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The emotional self and braindynamics

Conference Paper · May 2008

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Ilpo Helén
University of Eastern Finland
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Ilpo Helén#

The emotional self and braindynamics

Our brains, our selves ENSN workshop, Harvard University 1-3 May 2008

Abstract

My paper is a sketch of the core themes of my on-going research. My subject is historical

ontology of mood disorders (Ian Hacking) or political technologies of mood control (Michel
Foucault), depending on which aspects of the research are emphasised. In my paper, I will
continue the recent discussion on the neurochemical or psychopharmaceutical self (e.g.
Nikolas Rose, Emily Martin, and David Karp). I approach this issue by analysing excerpts
from autobiographical accounts of depression, which illuminate both a folk model of the
‘braindynamic’ notion of personhood and a regimen of personal living (Lebensführung) with
a mood disorder and psychotropic drugs. I make a sort of archaeological excursion into
these personal accounts and put them in the context of two historical lineages. The first frame
for today’s understanding of mood disorders is the descent of the affective self, and I will
outline sources of and events in the development by which affects or emotions have become
considered a driving force of human existence, as well as the key to understand and conduct
personal existence. While this story reaches back to the 17th century or even further in the
past, the second one, the descent of braindynamics, is delimited to more recent history. The
central issue here is how has the affective – or passionate or emotional – core of personal
existence become increasingly seen as embedded in or caused by neurochemical functioning
of the brain and even linked with genetic variation between human individuals. My paper
will focus on the latter, and I will claim that braindynamics both in lay and scientific versions
constitutes the relationship between the brain(s) and the self or personhood in practical terms.
In other words, it is the problematics of treatability, modifiability or control of emotions or
the mood and the corresponding techniques through which the connection between the brain
functioning and the personal conduct and being is established.

#
Adjunct Professor (docent), Academy Research Fellow; address: Department of Sociology,
P.O. Box 18 (Unioninkatu 35); 00014 University of Helsinki; FINLAND; e-mail:
[email protected]
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My paper is yet another expedition into historical ontology of mood disorders. Historical
ontology is Ian Hacking’s concept. It alludes to an idea that everything that is, or everything
that we think and experience to exist, can or is even bound to change. Further, it relates to
historico-philosophical reflection, or critique, of ourselves, our time and world, our condition
humaine. Finally, historical ontology is about being a person, or a moral subject:
‘Historical ontology [is directed] to what is possible to be or to do. (...) [It] is about
the ways in which the possibilities for choice, and for being, arise in history (...) in
terms of explicit formations in which we constitute ourselves. Historical ontology is
not so much about the formation of character as about the space of possibilities for
character formation that surround a person, and create potentials for “individual
experience”.’ (Hacking 2002, 22-23.)

Two years ago I gave a talk about the same theme at the BIOS centre, London School of
Economics. I focused then on depression as a thing and outlined or three ways by which we
today conceive of depression as an object, as something (Helén, 2008). In other words, the
subject of my talk two years ago was the ways depression is attributed with objectivity in the
context of mental health thought and practice.

Today I approach my theme from a different perspective. I focus on those elements of current
discourse that define mood disorders by referring to personal experiences, life situation,
biography, character or personality traits. In this context, depression, mania, dysthymia etc.
are about problems of being a person and essentially related to the core of personal existence
and conduct, i.e. to the self.

I concentrate on a particular manner by which ‘mood disordered’ personal being and the self
are reasoned in the professional discussion, especially among mental health experts with
neuropsychiatric orientation. My choice for an exemplary of such reasoning is Mood apart
(1997), a well-known book by a UCLA neuropsychiatrist Peter Whybrow. Two elements of
this a ‘compendium’, as the author calls the book, are of particular interest. First, Whybrow
emphasises time and again that what the person feels, i.e. his or her emotional reactions, is
the bedrock of personal existence and personhood, and thus the self is essentially emotional.
Second, Whyborw’s discussion on how depression and other mood disorders are personal
experiences and how they are related to particular individuals is embedded in a reasoning I
call braindynamics.

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Thought space

For a scholar like me, ‘the emotional self’ or ‘the emotional brain’ are histocially sedimented
and contingent notions, they are the truths of an era. However, it would be pointless to try to
refute or affirm the validity of those notions as a general anthropology or a theory of mind
through a historical critique. Instead, the tracing of origins and lineages should be focused on
historical particularity: What exactly is said when the above notions are used? What is their
novum, if any? What sort of reasoning and doing they facilitate or even enable, and what
restrict? Obviously, such questions are not only connected with the concepts but also with
discoursive and practical settings in which the concepts are defined, deployed and disputed.
And when the contexts are studied it is inevitable that the concepts and objects they refer
become to be seen as multiple (see Mol, 2002).

With the directions of inquiry in mind, I present a close reading of braindynamic rationale in
Whybrow’s comprehensive book on mood disorders. Before going into the text itself, I
present an outline of how I understand braindynamics and its epistemic composition.

My analysis presupposes that braindynamics re-interprets psychodynamic truths; or, more

precisely, it conquers the terrain of psychodynamics as the paradigmatic rationale for talking
about human emotions or affective basis of human existence, experience or conduct, about
the self essentially affective or emotional. There are two epistemological requirements for a
successful conquest. First, braindynamcs needs a metapsychology, in other words, a theory of
mind that focuses on dynamic interactions between feelings, moods, memory and personality.
Second, braindynamics has to provide a specific discourse or ‘language’ for discussion on the
specific character of the emotional self and its disturbances case by case.

Braindynamics is not a scientific discipline like neuropsychology, and neither is it a

multidisciplinary research programme like cognitive science. Rather, it is an epistemic
formation that crosses disciplines enabling the idea that human emotions, moods and desires
are facts to be studied scientifically and form a route to the human soul and the self. In
Foucault’s (1970) terms, braindynamics is savoir, historically contingent epistemic
groundwork that mediating between different types of empirical sciences which have
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emotion, mood or desire as their object. This characterisation owes much to Ian Hacking. In
fact, braindynamics can be outlined in a manner parallel to Hacking’s science of memory.

In Rewriting the soul (1995) Hacking studied history of psychological knowledge through a
genealogy of psychological trauma – in a way he presented a genealogy of the unconscious,
although he used the term ‘forgotten’. A decisive turning point in this story happened in the
late 19th century when certain empirical science defined memory as their object ant it became
scientifically legitimate to make claims about memory which could be argued to be true or
false by appealing to systematic empirical evidence. According to Hacking, memory was
conceived of as a substitute for the soul, and when the sciences of memory presented new
facts about memory, they indirectly turned the soul into an object of empirical investigations;
this was a rupture in the Western tradition of thought about the soul. The new ‘science of the
soul’ was also practical: the new increasing knowledge about the facts of memory opened up
new opportunities to care and cure, modify and control the soul, or the inner aspect of human
life.

A rough sketch of how did Hacking think that psychological sciences triangulated the soul
and defined memory as their object in three ways is presented in figure 1.What is essential in
the ‘soul pole’ is that the object of study is the memory of the individual. In the memory, the
basic emotional experiences of his or her life are stored, and that ‘warehouse’ is essentially
unconscious and beyond deliberate control. As such, it defines uniqueness of the person; so,
it is the self, soi-même.

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Now, braindynamics fits well into the same pattern, or even better than the sciences of
memory (figure 2). The first pole is obvious: emotions as vital functions and processes of the
human body are the terrain of neurosciences and psychopharmacology. They provide us with
the facts, theories of and controversies over physiology, anatomy, biochemistry and even
genetics of human emotional life. In the second epistemic terrain, emotions are seen in the
context of population and, in particular, objects of measurement and statistical analysis. With
this sort of objects and objectivity, we move to the fields of psychological testing and
psychiatric epidemiology. The rating scales of mood disorders symptoms used as a research
instrument epidemiological studies and clinical drug trials, as a diagnostic tool in clinical
practice, and as a popular device for personal mood assessment are crucial in this setting.
Equally important are epidemiological studies on depressive and manic disorders and
symptoms in the population.i

How about the third epistemic pole in the assemblage of brainsdynamics? The first
requirement for scientific reasoning in this setting is a discourse or ‘a theory of mind’ equal
to the metapsychology in psychoanalysis that would explicate personal emotional
experiences, define the self as regards to emotions, and explain human variation in emotional
reactions and mood on the basis of physiology and biochemistry of the brain. In addition,
braindynamics should enable detection and interpretation of emotional swings and patterns of

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an individual, as well as provide the basis for answering why this particular person falls ill
with depression or bipolar disorder, while someone else does not.

These requirements leads us the same direction as did the ratings scales and psychiatric
epidemiology: to the realm of mental health care and mental disorders, especially depressive
and bipolar illness. And I suppose we are dealing with quite recent discourse. In any case, I
would suggest that Peter Kramer’s Listening to Prozac (1994) is a fine example of a
braindynamic discourse, as is also Whybrow’s book. These books share a common approach
to the issue of embeddedness of emotional life and personality in the brain functioning. A
noteworthy feature of both books is a genuine attempt to thorough analysis and interpretation
of individual cases in a neuroscientific framework. Here is an example of this style of
reasoning (Hacking, 2002: 178-199), a braindynamic reasoning in cases. John Moorehead is a
case in which Whybrow’s returns many times in his book, and this quotation demonstrates
well what sort of questions are asked, and how they relate to a case in the braindynamic
reasoning:
‘What disorganization of neuronal regulation was John Moorehead describing to me,
for example, when he characterized depression as “a terrifying loss of self-control, a
paralysis, a stoke of the will”? (...) John went on to describe how making coffee,
brushing his teeth, and other minor decisions became like “career choices, like
whether of not to leave the Church.” Does such experience reflect the amygdala
adopting a different set point – comparable to turning down the thermostat – that
slows down the limbic processing of executive decisions? And what about the internal
rumination over morbid past experience? Does this reflect contonous, purposeless
communication among the neuronal centres of the limbic alliance in the absence of
decision-making?’ (Whybrow, 1997: 145-146.)

The limbic self

‘The stress of environmental and social changes, by disturbing homeostasis and disturbing
the emotional brain, can precipitate mood disorder in vulnerable individuals’ (Whybrow,
1997: 151). This is Peter Whybrow’s view of mood disorders, both depressive and bipolar
illness, in a nutshell. There is nothing extraordinary in it, and I suppose that almost any
mental health expert in the West could find it acceptable. But what sort elements is this
notion made of?

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Whybrow sees three types of symptoms in mood disorders: 1) disturbance of emotion and
mood; 2) disturbance of ‘housekeeping’ functions like sleeping, eating, day rhythm, sexual
appetite; 3) cognitive disturbance, especially in memory, concentration and decision-making.
‘These disturbed patterns of behaviour all reflect a progressive upheaval of brain regulation’,
says Whybrow. This grouping of pathophenomenology fits perfectly to the functions of what
Whybrow calls ‘the emotional brain’. There is nothing peculiar in this view. In
neuropsychiatric literature, symptoms of depression or bipolar disorder are quite often
grouped in a similar way, and they are self-evidently related to the regulation of emotional
reactions by the certain subsystems of the brain (see below).

What is noteworthy in Whybrow’s argument is his definition of the self ii through this
neuroscientific concept of mood disorders and emotion. In fact, the pinpoint of Whybrow’s
discussion on mood disorders is to consider them as conditions which, in Andrew Salomon
(2002: 15) words, ‘degrade one’s self’, i.e. as profound distortions of the core of personal
existence. He presents this view very clearly:
‘(...) By disturbing the function of the brain – the emotional brain – the illness enters
and disturbs the person, that collection of feelings, behaviours, and beliefs that
uniquely identify the individual self.’ (Whybrow, 1997: xvi)
‘(...) because emotional life lies at the very core of being a person, to accept that
emotion and mood can be “dis-ordered” calls into question the very experience that
most of us take for granted – the presence of (...) the self. The familiarity and stability
of this personal being are threatened when emotion and mood are disturbed.’
(Whybrow, 1997: 7-8)

Thus, Whybrow claims that the self is essentially emotional, and its existence and
sustainability are necessarily embedded in the brain, namely in the orderly functioning of the
emotional brain. Mood disorders have a special role in his reasoning because they make
manifest that the self is tightly entwined with the brain:
‘Depression and manic depression are thus very special diseases of the brain; they are
afflictions of the private person – the emotional self. It is not easy recognize of accept
their intruding presence, for in disturbing the neurobiological systems that regulate the
emotional brain, they distort the personality. This difficulty in separating the self from
the illness is a recurring confusion in mood disorder (...).’ (Whybrow, 1997: 8)

So, illness and even emotions can be seen ontologically different from the self, while the self
is inseparable from the brain. However, it is ‘emotion’iii that conceptually allows Whybrow to
reason in such a reductionist manner. I will return to the theory of the self that is included in

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his analysis of mood disorders. Before that, I take a glimpse on what our neuropsychiatrist
means by ‘the emotional brain’.

Not surprisingly, the location of emotions in the human brain is the limbic system. In the
figure below, you see how Whybrow delineates its anatomy. He shares a common
neuroscientific understanding of this subsystem. It is phylogenetically the oldest and most
primitive, and it has two basic functions: monitoring and regulation of the basic survival
drives (the housekeeping functions of the body, as Whybrow says) and regulation of
emotions. For fulfilling the latter function, the storage of memory traces of emotional
reactions and recalling them in the contextualising process of actual emotional reactions also
belongs to limbic functions of the brain. (See e.g. Andreasen 2001, 70-71.).

Whybrow defines the functions of the limbic system in an interesting way. Naturally, the
control of the brain centers responsible for maintenance of the body’s vital functions and
housekeeping activities are listed, as well as the regulation of emotional response or, in
Whybrow words, monitoring of ‘the changing social environment and communicat[ing]
need’. Besides these tasks, the limbic system has an additional function, the first in
Whybrow’s list: ‘to ensure the development of the next generation through attachment,
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nurturance, and learning of new skills’. (Whybrow, 1997: 129) Now, Whybrow sees the latter
and the regulation of emotional response tightly intertwined in the limbic functions of the
brain. This view leads us away from the framework of functional anatomy of the brain to
another context that is central to Whybrow’s braindynamics.

To Whybrow, the limbic system is more or less the same – both functionally and
anatomically – as the ‘ancient mammalian brain’, expect for those centers that monitor
circadian rhythm, sleeping, appetites and other survival functions of the human organism and
equals the ‘reptilian brain’. This choice of the terms already reveals that the most important
framework for Whybrow’s discussion on the emotional brain is evolutionary biology or,
more precisely, evolutionary neuroscience. Leaning on Paul MacLean’s idea of triune brain
(1990), our neuropsychiatrist argues that habitual modes of living have evolved hand in hand
with the modification of anatomy and physiology of the brain in the evolution of the species.
Thus, when the first mammals emerged in this planet they developed a social mode of living,
which would allow breastfeeding of the offspring. Social life required new kind of brain
structures and functions to develop on top of the basic ‘reptilian’ life supporting and survival
mechanisms. The former were to evolve for taking care of the expression of vital needs (by
the infant) and response to those needs (by the carer, well, the mother) which would
guarantee the survival of both the individual and the species. According to Whybrow, this is
what emotions essentially are about; and the most elementary relationship that emerged from
this exchange of expressions of the needs and ‘instinctual’ responses to them is attachment.

So, the early mammalian brain – out of which the limbic alliance in the human brain has
evolved – emerged in the evolutionary process to manage the emotional mechanism of
attachment. Because Whybrow’s reasoning takes place in the context of the evolution theory,
the latter were naturally in the service of survival and adaptation. In sum, attachment is a
specific feature of the emotional adaptation of a living creature, in a functional sense, and
emotions, as well as the brain physiology and anatomy they are embedded in, serve the social
tie. Thus, Whybrow defines emotions primarily social and, at the same time, sees emotional
reactions as the bedrock for the social life. Emotions are fuel for affections, the actualizations
of the latter.

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However, the social essence of the emotion is mixed with more primitive adaptive and
survival mechanisms by which an organism reacts to the external stimuli and sensations;
again, we are dealing with basic housekeeping of the organism and the immediate reactions
to external ‘input’. For this reason, Whybrow emphasise that the emotions evolved to serve
adaptation to both social and natural environments. In a sense, emotions form an interface
between ‘higher’ modes of adaptation by learning and through complex social relationships
and ‘lower’ patterns of reaction to external and internal impulses and sensations. And indeed,
emotions have the same place also in the evolutionary schema (the ancient mammalian brain)
and in the map of functional brain anatomy (the limbic system).

It is obvious that Whybrow’s closer description of brain functions and mechanisms of mood
disorders is not solely based on the evolutionary tale of the brain – the latter only provides a
general framework for his thought. In harmony with current neuroscience, he sees the brain
as a complex network of information processing and communication by biochemical means
which orchestrates the adaptive functioning of an organism. And of course, he emphasise
plasticity of the human brain and its enormous capacity to learn.

The limbic system is also a multi-centred network wired to process, monitor and disseminate
information required in controlling emotional reactions of the brain and the body, and it is
naturally connected with other specialized IC networks of the brain. Normally, the flow of
chemically mediated information is fluid and accurate allowing the organism to response the
external challenges by adequate adaptation. But in mood disorders this system has gone out
of the track:
‘The usually precise interchange of messages that sustain communication among
thalamus, hippocampus, amygdala, and the frontal cortex of the limbic alliance is
disturbed. New information from the environment is no longer attended to or
processed swiftly by the thalamus, and the emotional memory banks of the frontal
lobe churn without purpose, as the true emotional significance of ongoing events
becomes blurred by the preoccupation with remembrance. The homeostatic systems
of the emotional brain have adopted a new steady state, one less responsive to the
environment and less adaptive.’ (Whybrow, 1997: 145)

In the light of what Whybrow says about the emotional brain, it is possible to find four
different mechanisms by which mood disorders evolve – or four pathways of mood disorder
to distort the emotional self. First, there is the pathway of evolution or a phylogenetic
pathway: depression or mania is engender by a continuous mismatch between the adaptive
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apparatus regulating vital functions and emotional basis of being and the requirements of
social and natural environment. In the thought space of current neuroscience, phylogenesis
goes hand in hand with ontogenesis, and thus the first pathway implies a pathway for mood
disorders related to the basic biological development of the human individual. In this context,
depression and mania are rooted in defects of the genetic coding or biological processes of
the brain development.

Phylogenetic and ontogenetic pathways of mood disorders are developmental accounts.

Depression, dramatic mood swings, and their potential to afflict the self are explained by
referring to some features in the evolution of the species or to defects in the parallel
biological development of the individual human organism. Two remaining pathways for
mood disorders outlined in Whybrow’s book come closer to the world of mental health
clinics and therapy, and their model of explanation is functional. The third pathway is
functional anatomy: depression or bipolar disorder is a malfunction of the limbic
(communication) system in a manner described above. Finally, there is the familiar
biochemical pathway: disturbances in the endocrine system regulating the secretion of the
stress hormones (cortisol and adrenaline) and in neurotransmitter metabolism in the brain
affect emotional regulation and mood in a devastating way.

Mood apart shares a common characteristic with many other professional ‘compendia’ of
mood disorders: namely, it does not try to synthesize the above different pathways or
perspectives into a theoretical model of mood disorders. But it does not lack of a basic
principle, either. For Whybrow, mood disorders, the emotional self, and the emotional brain
etc. are all about adaptation, particularly, about adaptation of an individual organism. Thus,
depression, mania and uncontrollable mood swings are adaptive failures of the individual.
More precisely, a mood disorder is an outcome of a too rigid response to challenges and
pressures – i.e. to stress – from external environment (both natural and social) by an
organism. In turn, the rigidness of response results from lack of plasticity and flexibility in
the organism’s adaptive brain mechanisms, particularly in those regulating emotions and the
related vital functions. Due to this deficit, the individual gets depressed or heads on a mood
rollercoaster of bipolar illness.

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But what role does the self play in this adaptation? When Whybrow discusses about the self
and defines it essentially emotional, he actually speaks about a sense of the self, by which he
means a some sort of sense or feeling of continuity of existence; thus, the self refers to the
concept of identity in a sense of ‘remaining the same’. Because this sense of the self is based
on emotions, it is profound, ‘archaic’ and unconscious in the same sense as health was
defined as ‘life lived in the silence of the organs’ by a French physiologist René Leriche
(cited in Canguilhem, 1989: 91). Furthermore, because the self is emotional, its reflexive
activities (see above) consists of adapting, responding and reacting to impulses and
sensations from outside to serve the survival and functionality of the organism. In other
words, when attribute ‘emotion’ is tied up with the idea of the self, the latter is necessarily
defined reactive.

My analysis points to the same direction as Whybrow’s discussion. The self is embedded in
the brain structures and mechanisms that regulate emotional life and maintain the basic
housekeeping of the body. The self is a part of the human adaptive mechanism; or, to be
precise, the self has a particular function in this mechanism. Let’s think of what Whybrow
says about the basics of mood disorders: first, they are or result from an adaptive failure;
second, they are essentially major afflictions of the self. If this understanding is put in
Whybrow’s general framework of evolutionary neuroscience, the ‘self-function’ of the
human adaptive machinery becomes clear. Distortion of the self, i.e. of a sense of existential
continuity, by depression or manic-depressive illness functions as an alarm to the organism, it
is a red alert indicating that the basic mechanism maintaining of the vital functions do not
work properly. So, the self is a fuse in the neurotransmission network wired up throughout
the human adaptive machinery.

Temperament, susceptibility and stress

The above view of the self provides just a general braindynamic concept of the self, or ‘the
emotional self’, and it thus is a kind of a theory of mind. This theory does not say anything
about the self as the anchorage of uniqueness of an individual person, and it does not provide
us with the means to answer why a particular person falls ill with depression or mania.

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Whybrow deploys two conceptual clusters to approach the relationship of mood disorders to
the individually unique self. The first one is temperament and the other is what I call, in
accordance with the current vocabulary, susceptibility, although Whybrow speaks of
vulnerability to mood disorders throughout his book.

Resurrection of temperament has happened in discussion on psychiatric disorders and in the

field of developmental and pedagogic psychology during the past two decades. In its current
mode, temperament is a biopsychological typology of inborn personality traits.iv In the
discussions of psychiatrists, psychologists and geneticists working on mental disorders
temperament has been closely connected with ideas of individual variation embedded in brain
chemistry and research in molecular medicine detecting genetic susceptibilities for mental
disorders (see Rose, 2007: 188-209). One advocate of this view is Hagop Akiskal, a professor
of psychiatry at the University of California in San Diego. His dimensional approach to mood
disorders and attempt to overcome the rigid separation of depression from bipolar disorder by
the idea of mood spectrum are based on the above idea of temperament. As related to the
studies of mood spectrum disorders, he has discussed a lot about affective personality types
or ‘thymic’ temperaments that he divides into dysthymic, hyperthymic and cyclothymic
subtypes. These ideas have been quite influential. Peter Kramer (1994) used Akiskal’s view
on temperament as the backbone of his argument on personal susceptibility to depressive
illness and on effects of Prozac to those susceptibilities and depressive personality traits. Also
Whybrow’s discussion on vulnerability to depression or bipolar illness is mostly grounded by
Akiskal’s theories and studies on the relationship between mood spectrum disorders and
temperaments.

Whybrow’s view is not very complicated. For him, temperament means the same as the
personal emotional style or pattern of emotional reactions. Moreover, if a person has thymic
temperament – i.e., his or her emotional reaction usually lead to enduring sadness or worry or
to volatile mood – he or she is more inclined to fall ill with depression or bipolar disorder
than people with more stable or resilient personality. Whybrow emphasises the biological
aspect of temperament: the basic combination of personality traits is not only inborn, it is
biologically inherited, i.e. genetic. Thus, vulnerability to a mood disorder is genetically
engraved in a person’s vital functions or, more precisely, in his or her emotional brain. From

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this perspective, what makes a person’s emotional self unique is inclination to a mood
disorder, his/her vulnerability.

It is noteworthy that Whybrow does not discuss about actual experience or onset of
depression or mania but the potentiality or likelihood of mood disorders, inherent in an
individual person. For him, ‘melancholic person’ does to refer to people who always feel blue
or live under endless dejection but to the persons who are likely or ‘at-risk’ to fall into a
melancholy of some sort.

All said above lead to another conceptual setting in which Whybrow discusses about
particularity of the person. In this setting, susceptibility to mood disorders – or, in
Whybrow’s terminology, vulnerability – is the core issue. In fact, temperament means
essentially the same as susceptibility in neuropsychiatric discourse. Regarding personal
susceptibility, much of research in the field is focused on tracing susceptibility to mood
disorders back to neurochemical processes in the brain and to ‘susceptibility genes’. From
this perspective, temperament is molecular susceptibility, or it can be said that temperamental
susceptibility to depression or bipolarity is embedded in the variations or ‘defects’ of
molecular processes. In any case, the idea of temperament serves here as a general framework
connecting the level of neurochemistry and genomics to the realm of psychopathological
phenomena.

However, while Whybrow focuses on molecular biology of susceptibility – on molecular

susceptibility, if you like – he suggests, at least implicitly, that there might be subtle
variations in neurotransmitter metabolism, receptor functioning or genetic coding which may
contribute the onset of depressive or manic episode in a certain circumstances. Such an idea
of minor variation that do not express themselves as differences in temperament would be
very compatible with the development by which depressive and bipolar disorders have
expanded to cover mild mood disorders and even single symptoms, and there is an increasing
emphasis on ‘subthreshold’ forms of depressive or bipolar illness. Thus writes Whybrow,
with a taste of future optimism:
‘(...) we will discover a variety of genetic variations, each of which can
predispose an individual to bipolar illness, including milder forms such as
seasonal affective disorder or the hyperthymia of great achievement. Probably
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 each variant will be responsible for a slightly unusual genetic code in the
library of instructions that builds the machinery of the neuron. The resulting
minor deviations – for example, in the metabolism of neurotransmitters, the
building of receptors, in the enzymes, or the messenger systems that transport
information within the neurons of SCN [suprachiasmatic nuclei] – will each
disturb the dynamics of regulatory function.’ (Whybrow, 1997: 162-163)

Furthermore, Whybrow also discusses another possible pathway through which deviations of
brain chemistry and mechanisms of emotional regulation may evolve and affect experiences
and conduct of the person. On this route, malign molecular variations are not inborn or
genetic but outcomes of a mechanism called ‘kindling’ in the professional discourse. The idea
kindling originated from neurology of epilepsy. In this context, the term referred to a process
whereby a stimulus that does not by its own right trigger an epileptic fit, but if given
regularily over a period of time, can lead to a test animal having spontaneous seizures
although the original stimulus is absent (Healy, 2008: ch 6.). Kindling is widely used, and it
has acquired a more general meaning in current neuropsychiatric discussions on mental
disorders. For example, it a central concept for a current neurobiological understanding of
trauma. According to the latter, the memory of the traumatic event is etched into the
traumatised person’s systems of neurotransmitters and hormones that regulate stress
reactions, so that trauma becomes independent of mental experience and the essential
recollection, or repetition, of the trauma takes place on the physiological level (see Leys,
2000: 229-45, 254-65). Peter Kramer (1994) applies a similar rationale to depression. He
claims that prolonged stress or a severe trauma may, besides causing psychological effects,
affect a person’s neurotransmitter metabolism and cortisol secretion so profoundly that these
physiological systems begin to react independently of external stimuli. In turn, this reaction
affects the person’s feelings and behaviour and may cause depression, panic disorders,
inhibition or low self-esteem; in fact, kindling of this kind may even change the pattern of the
person emotional reactions (i.e. what Whybrow calls the emotional self). Kramer deploys this
view to support his claim that Prozac is able to change personality of the depressed person.

Whybrow discusses the relationship between neurobiological kindling and mood disorders in
a way parallel to Kramer: However, he puts the issue in a wider framework of stress. With
this theme, Whybrow’s picture of the emotional self becomes complete. Obviously,
melancholic or ‘thymic’ temperament or susceptibility to mood disorders alone is not enough

15
to make an individual ill with depression or bipolar disorder. Something is needed to trigger
the disorder, a precipitating factor from ‘environment’.

By making tasks, challenges or even threats, the environment causes stress to the organism.
By reacting to stress in an adequate way, by coping with it, the organism adapts into the
environment. And through constant adaptation the organism achieves internal and external
harmony, or homestasis. Thus, stress and adaptation are conceptually entwined to each other,
as stress is defined as if a force that drives adaptation. However, ‘under circumstances of
chronic challenge, the stress response persists beyond the point of useful coping, an as
adaptation fails, stress itself become the damaging agent’ (Whybrow, 1997: 151). This is
what happens in mood disorders.

In this light, it is easy to see what Whybrow means when he says that depression and mania
are essentially afflictions of the self. Conceiving of mood disorders as an adaptive failures
means that stress reaction mechanisms in human body, including the brain, keep on running
even in the absence of a stressful situation or impulses. In other words, stress becomes
kindled in an actual mood disorder, i.e. stress is embodied in the self and it eats away the
emotional core of the person. However, an essential requirement for this to happen is
susceptibility of the person:
‘(...) whatever specific functional deficit determines the vulnerability to mood
disorder, the neuronal centres of the brain will work to minimize its behavoiural
effect. This ongoing self-correction – a necessary baseline adaptation – burdens
performance, however, and reduces the brains’s adaptive capacity under stressful
circumstances. What is really referred to when we speak about vulnerability is this
diminish capacity to function under stress.’ (Whybrow 1997: 163)

Attachment

At the end of my paper, I return to the theme of attachment in Whybrow’s book. A key
element in his view is that the main adaptive function of emotion is to initiate and maintain
the elementary social organisation, the relationship of nurture and care between the child and
the mother. For Whybrow, the core meaning of emotion is almost the same as attachment;
thus ‘emotion’ is essentially a social concept, it is about affection through which the human

16
individuals (and social animals) join permanently together. In brief, emotion is the basic
element of social mode of living.

The concept of attachment takes Whybrow’s reasoning back to Donald Winnicot and
especially to John Bowlby and further to Melanie Klein and the discourse on object relations
and pre-oedipal personality development. In fact, Whybrow’s discussion on attachment is
surprisingly congruent with Bowlby’s definitions of the concept. So, does psychoanalysis
enter into the house of braindynamics from the backdoor? This is a complicated matter. On
the one hand, Whybrow’s idea of attachment does not reach beyond biological discussion and
an evolutionary explanation. In this his view is compatible with Bowlby’s who grounded
much of his ideas about attachment and mother deprivation on experimental studies of social
and nurturing behaviour in animals and considered attachment a fundamentally biological
process, as if an instinct. On the other hand, both discursive and practical context in which
the idea of attachment has been embedded in is so saturated with psychoanalytic and
psychodynamic thought that they inevitably become an element of reasoning when the
concept is deployed.

And indeed, attachment is a sort of supplement or leftover in Whybrow’s landscape of the

emotional self. It is crucial for his concept of emotion and characterization of depression.
Yet, there seems to be no proper place or role for it in the architecture of braindynamics (see
figure 4).

17
The central role of attachment in Whybrow’s book can be seen to give support to Jonathan
Metzl’s (2003) argument that the hegemonic neuropsychiatric concepts and theories
inevitably contain a psychoanalytic ploy. That ploy directs both experts and lay people to
think that mental troubles originate from the individual’s life histories, especially from the
childhood. And in the end, they are seen to be caused by the person’s shattered or traumatic
relationships with his or her mother that distort the development of his or her personality.
According to Metzl, the general framework for this mixture is the American therapeutic
culture embedded in psychoanalysm and psychopharmacology. The main practices of this
culture are modification or ‘fixing’ feelings, moods and actions with the help of drugs (legal
and illegal), and the endless dwelling upon family relations (daddy-mommy-me) and
reduction of maladies to the Oedipal triangle and ‘ the childhood trauma’. The latter is the
terrain of psychotherapies. This practice and the notion of ‘blaming the mom and fixing it
with the pill’ developed in the U.S. in the 1950s, and by the 1980s, the everyday life of
educated middle class Americans was saturated by it.

Whybrow’s discussion on mood disorders has many elements that suit well in this therapeutic
ethos, especially his emphasis on attachment and the usual praise of psychotropic drugs.
However, there are elements that suggest to a possible season’s change in the management of
emotions. Perhaps, Whybrow was writing at the watershed between therapeutic management
of emotional wounds and practices of adjusting personal emotional ‘resources’ and moods to
the demands of the situation. The rationale of such mood control emphasises flexible
responses to changes and challenges and functionality as the measure of normality and health
(Helén, 2008; see also Martin, 2007). Many aspects of Whybrow’s discussion are compatible
with tendencies of mood control beyond mental health care and therapy: the general
framework of adaptation, focus on behaviour and a broad concept of stress. He also defines
vulnerability to mood disorders as ‘a diminish capacity to function under stress’ (Whybrow,
1997: 163). In the context of mood control, this definition will implicate that there probably
are persons with highly flexible psychobiological mechanisms for adaptation in stressful
situations and an extraordinary capacity to function under stress. This brings us to a topic that
has become hot in the neuro- and psychotechological fields, especially in the U.S.: resilience.

18
 Notes

i
Historically, the elements of braindynamics have emerged in quite different times. Systematic
empirical studies in brain anatomy and physiology have their first heyday in the late 19 th century, and
the roots of modern neurology reach even to 18th century. Modern psychopharmacology was born in
the mid-1950, and the history of rating scales and psychiatric epidemiology dates back to the late
1950s and early 1960s.
ii
In modern Western moral reasoning, the idea of the person is inconceivable without a reference to
the self that, in turn, is seen to be constituted by some sort of inwardness. The person in this sense is
doubled: besides being for others, i.e. defined by the status in a community, the person is constituted
by inner life as the source of thoughts, wishes, feelings and orientation in life which are expressed in
his or her ‘outer’ conduct. It is usually thought that the quality of this inner life and the relationship to
it, i.e. to the self, defines the actual existence of the person. Furthermore, being a person in our moral
and existential world requires individuality in a sense of uniqueness, or ownness, and reflection of the
source of this uniqueness, of the inner life. It is self-understanding that ultimately constitutes the self.
Certainly, we are dealing with a long duration of the Western thought. The idea of personal
inwardness originated in monastic asceticism of early Christianity, and the notion of unique individual
as the focus of ethical life can be traced to the ancient Greece. Here I would like to point out a moment
in this tradition of thinking of the person and the self as inwardness: the British philosophical
psychology or naturalistic philosophy of mind in the late 17th and 18th century and John Locke as its
main representative. In a way, Locke and other philosophers of the mind during that time continued
philosophical problematisation of the thinking subject, as well as the moral subject, initiated by
Descartes, and reframed the above notion of the self. In brief, Locke thought that being a person and
stability of identity over time required awareness of consciousness of the self; self-consciousness, in
turn, was embedded in human capability to remember and acquire mental or, in modern terms,
psychological continuity with the past. This identity of the person, or the self, embedded in memory
provides the bedrock for personal responsibility over the deeds, and Locke called the core of the
person, the self, forensic.
So, what characterises the idea of personhood and the self that we have inherited from the mental
philosophers of the emerging commercial society? First, the self is biographical. A basic ideas shared
by e.g. Locke and David Hume was that naturally human mind did not have any content but is a tabula
rasa. Then, it is filled with sensations from the outside world that accumulate into mental ideas and
are associated with each other by the mind. So, the personal mind evolves alongside with what the
person experience in his or her life. Locke’s and Hume’s thought did not involve any systematic
concept of inner development of the person or the self. However, it is not hard to see seeds of the idea
of personality development, an indispensable notion for our moral and psychological reasoning, in
their theories of the mind.
Furthermore, the self can be said to autobiographical. This feature stems from a duality of
memory: besides being a storage of experiences, memory referred also to the ability to associate
‘sensations’ of the past from that storage. As the self is embedded in memory, the self is necessarily
characterised by a mechanism of mental feedback or a loop that connects the past and the present –
and this loop is the groundwork for continuity of the person, for personal identity. You can even say
that the mental philosophers of the late 17th and 18th century thought of the self as such a loop; thus,
the self is reflexive.

19
 The forensic character of the self, i.e. the idea of deep-rooted inner responsibility of the person, is
based on this reflexivity. But there is more to it. The idea of self-reflection implies that the self
becomes an object of its own activities. Thus, the self refers to both the inner life of the person and an
agent that objectifies the inner life and disengages from it. Such a self-objectification and
disengagement from oneself have practical (ethical) consequences, since they are prerequisites of what
in Locke’s and Hume’s days was often called self-mastery; today, we would rather speak of self-
control or self-management. (This excursion is based on Douglas, 1992; Foucault, 1997; Hacking,
1996; Martin & Barresi, 2000; Taylor, 1989.)
iii
In much of learned discussion, especially in Anglo-Saxon world, ‘passion’, a key term in Western
tradition of moral and mental philosophy and medicine, was replaced by the term ‘emotion’ in the
mid-19th century. The latter was given such definitions like Alexander Bain’s in 1859: ‘Emotion is the
name used to comprehend all that is understood by feelings, states of feeling, pleasures, pains,
passions, sentiments, affections.’ With the eclipse of the passions, much of sensitivity to variation of
the ways by which emotional impulses are connected with human motivation and conduct was
vanished from the Western thought.
Lumping of all kinds of ‘feelings’, ‘movements’ of ‘agitations’ under one, fuzzy category and
making vocabulary of mental states more simple can be traced back to David Hume who sometimes
used ‘emotion’ in this meaning and even to John Locke who emphasized two basic ‘sensations’, pain
and pleasure, which ultimately move the human being and determine his or her existence. However, it
was Thomas Brown who in his theory of mind defined emotions as passive, non-intellectual feelings
or states of mind that were involuntary. Emotions was a class of internal affections of the mind, an
opposite of thoughts that were intellectual, active and voluntary states of mind. (The third type on
mental phenomena were external affections of the mind, i.e. sensations.) For Brown, emotions were
mental phenomena, but later in the 19th century scholars like Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer and
Charles Darwin related mental feelings and agitations, ‘emotions’, to physiological reactions of the
human body, especially the functions of the nervous system. Thus, the way was paved for William
James, a philosopher, and Carl Lange, a Nervenartz, to make the following conclusion: ‘[T]he bodily
changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and (...) our feeling of the same changes as
they occur is the emotion’.
So, what does this modern notion of emotion, the core of which is still valid today, signify? What
is said when ‘emotion’ is deployed to characterize the person, human conduct or the brain?
First, the concept of emotion makes all feelings and forms of mental agitation homogenous and
almost totally deprived of qualities. In modern discussion on emotions, only two or three ‘basic’ ones
are mentioned – fear, anger, sometimes joy. Such a scarcity makes ‘emotion’ conceptually fuzzy, and
it essentially signifies an idea that what matters is the reaction or condition of being moved or agitated,
not the quality of emotions or its object or cause. Such an emphasis is embedded in two tendencies of
the late 19th century human sciences. The first is the deployment of energetic models, i.e. metaphors of
hydraulics or electricity, to describe and explain human life and action. The other one is the quest for
the most elementary impulse or element of human (re)action, or an entity or forces that could be
proved to be the ultimate cause or determinant of human being, conduct and experience. Against this
background, ‘emotion’ belongs to the same group as ‘instinct’, ‘drive’ or even ‘reflex’. All these were
the late 19th century conceptual inventions shared by emerging human sciences and biology.
The second feature of modern notions of emotion is that it is simultaneously both a mental
phenomenon or reaction, as well as physiological. This certainly is not an invention of 19th century
psychology but dates back to the 17th century naturalistic medicine and moral philosophy, especially to
Descartes’s discussion on the passions. The Cartesian view that the body and the mind are related by a
causal relationship, usually directed from the body to the mind, was reaffirmed by the modern theories
20
of emotion. Finally, emotions are regarded as ontologically independent. Their existence and effects
cannot reduced either to the persons or to the order of the world. This makes the relationship between
emotions and the person rather complicated. From this perspective, the person cannot be regarded as
an emotional subject; rather, he or she is subjected to emotion – which is an ancient notion, of course.
However, every person has his or her own emotional life, and the only mode of being of emotions is
personal emotions. Hence, the person is a subject of a certain aspect of emotional life: he or she is
subject of emotional expression or response or reaction, but only to a certain degree. (This excursion is
based on Danziger, 1997; Dixon, 2003; Helén, 2007; Hirschman, 1977; Jackson, 1986; Richards,
1992.)
iv
The new coming of this key concept of ancient humoral medicine can be traced back to Hans
Eyschenk’s personality typology based two continuums of personality traits and Stella Chess’s and
Alexander Thomas’s comparative longitudinal study of the behavioural styles of the infants and small
children which started at the late 1950s. It should be noted that temperament has been one of the most
successful anti-psychoanalytic concepts that emerged in the 1950s and the 1960s.

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