Love Beyond Subject and Object with therapist & neuroscientist Mark Solms

 Mark Solms | Part 2 | Can love bring us beyond traditional divides?
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Mark Solms is a professor in the Department of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town: "My early research focused on the brain mechanisms of sleep and dreaming led to an interest in consciousness, which is currently my major focus. My emphasis is on brainstem mechanisms of consciousness and the foundational role of affect, emotional affect in particular. This work has included applications to various neuropsychiatric disorders, such as anosognosia and confabulatory amnesia, and, more recently, depression and addiction."

In this episode, Andrea and Mark discuss the intricate dimensions of love and consciousness. Solms and Hiott explore the various elements that constitute love, including romantic love, attachment, and care. Solms highlights the complexities of human emotions and how they integrate into love and relationships. Solms also discusses the concepts of narcissism, object love, and how the integration of different emotional drives forms advanced states of mind. The conversation touches on the importance of subjectivity in neuroscience, the development of self-awareness, and Freud's contribution to understanding human nature. The episode provides a nuanced look at how feelings are fundamental to conscious experience and the obligation of science to incorporate subjectivity into its worldview.

00:00 Understanding Consciousness and Self-Awareness
00:55 The Complexity of Love and Relationships
02:47 Introduction to the Podcast and Guest
04:48 Exploring the Concept of Love
05:40 The Components of Romantic Love
08:20 Attachment and Care in Relationships
11:56 Balancing Emotions in Love
17:18 The Role of Feelings in Human Nature
29:05 Exploring the Nature of Love in Mammals
30:33 Philosophical Love: The Quest for Knowledge
31:25 Lust and Its Complex Relationship with Love
32:42 Freud's Concept of Narcissism
35:22 Integrating Lust and Attachment
43:36 The Evolution of Consciousness
51:28 Freud's Scientific Project and Subjectivity
57:05 Balancing Objective and Subjective Realities
01:00:08 Concluding Thoughts on Love and Consciousness

Mark Solms
Hidden Spring
Love and Its Place in Nature

Transcript

Mark Solms: Love as subject and object

 [00:00:00] our own consciousness, most of us, Uh, people like you and me who, who take part in and watch podcasts, you know, we have a very complex form of consciousness.

Mark Solms: And so we take that for granted. That's what we mean by consciousness, this stuff that, that you and I are busy engaging in now, but that's an extremely highly developed complex, compound form of consciousness. it even goes beyond what I've just said to you. So, I think first we have feeling, secondly we have feeling extending onto objects.

Thirdly, we are able to abstract ourselves from that situation and recognize, oh, it is me. I, too, am an object. It is me who is feeling that about, about her, so that's third person perspective. And that's where most of us live. We live up there in abstract thoughts about our thoughts and feelings. Freud spoke of the libidinal drive [00:01:00] being, taking itself, taking the self as its object, and then you have to move to taking an object, outside object, as as your love object.

but once you start recognizing that the object too has needs, the object too is a subject, then, then you start being able to love.

 And it's involves a state of vulnerability, I keep on coming back to that.

 To have a successful loving relationship is not easy. 

the pain of separation is the risk we have to take in order to properly attach to somebody. 

 Remember the moment when I recognized my firstborn child was separate from me. It was an actual realization. It was, oh my God, he has his own mind, 

The most interesting thing about the brain is the fact that it feels like something to be a brain.

What most people think of as objective reality is also their subjective, Representation of it. 

and then we need a [00:02:00] language, which can unify both of those. And this is why I consider myself a dual aspect monist.

 Our feelings have causal consequences, it alters what the rest of the body and brain does, , the fact that it feels like something to be one.

So, I think that it is an absolute necessity and a wonder. I I'm thrilled to be studying it, just because it's so, so interesting. Fascinating, but it is also an absolute obligation on neuroscience and the whole of biology and the whole of natural science to, to integrate subjectivity into into its Weltanschauung, as they say in German,

bringing all of this together in romantic love is an enormous achievement 

hello, everyone. Welcome back to Love and Philosophy. 

Andrea Hiott: This is part two with Mark solms, who's a neuroscientist, neuropsychologist. I had a conversation with him about feeling as the hidden spring [00:03:00] last year, and we talked about love, but we didn't actually mention the word love, I don't think. So this is part two where we start with love, and the word love, and discuss that through his work, through the idea of subjectivity, I won't try and give you a summary of this because Mark himself explains everything.

Very well. We do mention Jonathan Lear and a book which I will put in the show notes about Freud and love as a basic force of human nature which is interesting and which you might remember from the conversation I had with Alvin Oey the only little thing I wish I had asked is if he really meant that we are brains who know we are brains. Because, of course, the embodied people out there would understand that we're bodies who know that we have brains. So maybe next time I talk to Mark I'll try and clarify that a bit. I'm gonna post two or three conversations in the next week or [00:04:00] so. It's just as bonus and some ideas I'm trying to work through in my research relative to this idea of empowerment in AI. I'm gonna post that coming soon, and then another one, a philosophical one. So there's a few different kinds of options coming. For those of you, I know some of you are more interested in these sorts of conversations, like the one with Mark, and others more in the artificial intelligence, others more in the philosophy. So this week everyone gets something, and I hope that it brings something good to you. It's a lot of good people doing good work that I want to share with you. And it's been quite a start to the year already. I hope you're all doing well, sending you love and philosophy. 

Anything you want to ask me before we jump in, or shall we just No, 

I'm fine. And I read, the emails you sent, so I'm I don't know why you sent me a question mark. The last thing you sent me was a question mark, but I thought maybe that was Really? 

A question mark? 

Mark Solms: Yeah. I don't 

Andrea Hiott: know.

Oh, you know what? [00:05:00] It's probably on my phone. I think I just hit a heart. And maybe it doesn't show up as the The emoji didn't show up. Oh, okay. So it was actually a heart, but you got to That you got. Maybe it shows up on the email. 

Mark Solms: I prefer a heart to a question mark. 

Andrea Hiott: Yeah. It was definitely a heart. I didn't send you a question, Mark.

But I have seen sometimes the emojis just come through like that. Yes. Of course. Yeah. 

Okay. Hi, Mark. Nice to see you again. We already said hi, but for everyone out there, hello. 

Mark Solms: Hello Andrea, good to see you too. 

Andrea Hiott: So last time we didn't talk about the big four letter word, L O V E.

So we're having another little session here to add on to that one. And I guess, just to get started, here's a question, is love a feeling in the way that you use the word?

Mark Solms: Yes, of course, love is a feeling and it's a lot more than a feeling, which I think points to the fact that it's not a,, in my view, love is not a elemental emotion.

It's a composite of a [00:06:00] number of more basic things. I suppose I should also add there's not only one kind of love. Um, I, I'm aware that this is a major feature of your, of your podcast, so I'm probably bringing calls to Newcastle by saying things like this, but, um, I'll give you my view, on this subject, uh, as if you know nothing about it.

So I, I suppose the, the major kind of love. That people that the word conjures up is romantic love. Um, and so I, I have already said I think of, of, of love as a composite, uh, state of mind. So, so let me illustrate it with romantic love. The first thing that, uh, in terms of, lemme just remind, us all as well of what I've, that what the basic, um, emotional dispositions are a, according to the.

[00:07:00] taxonomy that is most authoritative in affective neuroscience, namely that of Jak Panksepp. There's, there's lust, and there's seeking, and there's rage, and there's fear, and there's care, and there's play, and forgive me if I left anything out, there are meant to be seven of them. So, um, romantic love involves love, of course, uh, otherwise it's not romantic.

In other words, it involves sexuality, um, and It doesn't involve only sexuality. In fact, sexuality left to its own devices doesn't even need a partner. You can just masturbate and satisfy the sexual tensions that come with lust in and of itself. So that leads to the second, um, obviously major component of a loving relationship, a romantic relationship, namely that it's not only romantic, it's [00:08:00] also a relationship.

So there's attachment. involved. Um, and there, there are two attachment drives. In fact, I think the one I didn't mention a moment ago is panic slash grief. So there are two, uh, attachment drives. One of them is the one, odd name as it is, what it boils down to is the need to be cared for, the need to be cared about, the need to be wanted and needed and attended to and, and so on.

Um, yeah. And, uh, so that in a romantic relationship, you know, you want, um, sexually somebody's, uh, uh, relate relationship with you, but you want also lovingly that person's relationship with you. You want the sexual relationship to be, um, embedded within a, a deeper, richer, fuller. Connection with each other.[00:09:00] 

Um, and that leads me immediately to the third component, which is the other attachment drive called care. We don't only need to be cared for. We need and thank God it is a need. We need to care for others. It's a sort of a, a connection. nurturing, uh, nurturing drive, the so called maternal instinct. But that's obviously a misnomer because it doesn't only arise in mothers.

Um, and if incidentally, let me just add now already that if you don't integrate all of these, and I haven't yet finished my listing, but if you don't integrate all of these, These more elementary emotional, uh, needs into a romantic relationship, then that relationship's in trouble, you know, because it has to involve romance in the sense of sexuality, but it also has to involve, you know, caring [00:10:00] relation, relationship in both directions.

You have to care about each other, um, which leads to another not frequently recognized aspect of relating, uh, which is affective neuroscience called play, um, which despite the word, well, the word conjures up fun, which is of course a nice part of it. You know, a real, a romantic relationship should involve fun, doing things together.

Um, that are, that are, um, enjoyable in a kind of playful way, um, including banter and jokes and, you know, all of that sort of thing, but also why the friendships you are part of a bigger network, you're not, it's not just the two of you in some sort of silo. Um, but then in addition, uh, and this is the, the, the, the slightly less, uh, pleasant aspect that's uh, uh, uh, part and parcel of the, of the play drive, which is that it also involves [00:11:00] power dynamics.

Um, there's a, there's a, you know, who's calling the shots, who's setting the agenda. Um, successful play, uh, involves reasonable balance in regard, uh, reciprocity, mutuality, turn taking, taking account of what's in it for For him or her, you know, is this enjoyable for both of us? Uh, you know, I'm enjoying myself, but, but what about my partner?

Um, so there needs to be a, a fair, and the word fair is very important. There needs to be a fairness in terms of, um, in terms of this power dynamic. So that's already four things. lust, panic, grief, care, and play. Um, then there's two more, um, out of the seven. I'm not going to list all seven because I don't think fear should be a part of romantic relating.

Um, so to the extent [00:12:00] that fear is in the mix, there's a problem. Um, but you do need to integrate The other two, uh, namely rage, uh, whose partner never frustrated, uh, it's inevitable, uh, that, that your romantic partner is going to on occasions, irritate and annoy you. So you need to somehow integrate that into how you relate to each other.

What the loving relationship involves has to also involve some management. of, of these kinds of tensions. It's not, it's, um, rage is obviously too strong a word. Uh, if it reaches the level of rage, that's problematical, but you have to deal with irritations and frustrations and, you know, the other person getting in the way of what you want and so on, on occasions.

And then lastly is seeking, uh, seeking, uh, not many people are with this drive, but it certainly exists. [00:13:00] And it's a, it's a need to engage with what is not known. It's felt as curiosity and exploratory interest and so on. And so to put it crudely, uh, in our loving relationships. On the one hand, in terms of the attachment drives that I mentioned, you know, you want your, you want your partner to be with you forever and always, that's attachment.

But seeking is always looking to see what else is available, uh, because it's interested in the new, in the novel, in the, in the unknown. Um, and so ideally integrating seeking into a loving relationship involves always finding something new together. rather than having to look for postures greener with other people other than your partner.

So I think romantic love involves an integration of all of these different emotional needs with each other. And what I haven't made sufficiently clear [00:14:00] Uh, in, in my little summation so far is that when I say integration, I mean, uh, to include the fact that they conflict with each other. So, um, obviously, as I've just said, attachment can conflict with seeking.

In other words, wanting to keep the same person can conflict with wanting to look for interesting new experiences. Um, the two attachment drives. Conflict with rage, uh, because, um, you know, as much as you love your partner, uh, they, they inevitably, uh, also annoy you. And so there's conflict, which gives right attachment feelings, uh, in conflict with.

with, uh, rage feelings give rise in the best of circumstances to guilty feelings. Guilt is what is what prevents you from acting on your rage, you know, it, it inhibits it and, and, and [00:15:00] contains it. But, um, in some people, Even the integration of lust with attachment feelings can present conflict. Um, attachment feelings, if I go back, sorry if I sound like a psychoanalyst, which I am, but if I go back to The origins of those attachment feelings, they, they fundamentally are mommy feelings, you know, feelings toward mommy.

Um, and it's quite hard to bring, and this is incidentally not a sex thing, boys and girls are attached first and foremost to their mothers, for the most part, usually, of course, it varies, but you know, that's the, that's the norm. And those warm, fuzzy, you know, feelings of being loved in the, in the, in the, in the, A nursery and the nest and so on.

It can be quite a, quite a task to reconcile those sorts of feelings with, you know, crude, lustful, erotic [00:16:00] desire. You know, um, So you get things like the, forgive the slang, but the so called Madonna Whore syndrome, you know, where you get people who are able to have satisfying, in inverted commas, sexual relationships with people that they have no attachment to.

And then with people who they're attached to, they can't bring sex into it. You know, it's, it's, it's too difficult. So, so bringing all of this together in romantic love is an enormous achievement. to have a successful loving relationship is not easy. Um, but that's a very long winded answer to your question.

And let me tell you, there's more, uh, but that's, those are the headlines. 

Andrea Hiott: I love that. And there's this little phrase I'm often talking about, or part of this research is about thinking beyond dichotomy and holding the paradox. And I think what you just expressed, and also a lot, our romantic relationships can be exercises or [00:17:00] practice in trying to hold those things that might seem irreconcilable or as if they're paradoxical in a way that they don't fit together.

So I really appreciate that, that comment. But there's a couple things. One thing I want to get to is, you were talking about mostly romantic love, but are we, able to talk about love in a different way, for example, Jonathan Lear talks about love as a basic force of human nature. In a way it's almost just saying that love is all feeling.

 I want to go there a little bit with you, but before you said you just sort of dismissed fear and I know a lot of people think that fear is a very big part of romantic love, the fear of losing the other and all of this, so how can, how, you just think that shouldn't be part of it so you don't want to talk about it.

Or have you seen a way in which it's really not actually part of it? 

Mark Solms: No, sorry. Let me explain. Um, In, in affective neuroscience, uh, we divide anxiety into two [00:18:00] types. The one is fear, which is anxiety about coming to harm, uh, anxiety about danger to life and limb, uh, and the other type of anxiety is panic, which is anxiety about losing a loved object.

Um, so certainly that, panic, grief, Um, panic is part of that attachment thing. Uh, uh uh, panic is the negative expression, you know, of anxiety about separation and loss. That is very much a part, I mean, I've put it in negative terms, the anxiety about loss, but it is a positive thing. I mean, attachment comes With the price of anxiety about, about loss.

Uh, that's the, the pain of separation is the risk we have to take in order to properly attach to somebody. So yes, indeed, that's part and parcel, a big part of romantic love. Fear. In the sense of I am scared that this person is going to harm me. I [00:19:00] hopefully, uh, plays an absolutely minuscule part. Okay. 

Andrea Hiott: I'm glad I asked you.

Yeah, that's, that's true. Tempting divorce. 

Mark Solms: That's what. 

Andrea Hiott: The 

Mark Solms: relationship's coming apart. 

Andrea Hiott: So we're looking at a really focused part of this of between two people and it seems subjective. It's going to be different for each of us and so on. But I wonder if you've seen regularities, patterns in terms of what love is or even feeling. If you've seen patterns of this that relate to overall the way a person is in the world The way we come into being who we are in your intro you introduced a this developmental Aspect of how we come to love and why it's so important i'm trying to think of the continuity of it and How it might apply in ways that aren't just between to people in a very specific relationship.

Mark Solms: Yeah. So, um, that's a compound question. So let [00:20:00] me, let me try and address it Um, and it it will involve a number of steps, I think, in order to address it properly. Um, so let me begin with the statement that you made in passing, attributing it to Jonathan Lear, uh, who's a, who I admire and, and like, incidentally.

Um, I, I, I spent a year on sabbatical at, uh, University of Chicago and, uh, He kindly, um, had me as a visiting fellow at his, uh, at his, um, what's it called? The Collegium something or other, it's a wonderful interdisciplinary, um, center. Um, Neubauer Collegium, I think it's called. Oh, 

Andrea Hiott: yeah. Okay. Anyway, I'm, I'm, I'm getting distracted.

Mark Solms: No, that's 

Andrea Hiott: great. I mean, the reason I brought up him is, uh, Alvin Noe, the philosopher, recommended that book. So, and yeah, [00:21:00] it has to do with trying to understand what we talked about in the first conversation in a way of, of yeah, what is this kind of thing that we share that is feeling, but. 

Mark Solms: So, so let me begin there with, uh, at a, at a rather basic level.

I think, uh, what I heard you saying and attributing to Jonathan Lear was that. Feeling and love might be synonymous, uh, and, uh, I think that that that is self evidently not the case. Uh, we've just spoken about, uh, uh, fear, um, uh, likewise, rage in and of itself is not a loving feeling, uh, rage in and of itself is the antithesis of a loving feeling.

Um, so, so just those two, um, feelings, they clearly are feelings. Um, the fact that they exist and in my view that they are natural kinds, they are basic emissions that not only all [00:22:00] humans, uh, are, are, um, subject to, but in fact, many animals do, um, so fear and rage are not loving. 

Andrea Hiott: I'm not saying that he's saying that all feeling is love, but he is saying that love is a basic force of human nature, and that it's a sort of archaic mental process, he calls it, which sounds a lot like, if we think about the brain, sounds very similar to something like Hidden Spring.

And also that, This was the beginning of a science of subjectivity, in a sense. So you can see how there's these themes that are relative. So I guess the bigger question is, can feeling be understood as a basic force of nature, in your opinion? 

Mark Solms: Uh, well, I'm sorry, uh, that I misunderstood, uh, what you said about Jonathan's view. I see it's the other way around, that love is a feeling, uh, and, and, uh, and then secondarily, uh, love is a basic feeling. So, yes, I, I think that, um, feeling is, is absolutely fundamental to our natures. [00:23:00] Feeling is how we come to know what we are. Uh, whether or not we're meeting our needs and, and that doesn't apply only to emotional needs.

It goes even down to the level of, I mean, try holding your breath for a minute and see what, what you feel. Uh, you feel, you know, air hunger. Um, try not drinking for a day, try not eating for dinner and so on. So try not urinating when you, when your blood is full. All of those are needs, bodily needs, that we become aware of by feeling them.

And the feeling of a distended bladder is unpleasant. And the feeling of, of, of voiding that bladder is, is a pleasurable relief. Likewise with hunger, thirst, sleep, pain. 

Andrea Hiott: He does bring up, you know, bowel movements and vomiting and things like this as almost expressions of mind.

I think you might even say expressions of mind. And he is relating that kind of [00:24:00] archaic connection to something like the feeling of love, which doesn't mean we've called it love, and it doesn't mean it's romantic love in the way we were talking about, 

Mark Solms: yeah, so, so I'm trying to take it step by step.

And remember, I said, it's a compound question. And so to do it justice, I need to take it, I need to divide it into bits. So the first bit. I said not all feelings are loving and that was because I misunderstood you. Now, because I have understood you, I'm saying, yes, feeling is a, is a fundamental part of, of our natures.

Uh, and, um, uh, I would go so far building on what you've just said, I would go so far as to say feeling is what brings into being the most rudimentary state of mindedness is to feel something. Um, so bodily processes of the kind that we've just been talking about for the [00:25:00] most part, go on autonomically. Uh, you're not normally aware of your need for oxygen.

It's an autonomic reflex peristalsis, which has to do with the extraction of nutrition from the outside world. You know, the processing of all of that goes on automatically, as does blood pressure regulation and a great many other such things, the burning up of blood. the sugars in your fatty tissues, um, which is absolutely fundamental to your being able to keep going.

Uh, it happens automatically. So those things, uh, we call them autonomic for good reason because they, they're automatic. There's no, there's no mind there. Um, but, uh, I gave you some examples earlier. Uh, I said, try holding your breath or try not avoiding your bladder or try not eating, try not sleeping. Then, uh, it comes to mind.

Uh, so this is, this is the body now, to use Freud's [00:26:00] definition of drive, uh, it is a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work by virtue of the connection between the mind and the body. So the mind literally, uh, is, uh, comes to, comes to being by virtue of the body making a demand, which is felt. And why do we feel it?

Uh, we feel it so that we know, uh, through voluntary action, not reflex, not autonomic, uh, uh, uh, responses, but through acting, um, in a state of uncertainty. in the world. Is this working? Is this not working? Feeling tells you this need is being met. This need is not being met. Um, when we spoke last time, I think I gave the example of being in a burning building in a carbon dioxide filled room.

And you know, you don't know which way to go. You've never been in a burning building before, let alone this one. And the feeling of increasing or decreasing suffocation, distress [00:27:00] or air hunger tells you whether you've made the right or the wrong move. Choice. So the mind comes into being with feeling, which underwrites choice.

You choose to do what feels better and you choose to avoid what feels worse. And of course, you have to tolerate sometimes bad feelings for longer, longer term, good feelings. And that's the reality principle, but let's not get stuck in, in, in long theoretical grass. So. Feelings are fundamental. Now, um, we come to, to love, uh, in relation to feeling.

I've already said that romantic love is a composite. Uh, now I would say, that there are other things that deserve to be called love. that are not romantic love. And, and I think the easiest way to convey that or illustrate that is to, um, take some of those components of romantic love [00:28:00] and look at them by themselves.

It's clear that what I call, what we in affect of neuroscience call panic grief, and I'm sorry for the cumbersome term, but that attachment drive It's clearly loving, you know, it's, it's wanting, wanting the love of a caregiver, wanting the love of an attachment figure, wanting their presence, their, their, their, their physical proximity, you know, the soft, warm, fuzzy, um, you know, that feeling, uh, it's loving, uh, it's not integrated with anything else.

By itself, it's a loving feeling. Um, the same with care, that nurturant feeling that I spoke of earlier, wanting to, wanting to make things better for somebody who's in distress. You know, a baby's crying and you pick it up and you hold it and you rock it and you say, you know, soothing things to it. Uh, it's a loving thing to do, to [00:29:00] nurture.

So that inclination, which I say again, thank God, is built into our nature. All mammals, you know, have this, uh, nurturant instinct, um, and it's a loving feeling just all by itself. Um, I think that play also is loving. Play is a pro social, um, you know, I want to be part of the group. I want to get along with them.

I want them to want me to be in the group. I want them to like me. I want them to be my friend. Uh, and I want to have friends. I want to be chosen, uh, you know, into that team and so on. These are all, these are all loving, uh, feelings, pro social, it's, it's wanting to, you know, it's a constructive, uh, uh, joyous, uh, And and connected sort of thing, you know, connect a certain kind of a connection with others, which is very [00:30:00] positive, and certainly deserves to be called loving.

I love my friends. I mean, that's it rolls off the tongue. So I love being with my pals, as we say here, the so those are three different kinds of love. The, the, there are others where other basic states of mind, emotional states of mind, which might also be called loving, but it's a slightly more tenuous.

Um, Uh, kind of love. Um, one of them is seeking. I mean, you could say of a philosopher like Jonathan Lear, he loves knowledge. You know, he loves to understand. He loves to, to solve a problem. Um, it's a very different sort of thing from the other three types of love that I just mentioned. Uh, but you can see why it might be called loving.

Um, And, uh, um, I mean, I, I'm a scientist. I know that kind of love, the love of knowledge, the love [00:31:00] of, of, of engaging with a puzzle and, and a mystery, you know, and, and, and solving it or at least making progress with it. It's a, but it's, you can see why the word love starts to be, maybe not everyone would call that love.

I'm happy to, but it's a very different thing. And then lastly, lust. I don't know if lust is loving, but I, but, you know, I like to think that for most of us it is, um, you know, it doesn't have to be, uh, but, uh, and this leads me to the next level of what I wanted to say to you. So I've spoken about feeling, and now I've spoken about these loving feelings, the variety of loving feelings.

And I ended with lust. And I said, it doesn't have to be loving. And that takes me back to something that I said earlier. So now I'm coming to the third thing I want to say about this idea of Of the relationship between [00:32:00] feeling and love and the question as to whether or not love is a basic state of mind.

Before I get there, sorry, it's a very complicated story. It's clear that I do think there are kinds of love, which are basic states of mind, but they're not the same as each other. And there are basic states of mind, of emotional mind, which are not loving, like fear and rage. They're not by themselves loving.

Um, so now I'm coming to this last bit and, and, and starting with lust. Freud. in his infinite wisdom, discovered a thing called narcissism. I don't know how we understood anything about the human mind before the concept of narcissism was introduced. It seems like it's always 

Andrea Hiott: been here, but you're right.

That's a Freudian idea. I almost forgot that [00:33:00] it was. Yeah, 

Mark Solms: yeah. Only a hundred and a bit years ago, Freud introduced this. In fact, his paper was called, well, in English translation, it's called Narcissism and Introduction. The German title, more literally translated, is Introducing Narcissism. So Einfuhren der Narcissmus, introducing the concept of narcissism, you know, is the, is the German title.

So yeah, it's a fundamental concept, but, uh, Freud initially thought of narcissism only in terms of what he called libido. Um, in other words, the sexual drive, what, what, what, what in affective neuroscience we call lust. Um, and I said to you, well, let me just remind you what Freud said. That the libidinal drive, uh, can be directed toward an object, or it can be directed toward the subject, [00:34:00] toward the self.

That is narcissism. So narcissism is simply put self-love. Mm-hmm, . Um, that's what narcissists suffered love of himself. He's seeing his reflection in the, in the water and, and thinking, gosh, that's, you know, how beautiful. I, I think he's the, the most gorgeous thing ever. So that's loving yourself, self love.

And this is linked, uh, in Freud, in Freudian theory. And remember, this is the introduction of the concept of narcissism. It's linked with what Freud called autoerotism, auto, autoerotic behavior. So I mentioned masturbation, which is the most obvious form of autoerotic behavior. Um, and that's why Lust does not have to be loving in, uh, in the sense that I suspect Jonathan Lear is getting at.

Some love, hmm, is that loving? Uh, well, highly [00:35:00] problematical form of love, you know, so for Freud, um, development, mental development, progress, means, uh, transcending, uh, narcissism, uh, and, moving toward object love. Now, in my terms, that involve, and when I say mine, I mean affective neuroscience, neuropsychoanalytic terms, that involves the thing I was talking about at the very beginning in relation to romantic love, when I said lust has to be integrated with attachment, uh, before it becomes object love, now using Freud's term.

So it's not just discharging sexual tension, it's integrating sexual feelings with affectionate feelings. Um, and there you have a sexual relationship. So Freud spoke of the libidinal drive being, uh, [00:36:00] taking itself, taking the self as its object, Uh, and then you have to move to taking an object, outside object, as, as, as, as your love object.

Uh, and, and the way we conceptualize that today in neuropsychoanalysis is it involves an integration of two drives. Freud didn't realize there's a separate drive for attachment. He never accepted that. Uh, he thought this was just a disposition of the libidinal drive. that can either be self directed or object directed.

We think the libidinal drive by itself is a not particularly loving thing. It's, it's a, it's, you might almost call it just a bodily need. Uh, but to, to, to, to, to integrate that with these affectionate currents, and remember what we said about separation and loss, is also to make yourself vulnerable. Now you're in the hands of your object, if you'll forgive the pun, I didn't mean that.

Now you're in the hands of your object. Um, you know, he or [00:37:00] she might meet your sexual needs, and they might not. They might find somebody more appealing than you. Uh, they might, you know, have a headache tonight, and so on. And so, you know, you're vulnerable.

That's the moving, that's the, I'm starting to illustrate a point here, which is that love In the sense that I think Jonathan Lear is talking about as a basic state of mind, in fact, is not so basic.

It is basic in relation to each of these drives, the ones that I mentioned as loving, but the integration of them makes for a state of mind that is more deserving of the word love. Now let me go back to Freud. Freud having discovered narcissism in the context of his first drive theory, uh, then discovered, discovered, I say in inverted commas because I don't believe it's [00:38:00] existing, I don't believe in its existence, so I'm not sure he discovered anything, but Freud discovered the death drive, um, and then came a whole new understanding of narcissism, what we call destructive narcissism, the thing that the Kleinians, um, um, made so much of.

And Freud sums it up pithily in this alarming phrase, when he says hatred is older than love, um, as a, as a, as a mode of relationship to objects. So as far as others are concerned, as opposed to my beloved self, others, my first attitude to the other is hate. This is Freud's view. Um, and, um, uh, You have to, and that's because the object is not there for your, uh, satisfaction.

The object is separate. It's an insult. The object is, the object has his or her own, um, needs and they're not [00:39:00] yours. Uh, and so, you know, the object frustrates you. Now that, so, so think about the narcissists, you know, maybe even some of your senior politicians, um, think about the narcissists you know, and they are horrid people.

Uh, they, they, their, their love of themselves is, is very, um, uh, evenly matched with their contempt toward others, you know? And, uh, so this is a fleshing out of Freud's concept of narcissism, that it involves self love and object hate. Um, now in, in, in terms of, in neuropsychoanalytic terms, the way that we understand that, remember I told you that moving from narcissism to object love sexually involves integration of lust with attachment.

Now I'm saying dealing with this aspect of narcissism involves integrating, as I said earlier, [00:40:00] integrating your frustrated feelings with your dependency upon the object. So, you know, you can't just give free vent to your selfish, um, demands and, and, and, and expectations and anybody who irritates you gets booted out of your way.

Um, you know, that, that is narcissistic. A more loving attitude is to recognize as much as my friend or partner or, or, or playmate or whatever, you know, might be frustrating me, I need them. So I have to, I have to, I have to keep a lid on things I have to take account of. What about their needs, you know, and so that is loving.

So now I could carry on from what I've said now I don't want to take up all of our time making just this one point. So let me just say, you can generalize from what I've said, [00:41:00] each one of our seven drives has a narcissistic disposition. And that's not loving. I mean, just take, for example, if I can just add one more to illustrate when I say each of them, I'll, I'll, the care drive, um, which you might think is quintessentially loving, as I said earlier, many people, uh, see their children as an extension of themselves.

They're not loving the child, they're loving themselves in the child. 

Andrea Hiott: But that's not loving towards the object. Is it still a kind of self referential love? Yes. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying it's love, but it's not self referential. But it's not a bigger kind of love. It's somehow stuck in its own loop of 

Mark Solms: yeah, yeah, I must confess, I actually remember the day. Remember the moment when I recognized my firstborn child was separate from me. It was an actual [00:42:00] realization. It was, oh my God, he has his own mind, you know. Um, and so I think many parents, it takes quite a long time to realize that, uh, that the child is not an 

Andrea Hiott: expert.

This is interesting because we've been talking about subject object a lot, and that is what I was hoping to learn from you about a bit in this conversation relative to the subject is how you see that development and I think what you've talked about with narcissism shows how it can become Turned in on itself in a way, but maybe to get at this.

I wonder mark how you think about the difference between all of this we're talking about in mind. Or if you already hold those together, not as separate, but as maybe different ways we're talking about it. Because, you know, we're talking about Freud, we're talking about subjectivity, and there's this idea of the science of subjectivity, phenomenology. I believe your work, his work, a lot of work is trying to look at What was once considered not [00:43:00] scientific subjectivity, our own feeling. And yet it's not in opposition to. Objectivity and so on. So there's a kind of different space opening.

So just to come back to that subject, object, and how, do you see this as a kind of, as a process of development that involves all these words that we often use dichotomously like body and mind? Or do you see those as, as dualistic? How do you see mind in this process that you've been describing? And the way you talked about romantic love.

Mark Solms: Well, let's start again with the most elementary part of the answer, which is that I think any feeling state, , is a mind comes into being just by a dint of feeling. So to, to use Tom Nagel's definition of consciousness, an organism is conscious if and only if there is something it is like to be that organism, something it's like.

For that organism. So an [00:44:00] organism that there is something it is like to be is a feeling organism. That's a minded organism. It's a conscious organism. I think that's the most basic thing state of mind that there can be. 

Andrea Hiott: The body itself, do you think of it as conscious? Is life already conscious? Or are you talking about something like metaconsciousness when you use the term conscious? 

Mark Solms: I do not mean metaconsciousness. I mean, basal consciousness. Basal 

Andrea Hiott: consciousness. Raw 

Mark Solms: feeling. Raw feeling. That's what I. What you've just asked leads immediately to my second point, uh, which is that, uh, so firstly you have feeling.

Secondly, in other words, developmentally and phylogenetically. Uh, secondly, you have states of mind, which involve, I feel like this about that doesn't have to be in words. It's that there's a feeling and the feeling extends onto a perception. Um, so [00:45:00] now the feeling, uh, renders conscious what it's, what it's about.

Now, uh, I, there are even human beings. uh, children born with no cortex, it's called hydranencephalus, who are clearly feeling beings, they are emotionally responsive beings, there's something it is like to be them, but it is impossible for them to know what their feelings are about because they have no cortex, they can't make images.

of the objects that are evoking these feelings in them. So I think that's a second order of consciousness. For me, the first person is just a feeling state. The second person is feeling about an object. That's a very 

Andrea Hiott: important point because those children which you described very well in your writing are conscious But a lot of people use the term consciousness to mean that they're aware of themselves as a subject in a certain sense or [00:46:00] they can Report on it in a certain sense, but it's really that Immediate level to begin with 

Mark Solms: Understandably, we, um, our own consciousness, most of us, Uh, people like you and me who, who take part in and watch podcasts, uh, you know, we have a very complex form of consciousness.

Um, and so we take that for granted. That's what we mean by consciousness, this stuff that, that you and I are busy engaging in now, but that's, uh, an extremely highly developed. complex, compound form of consciousness. So, uh, it even goes beyond what I've just said to you. So, I think first we have feeling, secondly we have feeling extending onto objects.

Thirdly, we are able to abstract ourselves from that situation and recognize, oh, it is me. I, too, am an object. It is me who is feeling that about, about her, you know, so that's third person perspective. [00:47:00] And that's where most of us live. We live up there in abstract thoughts about our thoughts and feelings.

We don't understand 

Andrea Hiott: that continuity, which begins and is still grounded in feeling, raw feeling. 

Mark Solms: Yeah, it's largely the best way to illustrate it, I think, is to remind people of what it's like to be dreaming. For the most part, you lose that, that third person perspective, uh, upon what's going on. It's just, I feel like this about that.

Um, there's no, there's, unless you have lucid dreams, there's no reflection upon, oh, this is me having a dream about such and such. And it's you're just stuck in the concrete moment. Um, so To to go back. So there's there's two things we're talking about just not to not to conflate them. The one is what we've just been saying, I say we because it seems we agree that [00:48:00] this feeling.

Then there's feeling about objects, and then there's the ability to reflect upon oneself as an object, having feelings about other objects. That's not unrelated to, but not identical with, the transition from narcissism to object love. Uh, not for the transition from narcissism to object love is taking account, ultimately, just to put it very generally, it's taking account of the perspective of the object, recognizing that I depend upon objects and objects depend upon me.

Um, and so love in the sense that I think Jonathan Lear is talking about, um, is, is it kind of emerges with successful mindedness. I mean, in other words, to have just feelings and to ventilate them, um, is, is, you [00:49:00] know, every baby is born like that. I'm sorry to say, um, maybe I'm, you know, it's, uh, uh, then it has to realize this person who I'm howling at, you know, I'm entirely dependent upon them and, and, uh, you know, and, and he or she has needs of their own too.

And I can't just demand, you know, and so I think that once you start getting to this Um, um, interrelatedness, um, this recognition of the existence of other minds, um, at this point, love, uh, in, in, in the sense that I, I gather Jonathan is talking about, uh, becomes, comes into being and, and, and, you know, in line with what I think he's saying, let me add, it is.

essential. If you can't do that, you're in trouble. You know, if you, if you can't do that, you've got a very, this is what Melanie Klein called the paranoid [00:50:00] schizoid position, or part object relationships, or part object as opposed to whole object relationships, where the object is just seen as a, uh, as a means to an end in terms of satisfying my needs, you know, but once you start recognizing that the object too has needs, the object too is a subject, uh, the, the, you know, then, uh, then, then you start being able to love.

 And that, and it's involves a state of vulnerability, I keep on coming back to that. 

Andrea Hiott: Yes. And that vulnerability might be one reason people push away from going through that subject object development, but we keep coming back to Jonathan Lear but he does talk about Freud as developing a sort of science of subjectivity and if we had time, wanted to talk to you about your friend Oliver Sacks, and I wonder how you see this.

Do you see science as somehow separate from all of this that we've been talking about or are you seeing a way in which all of [00:51:00] this is trying to find its place in a larger space? That, that we can look at our own consciousness and our own feeling in the way you described and we can help one another do that as something like science or is that different from, for example, the neuroscience where you're doing very specific experiments with dreaming and how do you hold those things?

Mark Solms: Yeah, so I, um, in case some of our viewers don't know this, uh, I have translated, uh, Freud's works, uh, and revised translations of Freud's works. So, um, I've spent a great deal of time getting acquainted with what exactly Freud's project was. What was he up to? And I think it's, it's not that it's lost in translation.

I think Freud doesn't articulate it adequately, that his project fundamentally, I mean, his whole life's work was trying to bring into science, [00:52:00] into natural science, the, the, the empirical fact of experience. You know, that there is part of nature, uh, it exists. Yeah, it is. You and I are observing it right now.

Part of nature is the fact that we experience, there is something it is like to be an object that is minded, uh, and, this has to somehow be integrated with everything else we know about science. So, you know, with everything that, that, and Freud's first efforts are explicitly self consciously Like his project for a scientific psychology of 1895, he's explicitly and self consciously trying to provide a mechanistic, by which he means a Newtonian, um, you know, a mechanics of mental forces, uh, uh, and mental energies and mental objects, uh, and trying to use the same languages we use, um, for everything else in [00:53:00] nature.

Now that was a very, primitive attempt, um, which was unsuccessful. But it illustrates what, what Freud's whole, um, mental, I mean, scientific effort was about. It was to try to bring subjectivity into science, um, and integrate it with the rest of science, which it must be possible to do unless You take a dualist view and think that we are disembodied souls, you know, if, if we're not, um, if, if, if, if consciousness and therefore experience is just part of nature, it has to be, it has to be possible to weave our understanding of how it comes about, what it does, why it's there, you know, et cetera, uh, into the fabric of the whole of natural science.

Freud called it psychical reality. Um, it's, he's saying part of reality is cyclical reality, and we need to, we need to understand [00:54:00] this part of reality in the, in the same way, uh, and, and in a way commensurate with, uh, the ways in which we understand the rest of reality. So that was Freud's project. That is my own project.

I've picked, I've taken on that very same project. I think it's. Unbelievably important. You know, I don't know why anybody does anything else. What's more interesting and important than that? Um, now you mentioned Oliver Sacks. One of the, not one of the, the reason why I, I first of all contacted him, which was in 1984.

That I began my, my, uh, relationship with him was precisely because I saw, well, here's a neurologist who takes seriously the experience of his patients and thinks that this is valuable information. He didn't do it systematically. He wasn't, he wasn't, uh, you know, systematically trying to research subjectivity and its place in, in, in [00:55:00] neurology and therefore in, in, in physical science.

But, but he, he, you know, he kind of intuitively knew that unless you take account of the subjective aspect of brain function, you're never going to understand how this part of nature works because Let me just say that clearly. The most interesting thing about the brain is the fact that it feels like something to be a brain.

In other words, the brain has subjectivity. We're not aware of anything else. So, you know, you actually asked earlier, do I think everything feels, I don't think everything feels, uh, but everything with the brain feels. And, um, the, you know, so the most interesting thing about the brain is that it has this incredible capacity.

And, um, you know, unless we understand why it feels like something to be a brain and how this comes about and what the feelings do, because any one [00:56:00] of us knows from our own immediate experience that our feelings have causal consequences, it alters what the rest of the body and brain does, you know, the fact that it feels like something to be one.

So, so, you know, I think that it is an absolute necessity and a wonder. I mean, I'm, I'm thrilled to be studying it, uh, just because it's so, so interesting. Fascinating, but it is also an absolute obligation on neuroscience and the whole of biology and the whole of natural science to, to integrate subjectivity into its, into its Weltanschauung, as they say in German, which is kind of like loosely translated as worldview.

Andrea Hiott: Yeah, it's already in there, too. I think that's part of it, too, that you show and Sachs shows and other people show in different ways, so we need to recognize it and account for it in the same kind of movement that you were describing before, that's [00:57:00] how we come to know ourselves.

Objectively is through some sort of subjective experience, but I wonder how you hold it in your own life because you're you are balancing worlds. I mean, you in the traditional sense of objective and subjective, which I'm trying to open the space around, but you have to hold both.

And I know both can be criticized, right? People can say that's too subjective or that's too objective depending on which stance they're coming from in your worlds. So how have you found a way to hold all of that together? Or is it just ongoing? You figure it out day by day. 

Mark Solms: Well, um, I've certainly figured things out day by day in the sense that I have a, I'm more satisfied with my understanding of these things now than I was 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago.

So yeah, I'm figuring it out as I go along. Um, For me, that book of mine that you mentioned, The Hidden Spring, was was a kind of culmination, it was a coming together of, [00:58:00] okay, this, this I think is how it works. Not to say that, you know, please God, I'll live a few more years, that I won't, I won't, you know, have have better thoughts, but that's, that's as good a, a understanding as I can come up with.

So what I wanted to say about this is, um, let us not forget that what most people think of as objective reality is also their subjective, Representation of it. So, you know, a thing like this screen in front of me, it only takes the form that it does because this is how I perceive it.

You know, I have, I have these special senses which register these aspects of the world and so on. So it's a, for me, the interesting thing. It's not object subject. It's a subjective awareness of the part of the universe that I myself occupy and subjective awareness of the part of the universe that I do not occupy.

Um, and then we need a language, uh, which can unify both of those. And, and, [00:59:00] and this is why I consider myself a dual aspect monist. I think that these dual that the so called physical, which is just, you know, tactile, visual, you know, and so on, audit auditory that the way that we register the outside world, as opposed to the affective way that we register our own being.

Um, the, the, the. the common underlying reality is inferred. It has to be inferred from perception. You can't ever, and that's a Kantian sort of view. I think that we never will see the face of God, to put it poetically, you know, we, we, we, we, we, you only can ever come up with better, um, better guesses about the fundamental nature of things.

And if you look at what's going on in physics today, you know, it illustrates this very well. We're groping in the dark. We end up with models of reality. It's [01:00:00] no accident that what we have in physics today is the standard model. It's a Um, so I'll have to end sadly on that, uh, I say sadly because I enjoyed talking to you very much.

I enjoy, I enjoyed this conversation very much, uh, but, but, uh, duty calls. 

Andrea Hiott: Well, thank you, Mark. That was wonderful. You, you showed us how to hold the paradox. So thanks and have a great day. 

Mark Solms: You too. And thanks very much for your interest and for giving me sufficient time to be able to spell out my own thoughts.