, is what I suspect I was doing as a child.

And I propose that that is what Mark Twain was depicting in Tom Sawyer. That is why I called attention to the fact that Tom and Joe ran off to be pirates and thus had, at least in their own minds, ceased to be children. They had become autonomous adults of a particularly adventuresome kind, living at the fringes of civilization. It is from that point of view that Tom observed the conversation between Aunt Polly and Mrs. Harper and it is from that point of view that he felt an impulse to reveal himself to his Aunt and thus relieve her grief and anxiety. Twain tells us, however, that that impulse also came with a sense of "the theatrical gorgeousness of the thing." That has the smell of the child about it. But I regard that as further evidence of my point, that in a person mature enough to take at least some care for others it is easy, under the appropriate circumstances, to flip from one role to the other in the attachment interaction.

Just what is going on in the brain of someone reading Tom Sawyer is, of course, a different question. I have already argued (Benzon 2001: First Person: Neuro-Cognitive Notes on the Self in Life and in Fiction) that we use the same neural circuits to understand fictional events that we use to understand and enact real events, but I don't want to repeat those arguments here. The reader of Twain's book thus has an opportunity to enact a certain strategy for mastering loss in a context that is completely safe, as the events are not real and so the reader’s own welfare is not in jeopardy.

And so does the reader of LTB. We must be careful, however, in identifying just what it is that has been lost. Both the preface and the opening lines of the poem quite clearly state that his friends have left him alone. Once he has registered that fact, however, the first loss the poet complains about is that of "beauties and feelings." His friends may have left him, but it isn't their presence that he misses, it is those beauties and feelings, by which he presumably means the things his friends will see on their walk. He misses the opportunity to go out in Nature; that is why the bower is a prison. Something then happens during the first two stanzas that transforms the poet's mood so that, when he once again turns his attention on the bower at the beginning of the third stanza, he does so in delight. The setting that had seemed barren is now experienced as overflowing with life.

It would seem that, if we want to analyze this dynamic in terms of the attachment relationship, then we have to put the poet in the Child role and (Mother) Nature in the Caretaker role. It is Nature that is lost in the beginning, and it is Nature that is found later on. The process that leads from the first state to the second involves the poet's imagining what his friends might be seeing on their walk; they thus mediate his re-attachment to Nature. This relationship then becomes inverted in the course of the third stanza so that at the very end, Nature mediates the poet's relationship with one of his friends, Charles Lamb:

My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook  
Beat its straight path across the dusky air  
Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing  
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)  
Had cross'd the mighty Orb's dilated glory,  
While thou stood'st gazing; or, when all was still, 
Flew creeking o'er thy head, and had a charm  
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom  
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.

He blesses the rook, not for what it is, but for what it is to his gentle-hearted friend. This natural creature, and the sun that is its setting, is a link to his friend, just has his friend had been his link to nature earlier in the poem.

What of the mechanisms?

If literature — and, by implication, the other expressive arts — is affective technology, then what are the mechanisms of that technology? How does it actually work?

I regard those questions as real. Even if one accepts my arguments about attachment and the caretaker’s role, we’re a long way from actually understanding how that works. My essay on “This Lime-Tree Bower” has a great deal to say about how those mechanisms might work but, beyond the fact that those suggestions are speculative, considerably more detail is needed.

Much of that detail must, of course, be supplied by the cognitive and neurosciences. But I don’t believe they’re capable of going it alone, bottom-up. They’re going to need clues about how those mechanisms work, clues they can investigate. It’s not at all obvious to me that we’ll ever be able to do brain-imaging studies of people in real-life episodes of courtship or grieving, but we’re certainly within range of doing such studies of people reading and responding to literary texts. Independently of such studies, there’s much work to be done by simply describing, in detail, how such texts are structured.

* * * * *

Earlier posts in this series:

• Mode & Behavior 1: Sonnet 129
• Mode & Behavior 2: McCulloch’s Model
• Mode & Behavior 3: Music, Language, and Beyond