The One You Feed - Casey Schwartz

Episode Date: October 7, 2015

This week we talk to Casey Schwartz about the science of neuropsychoanalysisCASEY SCHWARTZ is a graduate of Brown University and has a Masters Degree in psychodynamic neuroscience from University College London. She has worked as a staff writer at Newsweek/The Daily Beast, where she covered neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times and The New York Sun. She lives in New York City.Her first book is called In the Mind Fields: Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis         Our Sponsor this Week is Athletic GreensClick here to get 50% off your first order!! In This Interview Casey and I Discuss...The One You Feed parableWhat neuropsychanalysis isBattling self doubtThe importance of asking others for helpThe Don Draper approach to creativityTaking a "mind bath"The divide between neuroscience and psychoanalysisFreud's Boldest Idea: TransferenceMapping transference in the brainThe resurgence of the unconscious in current neuroscience researchAvoiding the temptation to boil us down to chemicalsHonoring the mystery of human life and behaviorReductionism vs holism in scienceThe fantasy of the easy answerThe oversimplification of the role of the amygdalaThe dangers of extrapolating animal studies to humansPsychoanalysis on patients who have had brain damageThe uneven pathway of recoveryStarving neural pathways that separate thought from feelingFor more show notes visit our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our brains are so flawed. Sometimes you really just need a mind bath. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right

direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is Casey Schwartz, a graduate of Brown University with a master's degree in psychodynamic neuroscience from University College London. Casey has worked as a staff writer at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, where she covered neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times and the New York Sun. Her first book is called In the Minefields, Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis. I've got great news. Many of you have asked whether you could get a t-shirt with the logo on it, and the answer is finally yes. So, if you're looking for some clothing to help you

feed your good wolf on the go, check out our website, oneufeed.net slash shirt. They were handmade here in Columbus with a special edition line drawing of the One You Feed Wolf logo. The shirts are very comfortable. I spent a lot of time being very picky on exactly what they felt like to get the type of shirt that I wanted. So you can visit oneufeed.net slash shirt to order one. And if you're interested, I would recommend doing it soon because we only had a certain number made in this first round and they seem to be going pretty quickly. So I hope you enjoy. And here's the interview with Casey Schwartz.

Hi, Casey. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much, Eric. Thank you for taking the time to come on. I read your new book, In the Mind Fields, Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis, which is a fascinating title. And we will get into all the things in that book here in a minute. But let's start like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other's a bad wolf,

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I like that parable a lot. I've heard it before. And to me, its meaning is sort of, it seems clear, which is that what you pay attention to and what you engage in is what becomes real. And I apply it to the writing process because this was my first book and it was a very panicky, uncertain experience trying to figure out how to write it. And there were so many days where

the issue of sort of self-doubt could have become the thing that I gave into. But it was a constant battle not to. I think that's a great way to frame it because I think any of us involved in trying to do something outside of the ordinary, self-doubt is a very frequent companion. How is it that you deal with self-doubt? What to the movies. Sometimes it was meeting my brother and watching a baseball game. I mean, sometimes it was going for a run. Most of these tactics involved being with someone in my life who was sympathetic and could talk to me and let me basically just air my fears. And then the next day you wake up and you get back to it. can be such a valuable one, and it's something that I think a lot of us tend to, at least I am prone to overlook. I'll figure this out, I'll deal with it myself, or I'll just sort it out in my head. Exactly, and we're not all, I mean, I happen to have a wonderful brother who was so good at just sort of reminding me how to keep focus.

But I do think going to the movies is a wonderful trick as well. That's what Don Draper always suggested on Mad Men, if you remember. He was on to something. Yep, yep. Well, just changing the mental channel for a while can be really helpful. I find sometimes when I'm stuck in that negative thinking, there's no sort of just like, well, I'll just not, I'll think positive and it just is more powerful than the negative. Sometimes it's just like, I've got to change the channel from thinking completely. Our brains are so flawed.

Sometimes you really, you just, you really just need a mind bath. That's a great word. Yeah. So what led you to write this book? What was your path to becoming interested in this and then writing the book? It is not a subject I would have ever predicted. I would sort of begin my career as a writer with. But in my early 20s, I went off to graduate school thinking that I was going to be a psychologist. I had this idea that that's sort of, it was a momentary idea that that's what I wanted to do. And I picked a very unusual program for training. It was brand new. This particular course had never existed before.

It was two years long. First year was in London at the Anna Freud Center in North London, which is sort of like this throwback bastion of classical psychoanalytic thinking actually founded by Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud's daughter, in the 1940s, and just full of these old-school ideas about the mind, ideas like the ego, the id, repression, the unconscious.

I mean, I was there in 2006, but I often had this like utterly beguiling feeling like it could be any year. It could be 1950. But what made this program unusual is that the second year of it, there were only nine of us in it, and the nine of us returned to the United States to study the brain at Yale. And so the premise of this thing was, can something come of studying I realized, okay, wow, there's an incredible culture clash going on here between how we think about the mind, how we think about the brain, what we think is going to get us insight. And that's interesting. And B, it was because I was in this program that I wound up meeting the man who would become actually my main character, a man named Mark Solms. In the book, I thought you phrased up sort of what you were after in a sentence, which you said,

With their starkly different goals, methods, and cultures, psychoanalysis and neuroscience can appear to be two different species, mutually alienated, as if preoccupied with two altogether different pursuits. And so what you were trying to do, what this program did, and what Mark Psalms did, was to try and find a way to integrate these two very different approaches to the mind slash the brain, right? You use those terms differently depending on which discipline you're coming from. Right, exactly. And the differences extend so, so far. I mean, it's impossible to overstate this because it's not only that, you know, psychoanalysis is all about, well, it's all about subjectivity. It's all about subjective experience. How does it feel to be any particular person? I mean, what, what, what is a person go

in and discuss to their psychoanalyst? It's, it's what they're talking about is what, what it feels like to be, to be them. But neuroscience, the perspective is so different. It's, it's like looking at a person from the outside in, like, um, what can we see when we look at your brain in an fMRI machine? And, um, you know, so those basic building blocks and ingredients are in and of themselves radically different. But also I would say and what I've observed is that there's such a difference in culture and in personality type between the two disciplines. Like who wants to become a psychoanalyst is a very, very different temperament than who wants to become a neuroscientist. So when you imagine how could a conversation begin in a meaningful way between these two fields, you know, it gives you pause. You're not quite sure.

Right. Well, one of the things that I thought was interesting was, and I thought about as I was reading the book, was psychoanalysis on one hand, you know, on one end of the spectrum, neuroscience on the far other end of the spectrum. Where are the places in between that exist? You know, cognitive behavioral therapy, some things that seem to me to be a little bit more in the middle of those two. Is that a reasonable way to think about those things? Yes. I mean, you bring up cognitive behavioral therapy. I don't really get into that in the book,

but I think that's a good example because it's always been a version of psychotherapy that looks towards scientific evidence kind of more regularly or sort of it shapes itself with proof of what works and what doesn't. And I think, you know, that's not traditionally been how psychoanalysis functions. So yeah, and that probably is in between. Thanks. And now back to the interview with Casey Schwartz.

Psychoanalysis has always struck me as much more. You're going into the past. You're unearthing the past. You're dealing with things like the unconscious. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth.

Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason

bobblehead. It's called Really No Really and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Cognitive behavioral therapy, you're working much more with the thoughts that you have right now. What can I, you know, I've got a thought. How can I work with it more skillfully? And do you think that cognitive behavioral therapy lends itself better to being studied scientifically? Or do you think that psychoanalysis does too, but the culture of it and the people that are in it are the reason that there's not more of that?

Yeah, I think it's probably a combination of those things. But that said, actually, there's been this huge growth in the amount of evidence that now exists showing that psychoanalysis is effective. But that started sort of late. That only started about 15 years ago or so. Yet there is now actually a significant amount of research showing, yes, this thing works. Yeah, one of the things that I thought was interesting, and I didn't see it in the book, but I did read it in an article you wrote for a major publication, I can't remember which, where you were talking about some people who are starting to be able to explore what parts of the brain come to life when transference kicks in.

Oh, yeah. So this is a piece I did over the summer for the New York Times Magazine. This is a piece I did over the summer for the New York Times Magazine. And it is related to the book, but I focus on a man that I don't really explore in the book. His name is Andrew Gerber, a very interesting psychiatrist who basically is taking this very old-school Freudian idea, transference. I mean, this is an idea Freud came up with in about 1900 when he realized, you know what, we bring our histories into every encounter that we have in the present, every relationship we have in the present. Every new person we meet in the present is informed by our past experience. And that actually was one of, some people think that's the boldest and most original idea he came up with of all. And so Andrew Gerber thought, wouldn't it be interesting to figure out where in the brain these functions

that go into transference actually occur. So he's been working on that for almost a decade now, kind of on the side, sticking people into an fMRI machine, giving them all these tasks that supposedly activate their transference patterns and trying to see, well, can you pinpoint it to here? Can you pinpoint it to there? One of the other ideas that Freud is well known for is this idea of the unconscious. And it's interesting that there's a lot of science starting to show up these days that seems to be talking about the unconscious, talking about the unconscious, although I don't think it's really referred to that way, but Malcolm Gladwell's Blink or Thinking Fast and Slow, those books are talking about how there's

something happening underneath our conscious brain that is driving what we're doing. How do those sort of newer ideas tie in at all with what the unconscious idea was in psychoanalysis? It's 100% true. The unconscious is suddenly everywhere. And what's so funny is that until about 1980, that wasn't the case at all. Until about 1980, science kind of didn't believe in the unconscious. The unconscious was sort of a fairy tale that was, you know, not really believable, not really provable. It was seen as sort of not true. It was seen as, you know, very much in the purview of the Freudian. But now it is completely axiomatic throughout neuroscience that most of what happens in our brains happens outside of our awareness.

So this is very Gladwellian, you know, that we have these sort of processes of ways of assessing the world around us we're not even aware of. Yet, you know, we sort of arrive at conclusions all the time without exactly knowing why. And by the way, Eric, thank God, because we'd be so overwhelmed by the details of our lives if we had to be aware of every single one. But the big difference between that version of the unconscious and what Freud meant by the unconscious is basically repression. You know, Freud thought that things are unconscious because they're unbearable. And neuroscience kind of hasn't touched that yet. It hasn't quite gotten into why certain things would be outside of awareness and why certain things

would be in awareness. One of the questions that I've had is I've had people on and we've talked about this idea of there being this unconscious that's happening. And, you know, the studies, you know, flip open any science magazine, you're going to read something about how some part of your brain is doing something that you don't know. How do you work with that? Is there anything you can do with that sort of information? And does psychoanalysis provide a method of using that unconscious differently? Is that part of what it can bring to the table? Psychoanalysis has never, like, sort of lent itself to these easy kind of takeaways and these kind of news you can use, soundbites. I mean, in fact, that's,

its whole culture is sort of slow, slow, slow insight, slow, gradual process. So it's very much, it sort of cuts against our moment of, you know, help me by 5 p.m. But that said, I think the very fact of... 3 p.m., please. Sorry? 3 p.m., please. 5 p.m. is too late. I know, actually, 5 p.m. is way too late. But I think the very fact of being aware of how much exactly is outside of our awareness is in and of itself helpful. And so psychoanalysis, as you mentioned, is a much longer process. You talk about the book, you end the book really in sort of a place of complete uncertainty.

And you thought back to the beginning of the book and about that sort of the word, the phrase you used was sacred unknowability, um, and that you were perfectly able to end this book with uncertainty because you believe in uncertainty. And it seems like that is much more the realm of psychoanalysis, that there is a, um, that there's a mystery here. Yes. I mean, I think what actually one of the impetuses for doing this book was when I was studying neuroscience at Yale, I was sort of secretly horrified by what this field wanted to do, which was sort of to reduce us down to these very, very generic little schemas and these generic formulas for explaining all of human behavior, grand, grand questions like creativity and how we make decisions and how we fall in love and with whom. And neuroscience purported to be trying to answer these questions and with very simplified, in my mind, overly simplified answers.

And I secretly rooted against that ever happening because to me that shrinks us all down to a very unappealingly small size. unappealingly small size. And so in that spirit, I embarked on this book, which, as you know, kind of follows this one character in particular, Mark Solms, who I think, you know, who advocates for uniting the two fields and never losing sight of individual complexity, very much like Oliver Sacks before him. And so when I got that ending, when I got the idea for that ending, it just felt so right because it brought me back to the root feeling that had inspired the book to begin with years before. That idea of the reductionism of neuroscience reminds me of there's, you know, there's starting to be more conversation around from a nutritional perspective, like all these studies that boil down, you know, this thing to isolated vitamin C, you know, you extract this thing out of the hole,

and then you study just that little thing, but you sort of lose the whole picture that like, you know, that an apple is good for us in ways that go far beyond the, the, the individual vitamins that you extract from it. Yeah, no, I think that's really true. I think, um, it's very hard to keep the whole picture in mind and it's sort of, it's funny that, you know, that whole holistic thing is sort of not that American or something. I've noticed that and other doctors have sort of said that to me, too. But yeah, I think that is true. I wonder why.

I don't know. Maybe it's we all have a fantasy of, oh, there will be, you know, a trick, a silver bullet, a simple fix. We'd like there to be, but there never really is. at a simple fix. We'd like there to be, but there never really is. Yep. It's that magical thinking idea that that's one of the things this show sort of goes on and on about is that that doesn't really exist and that chasing that is usually a poor idea because it's likely to distract you from things that might actually be useful. Yeah. I mean, exactly. Right, right, right. And we're capable of so much more than one tiny solution. One of the other things that you wrote about recently, which I thought was interesting, was the scientist Joseph Ledoux. Did I say that right?

Yeah. Joseph Ledoux. Did I say that right? And he's widely known as the person who came up with the popularizing the amygdala as sort of the point of flight, or fight of that fear response. And I mean, in that you talk about another, you know, the amygdala might be the most popular neuroscience thing to write about. I mean, I, you know, it's come up on this show three or four times. But he is now saying, hey, I think it's a little bit more complicated than that. Yeah. No, Joe LeDoux, he's such a great character in the field of neuroscience. So I'd always wanted to write about him. And when his new book, Anxious, came out in July, I just thought, okay, this is the perfect opportunity because his new argument is really

interesting, which is that, you know, for years, there's been this kind of assumption that because the amygdala, which is one of the brain's sort of most central fear threat detectors, it does, it detects threats, it detects danger and helps to kick off the brain's defense responses. But there's been this sort of extrapolation from that and this assumption that the amygdala is also what makes us feel afraid. So Joe is arguing now that that's not true, that the actual feeling of fear, which is, he says, well, the whole question of animal consciousness is separate from this, but he says that the idea that the amygdala is responsible for the feeling of fear is not right, and that it actually takes

all kinds of parts of the brain working in concert to produce that feeling, that conscious feeling. And so the amygdala detects the threat, but then there are other parts of the brain that take that information and interpret it. Yeah, and so he's sort of caused a stir among many people for what he writes about this question of, can we study animals and hope to understand human emotions? Because, you know, and Joe himself studies all this stuff in rats, and these big white rats at NYU. And he basically is now arguing that he doesn't know whether animals have consciousness, but science cannot prove that they do,

and therefore it's really not useful to act like they do. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a floor? We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And

you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really?

That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If we want to understand human emotions, we need more than the animal research.

Right. Well, there's this assumption that, you know, you hear people talk about the different layers of the brain. There's the lizard brain. you know, you hear people talk about the different layers of the brain, there's the lizard brain, and then as if these are just, you know, stacked on top of each other, and there's been no change between what that part of my brain and a lizard's brain, which strikes me as being probably some truth to it, but probably a vast oversimplification. Yeah, I was just gonna say there is a part of me that, like, that it does resonate that, that I would have a little lizard brain in my brain, but exactly. neuropsychoanalysis was happening was in people who had brain damage and using that as an entry point to sort of see how these two things could mix. And you tell a story about a man who, um, he's a, a phasic. Did I say that right? Yeah. He has aphasia where he sort of lost the ability to

form meaningful sentences to, to communicate with the outside world. And yet he enters into psychoanalysis. Can you share that a little bit? Yeah, sure. So Mark Psalms, my protagonist, started a group in New York in about 2000 of psychoanalysts who are dedicated to psychoanalyzing brain-damaged patients. And this is so unorthodox because traditionally we think of brain-damaged patients as not really needing or even as not being qualified to receive psychological intervention. Well, so Solm says that's absurd. No one could possibly need it more. And he recruited this group, and they all have such interesting cases. I sat in on this group, as I describe in the book, for about two years, listening to them on a month-to-month basis report on their patient's progress. patient's progress. And one of the members of this group was an absolutely wonderful man named David Silver, who had taken on this unbelievably difficult task in psychoanalyzing a young patient

named Harry, who'd had a stroke very young in his late 30s, and basically lost the ability to speak. and basically lost the ability to speak. I mean, he had a scattering of words, like he could sort of sketch a couple things on paper, but he really couldn't get meaning out. He had aphasia. Yet they spent seven years in this treatment together, and it gave this patient such a profound lifeline that he had someone who was willing to pay such close attention and make such a heroic effort to understand his experience. Yeah, I was struck by that. It's a pretty profound and moving thing.

And I was struck by what you just said a minute ago where, you know, where Mark Solm said there might not be anybody who's more in need of it. Like, once I read that, I was like, how obvious is that? We take these people that have had these horrible things happen to them who are confused and don't know how to relate and just sort of go, well, let's see if we can fix it. But if we can't fix it? Good luck. Yeah, exactly. You know, I was actually, so last weekend I was in Boulder, Colorado, talking about this exact thing in this part of the book. And this woman in the audience raised her hand and said, you know, four years ago I had a brain tumor. They removed it and I became aphasic. I lost the ability to speak. And then she said, I was so devastated that none of the neurologists who treated me cared at all about what the actual experience was like. They never

asked me a single thing about what I was going through. And then she said that it was the first time that she had spoken aloud in public in four years. Wow. Yeah. Well, that must be a good feeling for you to know that those people, you know know that the book is reaching some of those people. Yeah, it is. Very much so. So one of the other areas that you talk about, it's not in the book, but I thought it was really interesting. Back to Gerber. You know, he's done a lot of study on psychoanalysis and using neuroscience, but he said he saw a pattern in the patients who progressed the most. They didn't move in a linear way from worse to better, from neurotic to not neurotic. However, rather they were sort of in the middle of their treatment. They would go through a period of intense flux and then sort of come out the other side and improve. Can you share a little

bit about that and what he learned there? Yeah, I loved when Gerber told me about this observation of his, because it's so interesting that, you know, this was his dissertation. He did this when he was in psychoanalytic training in his 20s, and actually at the same place that I went to, at the Anna Freud Center. And he was trying to figure out, okay, why do people get better in psychoanalysis? Like, what actually accounts for this? And so he had these psychoanalysts fill out weekly detailed, detailed reports on everything going on with their patients, every aspect of behavior, relationship, everything. And what he finally knows, it took him like nine years to finish,

but the patients who really made progress in psychoanalysis went through this middle period of being basically a total mess. Their lives would get messy. They would become erratic. They would become slightly, even in some cases, unhinged. And he thought of this as their molecules, you sort of throw them up in the air and they sort of dance around and rearrange themselves. And that has to happen before the real improvement can set in. Yeah, that's a really interesting concept. That idea that healing doesn't progress linearly is certainly an experience of mine. That's interesting. I mean, even just if you look at like, you know, dealing with grief, it's like you feel better for a few days.

Like, oh, I finally accepted this. And you wake up the next day and you just feel as bad as you ever felt. And you're like, wait, what's going on? I thought this is supposed to be progressively getting better. And I've just noticed that doesn't seem to be the pattern, that it's better,

it gets a little bit worse. The other thing that I've noticed is a tendency to swing to, you know, to be at one extreme, swing over to the other extreme for a period of time, and then over an extended period of time, finally find the middle between those two things. I think that there's a huge amount of truth. I think that that is what Gerber would say he had observed. Those kinds of patterns, exactly. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. The book is really fascinating, and I'm interested to see,

it really sounds like a field that is very much in its infancy, and so it's really interesting to see where that will go and how these two different approaches to trying to make people mentally better can work together and inform each other. Oh, the fact that it's inventing itself is what drew me to it. And Eric, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. Yeah, thanks so much for coming on, Casey. Thank and this podcast at one you feed.net slash Casey