In response to David Lee Miller's comments on the fantasy of the present
moment, another aside, perhaps not totally unrewarding.

Leaving behind psychoanalysis for the moment, and turning instead to
current neuropsychological research being done in my own backyard:
neuroscientists studying the relationship between cognition and emotion in
a Medical Research Council unit here in Cambridge have focused some
concentrated attention on just this issue. It has been suggested that
people suffering from Major Depression may respond to therapy emphasizing
'experiential' rather than 'intellectual' forms of cognition, perhaps
because a core causal factor in the onset of depression could be an
inability to escape cyclical and omnipresent intellectualizing of
experience ('persistent rumination' is one of the core symptoms of Major
Depressive Illness; see the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, version IV)
linked to disrupted functioning of frontal regions (if you are interested
in neuroanatomy, the relationship between prefrontal cortex (known as
'pfc') and limbic structures seems to be particularly important).

Some clinical psychologists have emphasized 'experiential' modes of therapy
in treating depression because these modes of thought encourage depressed
patients to put aside intellectual cognition--a main feature of which is a
sense of 'detachment' that may well have something to do with the 'exile of
the present moment' inevitable, as David Lee Miller has pointed out, when
one is considering this subject from an intellectual perspective. The
alternative--'experiential' cognition--emphasizes not thought, but a kind
of 'inhabiting the present' through the performance of repetitive tasks or
through the pursuit of some activity that is felt to be 'second nature'. To
imagine what I am suggesting, think of a well-loved hobby or personal
pursuit in which you feel you lose yourself--'experiential' modes of
consciousness are reported by people during activities like singing,
knitting, running, meditation, playing guitar, and perhaps most
importantly, yes, during sex (particularly by women, I should add; men
don't seem to consider lovemaking as 'inhabiting the present' so much as
'pursuing desire').

It has been hypothesized that this putative intellectual/experiential
polarity may have something very important to do with the relationship
between mood and cognition. It may be too simple to suggest that mania and
depression represent extreme forms of inability to process emotional
cognition, or that they are states of hyper-intellectualization. On the
other hand, there is something (neuro)biological about this idea of the
'fictional present', and the potential importance of emotion to this idea
is, I think, very exciting. For we *can* experience the present, but only
in those moments where we are not thinking about it; *think* once, and the
present moment has already become a piece of history. The very act of
thinking about time, then (like the act of speech, like the act of
observing a particle at a given point in space with a given velocity),
destabilizes the relation between the subject of thought and the subject
doing the thinking. What I want to emphasize here, though, is that current
research in neuropsychology suggests an important alternative to this
intellectualization of loss in the present, namely the experiential mode of
consciousness--akin perhaps, in its meditative quality, to sleep and death
('the little death'; I may invite further scorn on myself by likening this
to that other consolation offered Heisenberg, namely wave-particle
duality--as de Broglie made clear, we never need ask the question of the
particle's position and velocity in the first place; catch the wave,
Werner). Emotional, experiential being, in this formulation, can restore
our sense of presence, leading to happiness.

New brain imaging technologies show important differences in neuronal
activation during the performance of 'executive function' tasks (memory,
planning, etc.: emphasis on pfc) as compared to 'experiential' or
'affective' tasks involving emotional components (emphasis on ventromedial
areas, limbic structures). These differences suggest that differing neural
function may be linked--causally or symptomatically, as you like--to the
'modes' of consciousness I have been discussing above. In fact, the Dalai
Lama is collaborating in a forthcoming study here on the therapeutic
potential of experiential, meditative cognition in the treatment of
depression; it will be interesting to explore the results of this study, as
it will for (I think) the first time bring into explicit conversation these
ideas of 'presence' and 'inhabiting the present', on the one hand, and
intellectual versus affective cognition on the other. My own hypothesis,
based on my experience with the 'elation' of pursuits such as running and
singing, is that this and further studies will start to demonstrate links
between a) different ways of experiencing time, b) different 'modes' of
thought, c) different brain activation, and d) different levels of
contentment.

As I often maintain (again to my general discredit), The Faerie Queene is
the Book of Life: if it's out here, it's in there. How 'content' is Amoret,
who in sweet ravishment pourd out her sprite? She is the 'lodge' of
Scuadmour's 'affection', filled with an emotion so fully that, in effect,
time stops for her in the tableau of the hermaphroditic union, likened
(otherwise I think unaccountably) to a marble statue. Spenser may not have
had a PET scanner at Kilcolman (although you never know, Harriot could have
had one down in Youghal), but the intuition that deep emotional experience
expands to fill the present--stopping time and absorbing our
intellectualized pasts and futures--is not a thought for our age only, but
of all time.

andrew


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