Transformational Sequence: Reading Paul Ricoeur with Psychoanalytic and Neuroscientific Notions of Change

Email: snarel@bu.edu

Abstract: What is it that causes people to change? What interrupts current ways of being and thinking in the world, provoking cognitive shifts and psychic transformations? This paper seeks to explore the answers to these questions through an analysis of the transformation process currently being examined in the fields of neuroscience and psychoanalysis in conjunction with the work of Paul Ricoeur. At the basis of emerging research in neuroscience regarding the human capacity for change lays the understanding of the brain as a plastic instead of static organ; that is, the brain can adjust and modify itself. Such perceptions of the brain have significantly altered and enhanced psychoanalytic approaches to treatment of individuals with physical or psychic traumatic histories, understanding that an injured brain can be transformed, repaired, and restored.

The paper will consider aspects of transformation from two angles: how the brain changes and how it is repaired. In the first case, I consider the neurobiological erasure sequence, known as the transformation sequence in the clinical context. I will detail the steps of each process referring specifically to Bruce Eckers’ work in Unlocking the Emotional Brain: Eliminating Symptoms at their Roots Using Memory Reconsolidation. He reports three stages: 1) reactivation of the symptom-requiring schema 2) activation of disconfirming knowledge (this constitutes a mismatch in the target learning of the symptoms with prior schema) and 3) repetitions of the above (30). To discuss what facilitates repair, I will consult affect and attachment theory, illustrating how relationality with others facilitates empathy and offers moments of repair and restoration.

Paul Ricoeur provides particular ways of thinking about change that both aligns with and enhances these neurobiological and psychoanalytic schemas, while his philosophical project encourages and insists on mutuality. To construct my argument, I draw primarily from Ricoeur’s work on memory, capability, and mimesis. Corresponding with the notion of transformation above, I reveal how Ricoeur considers memory a “continuous transformation of the immanent now into the modes of consciousness of the immediate past” (Memory, History, and Forgetting 112), reflected in Eckers’ notion of reconsolidation. For Ricoeur, memory relates to conversion and orients us towards a passage of time that follows an “arrow of the time of change” (97). Ricoeur’s notion of memory operates in accordance with the idea of neuroplasticity as memory has the potential to simultaneously constitute a convergence (of past and present for instance) and a mismatch (today’s occurrence is not the same as yesterday’s) eliciting change and potentiality. In Fallible Man, change and flow, aspects of memory, are necessarily somatic, and thus the body is implied in the transformative process; an important factor in the psychoanalytic notion of the transformational process. In Time and Narrative, Ricoeur asserts that stories, through a complex process of mimesis, effects transformation – “the creative power of repetition” opens the past again to the future constituting an “ontological recasting” similar to Eckers’ third step (380). By reading the transformational process in neurobiology and psychoanalysis alongside Ricoeur’s work, I will show ultimately that transformation in each includes creating within the individual a sense of the unification and wholeness, which relies on relation to others.