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Bourneville is not known to many people even though he
had attempted to demonstrate that hypnotic trance represents an interpretation
model for many psychosocial manifestations, such as mediumistic states,
the behaviour of crowds or even mystic ecstasies. Placed halfway as
regards popularity, is Pierre Janet, remembered almost exclusively for
his book "From Anguish to Ecstasy", which is still today a basic reference
text for all those who have an interest in religious psychology; however
this author certainly deserves today an overall revaluation, since he
was the only one who passionately and enthusiastically continued to
investigate consciousness and trance, leaving behind a significant bulk
of writings and ideas which are now becoming topical again. For instance,
it is to this aristocratic and reserved thinker that we owe the term
"dissociation", an expression which is misused, but has deeply entered
the psychiatric language. Janet used the word "désagregation" to indicate
that mental phenomenon, both common and perfectly physiological, which
enables us to do two things at the same time: while we are driving a
car we can at the same time be engaged in conversation with a passenger;
while we are speaking on the telephone we can at the same time doodle
on a piece of paper; we can walk along the street while reading a book
and our "automatic pilot" enables us to reach our destination without
having to devote our whole attention to the task.
Janet believed this capacity of our mind to be the basic foundation
of trance and now, after over a century, many experts share this opinion.
On the other hand, the term "dèsagregation", corresponding to the English
word "dissociation", has become a synonym for serious pathology, giving
rise to continuous misunderstandings and communication problems. Janet
also devised the concept of "mental automatism" and of "narrowing the
field of consciousness", which have also been accepted in psychiatrics
even though, again, they have been misused. The point is that Janet
was a "physiologist" of consciousness rather than a psychopathologist,
and therefore, in view of the interests of culture in his days, he was
almost doomed to be forgotten. Furthermore, in the latter part of his
life, he developed a greater interest for the philosophic aspects of
consciousness, thus giving up the physiological and clinical side and
entering a frontier territory which was only of marginal interest to
clinicians and psychologists.
In fact, after the triumph of the psychoanalytical theory, with the
importance it attached to dreams, the attention of neurophysiology and
psychology focussed on the physiology of sleep and dreaming and, on
these themes, extremely important work was started which was to lead
to milestone discoveries, but was also to definitely diverge from the
idea that consciousness and its altered states are, even if only functionally,
related to certain disorders, or that hypnosis can be of use in psychotherapy.
The pivotal concept on which many neuroscientists have based (and continue
to base) their work is that consciousness is produced by the activity
of neurons and studies on sleep and dreaming seem to have demonstrated
this very fact: when asleep or dreaming, the brain functions in a different
way than when it is awake. Broadly speaking, this was the situation
in the 1950's, at the beginning of the so-called "psychedelic era",
when the high propagation of psychoactive substances started a pressing
interest for chemically induced modified states of consciousness. A
number of neurobiologists became enthusiastic about the idea of having
at their disposal "chemical scalpels" with which they could demonstrate
that consciousness has also a strong neurochemical basis.
In fact, it was (and it is) extremely surprising that a few hundred
millionths of a gram, a nearly homeopathic dose of LSD, is able to completely
disrupt the operating program of normal consciousness; and this discovery
not only strengthened the idea that consciousness is a "secretion" of
the neurons, but it seemed also to indicate that it is possible to study
the neurobiology of consciousness and that neurochemistry could be the
most direct way to the understanding of the pathogenesis of many psychiatric
disorders. The international prohibition, requested by the United States
government and undersigned by all the western governments, against the
production and experimentation of the so-called psycho-dyslectic drugs,
interrupted this kind of research and obliged neurobiologists to study
consciousness by taking different paths and exploring other approaches.
Meanwhile, we have witnessed a great change in scientific research,
which is no longer carried out by small groups of researchers confined
to small geographical areas, as it happened in the times of Charcot
and Freud, but is widely practised in countless laboratories scattered
all over the world. The result is that we now have much essential but
incomplete information about consciousness; all these pieces of information
remain confined within the field of research in which they were discovered,
waiting to be put together and connected in a mosaic capable of giving
them the coherence of a global image, that which in Anglo-Saxon scientific
language is called a "model".
In neuropsychology, for example, the studies on the different functional
roles of the two cerebral hemispheres have been absolutely fundamental,
and they seem to indicate that wakeful consciousness actually consists
of two coexistent and collaborating consciousnesses, even though one
of them, the consciousness of the left hemisphere, has a leading role.
This discovery should encourage neurophysiologists to find the real
basis of the phenomenon of hemispheric dominance but so far the subject
does not seem to have aroused the interest it deserves. This issue becomes
far more urgent when considering the fortuitous observation, made on
subjects whose two hemispheres have been surgically separated (that
is they have undergone commisurotomy).
These
patients claim that, after undergoing the operation, they no longer
have dreams: electroencephalographic tests demonstrate that in the right
hemisphere the regular alternation of the REM phases takes place, whereas
such phases have disappeared in the left one. On the other hand, oneirologists
(and therefore experimental psychology) have demonstrated that dream
activity is not confined to the REM phase, but is fully present in every
phase of sleep. In this manner they have given the psychoanalytic theory
a shake-up and have, at the same time, strengthened the concept that
the brain is basically a data processor (a computer) and that every
state of consciousness is characterised by a specific operating program.
Various other observations seemed to strengthen the concept that the
three basic states of consciousness, wakefulness, sleep and dreaming,
are mutually exclusive, in that one can either be awake or asleep or
dreaming, while other discoveries have demonstrated that it is possible
to retain a consciousness of wakefulness (self-consciousness) even while
dreaming: one can dream knowing that it is a dream, a phenomenon known
for a long time in parapsychology with the name of "lucid dream", but
considered impossible by academic psychology. From a clinical point
of view, the most significant progress has resulted from experimental
research into hypnosis, which has been abundantly revalued.
Hypnosis has proved to be a very useful condition of consciousness for
understanding many of its modified states. Trance was no longer to be
used as a concept for understanding ailing consciousness, but rather
for understanding physiological consciousness, as Janet had rightly
perceived. During the state of trance there would seem to be a suspension
of the dominance mechanism and contemporaneous operation of right and
left hemisphere consciousnesses, that of wakefulness and that of dreaming,
an absolutely physiological and natural functional condition, which
can only be described with the term suggested by Janet, "dissociation",
as opposed to its contrary, "association". The latter, on the other
hand, could be proposed to describe the cooperation which characterises
ordinary consciousness when the dominance mechanism is fully active.
Based on this theory of the structure of trance, and based on the discovery
that in a divided brain the left hemisphere can no longer dream, there
has been the suggestion that the right hemisphere might be the seat
of the Freudian unconscious.
This
suggestion, on the one hand, at last provides the unconscious with an
exact neuronal seat, but on the other hand considerably reappraises
the very concept of the unconscious: it is no longer seen as an unreachable
dimension, which is remote and uncontrollable, but rather as being easily
accessible by inducing a state of trance, and influenceable by means
of the rationality of the left hemisphere. In short we could carry on
with a list of small discoveries or important observations which are
gradually leading us towards a model of consciousness, but are, at this
stage, still scattered and complete in themselves. Nevertheless a number
of attempts have been made in order to link these scattered data together;
these have resulted in at least two models which have influenced for
a few years the activity of the experts.
The
first model is the one suggested by Roland Fischer who called it "map
of the states of consciousness" because it should be of use both to
internal navigators and to researchers to find their way in the labyrinths
of consciousness. According to Fischer, having accepted the brain/computer
metaphor, the state of consciousness of relaxed wakefulness corresponds
to an operating state where there is a substantial balance between amount/speed
of data input in the central processing unit and the related processing
speed. In the metaphor, the processing unit is the cerebral cortex,
the input from senses (sight, hearing, touch etc.) corresponds to the
keyboard and the soma represents the peripheral units on which the processing
results appear (changes in the internal chemical state, changes in the
neurovegetative parameters, actions etc.). The state of consciousness
of relaxed wakefulness is considered the landmark and from this, by
increasing or reducing the amount of sensorial data entered in the computer,
or by increasing the processing speed, it is possible to obtain/induce
some changes in the state of consciousness, which are somehow proportionate
to the increase or reduction in the processor's workload.
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