SANITY

Do we need a new definition of sanity! Do we need Freud anymore. (Did we ever need him?)

What "we" do need is an understanding of how the brain works. The nature of consciousness is the most exciting unsolved scientific problem of the day. How is memory stored? How does vision work? What makes dreams?In the last 20 years of his life, the Nobel laureate Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix of DNA, shifted his curiosity from molecular biology to brain science. Crick formulated the theory that consciousness lies in the interaction of neurons—nerve cells. "To understand the brain," he says in The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, "you must understand neurons and especially how vast numbers of them act together in parallel."Another academic neurologist, Antonio Damasio, also locates consciousness in the mechanics of the body. The way that the body reports, in thousands of ways, the state of its cells and tissues and strives to keep them stable adds up to consciousness, he says in The Feeling of What Happens. The net effect on the body's owner is a sense of self, "a revelation of existence." Going further, Damasio sees consciousness, with the help of memory, reasoning and language, as "a means to modify existence."Modifying existence is where neuroscience meets psychoanalysis. Freudian theory is having to make peace with the new theories of the causation of behaviour. Surprisingly, Crick, the arch rationalist, had some good words for Freud: "A physician who had many novel ideas and who wrote unusually well." Damasio goes further. Freud, in his eyes, woke up the world to the reality of the unconscious, the importance of sexuality and of childhood. But, Freud himself, who trained as a neurologist, foresaw that psychoanalysis would be superseded by neuroscience. In 1909, at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, he admired the attempt of a surgeon to find the neural basis of mental states. He himself could not reduce his psychological theories to neuroscientific ones but he believed that these problems "may be on the agenda a century after us."
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