Chapter 6
Reflexivity and the psyche as a dynamic system
Part I provides a detailed picture of students' shift from cognitive control, where certain emotional feelings and parts of the personality are repressed or in conflict, towards a more open, flexible, embodied, and agentic self-experience, whether for writing, learning, or simply for being. As I have shown, this shift is evident not only in students' conscious descriptions, but also comes through less conscious metaphors and imagery, especially in their creative life writing. The opening-up of space for the imagination and the growing ability to manage it is visible, for example, in Simon's change of metaphor for his sense of self as a writer from closed, unspeakable psychic territory to more confident management of the ‘wild prairie’ of the imagination. Increased psychic space is visible too in Susanna's change of verb from the need to ‘disclose’ her identity as an ill person, to her subsequent willingness to ‘expose’ more of the raw emotional feelings this identity was keeping under control. Similarly increased psychic flexibility is visible in images of movement in the later creative writing, as in Susanna's shift from a sense of ‘stumbling and staggering’ along overgrown paths at the start of the MA to the fluid and sensual dancing at the wedding feast at the end. The creative writing Maria produces in her second year is also full of dancing, and Simon's later work is full of movement, with Ian Ferris rolling weightlessly in the ‘cool womb’ of the sea in ‘Murder’ and the constantly regenerating life cycle of ‘Pencil’. Thus at the phenomenological level the shift to a more open, flexible, embodied, and agentic psychic state seems to be experienced as an increased sense of inner space and movement.
In previous attempts to understand this shift I have referred to it, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's work, as the development of a more ‘dialogic relationship’, whether with others or with oneself (e.g. Hunt, 2000), and it is interesting that Dirkx and others in transformative learning (e.g. Taylor, 2000) use this concept too (although not the Bakhtinian version). Dialogue in Bakhtin's sense means being psychically open and flexible, able to suspend one's own preconceptions and engage with the other on equal terms (Bakhtin, 1981). More recently I have also been referring to this shift as the development of a more ‘refl exive’ psychic state (Hunt, 2004a), which I have come to understand as consonant with ‘dialogic’. Mezirow also uses ‘critical reflexivity’ or ‘critical reflectivity’ — the two being, for him, interchangeable — to describe the ‘crucial’ feature of perspective transformation, suggesting that it ‘needs phenomenological study’ (Mezirow, 1981: 11). Seeing that reflexivity, being a form of metacognition, is a fundamental mechanism of consciousness (Koriat, 2007), it is also relevant to Boyd and Myers's idea that transformative learning involves an ‘expansion of consciousness’. So reflexivity could be said to be a key concept in transformative learning theory. However, there is a considerable amount of confusion about what it actually means. Thus, in an attempt to throw light on the fundamental mechanisms of transformative change, I focus in this chapter on trying to make better sense of reflexivity by placing it within a bio-psycho-social conceptual framework.
The concept of reflexivity
For social theorist Anthony Giddens reflexivity is ‘a defining characteristic of all human action’, ‘a methodology of practical consciousness’ by which ‘human beings routinely “keep in touch” with the grounds of what they do as an integral element of doing it’ (Giddens, 1990: 36, 99). In traditional cultures where social change was slow people reflexively monitored their actions so as to reproduce the structures of society. In the modern world by contrast, where social change is rapid, reflexivity involves constantly examining and reforming social practices ‘in the light of incoming information about them’. This means constantly engaging in reflection, including ‘[reflecting] upon the nature of reflection itself’ (ibid.: 36–38, 99). Consciously reflecting on reflection is how reflexivity is generally understood in adult education (e.g. Illeris, 2004a), including by Mezirow.
In my own attempts to understand reflexivity, I have tended towards Donna Qualley's view that reflexivity is not just reflection on reflection, but a somewhat different process:
Where reflection could be said to involve taking something into oneself — a topic, an event, a relationship — for the purpose of contemplation or examination, reflexivity involves putting something out in order that something new might come into being. It involves creating an internal space, distancing oneself from oneself, as it were, so that one is both inside and outside of oneself simultaneously and able to switch back and forth fluidly and playfully from one position to the other, giving oneself up to the experience of ‘self as other’ whilst also retaining a grounding in one's familiar sense of self.
(Hunt, 2004a: 156; Qualley, 1997: 11)
The idea of refl exivity as involving ‘putting something out in order that something new might come into being’ seems crucially important here in light of the findings from the current project. It precisely evokes students’ experience of allowing new knowledge to come into being through loosening cognitive control — ‘giving oneself up’ to experience — rather than actively pursuing knowledge through conscious reflection. This makes reflexivity more passive than active and perhaps also less conscious. Jerrold Siegel supports this active/passive distinction, suggesting that whilst reflection — or what he calls ‘refl ectivity’ — is intentional and wilful, reflexivity is automatic, involuntary, something like a reflex (Siegel, 2005: 12–13). Yet reflexivity cannot be completely passive, as learning, no matter how relaxed, always involves an element of will. It also gives rise to action, in the form of carrying forward the new knowledge into writing or learning processes or engagement with others, or indeed into conscious reflection. Thus, as a starting definition, I would suggest that reflexivity is a cognitive-emotional 1mechanism that enables knowledge of the world and of oneself to be acquired through a relaxed kind of intentionality operating intuitively at a low-level of consciousness but giving rise to conscious reflection and action. Reflectivity, by comparison, is more conscious, intentional reflection, including reflection on psychic processes. On this definition Mezirow's active and highly conscious process of ‘critical reflection’ is reflectivity, whilst Boyd and Myers's more passive ‘discernment’ is closer to reflexivity.
But what about the role of the self in reflexivity: the switching back and forth between what I called our familiar sense of self and the sense of self as ‘other’? Dirkx's dialogue between the ego and the deeper, unconscious aspects of the psyche has certain similarities with this, but does not take us further. Social realist Margaret Archer's schema for understanding the self in reflexivity, by contrast, provides a useful starting point. She sees reflexivity as the individual's ability to become a ‘social agent’ capable of transforming society, that is, the ability to think outside of the conceptual frameworks we imbibe from family, education, and society, which echoes the idea of being able to be inside and outside of oneself in my starting definition. For Archer, being a ‘social agent’ necessitates distinguishing between the ‘concept of self (which is … social) and the universal sense of self (which is not)’. The ‘concept of self’ is associated with ‘social identity’, which emerges out of our immersion in existing conceptual frameworks; the ‘universal sense of self’ is associated with ‘personal identity’ — a sense of being the same person over time. ‘Personal identity’ is crucial in becoming a ‘reflexive social agent’, because it enables us to avoid being ‘swamped’ by ‘social identity’ (Archer, 2003: 19–20).
Archer's idea that reflexivity takes place between the self-concept and the continuous sense of self arising out of the body is helpful, but her suggestion for how the latter comes into being ignores empirical evidence. Working from a neo- Lockean position, according to which we come into the world as a ‘blank slate’, Archer sees the ‘universal sense of self’ emerging naturally out of the ‘practical activity’ of the body's engagement with its physical environment, starting with the infant's rubbing itself against the bars of its cot (Archer, 2000: 122–26). In light of extensive research in developmental psychology indicating that newborns are able to distinguish between their own bodies and other entities in their environment (Rochat, 2011), it seems more likely that they have an innate but pre-reflective bodily sense of self and agency, that is, a sense of being a connected physical whole that can engage with the world rather than a series of disconnected parts, and that it is this sense of wholeness that enables them to own as theirs their early encounters with the environment, including with their carers.2 Indeed in recent years the idea that there is an innate base level of bodily subjectivity and agency — a minimal or core self — pre-existing the acquisition of language has become a dominant theme in a wide range of scientific and science-related disciplines. Thus I would suggest that reflexivity is more likely to take place between this innate bodily subjectivity and a higher level of subjectivity in the form of the self-concept. I will now explore this idea in more detail.
The core self and bodily agency
Extrapolating from his research into the experience of people suffering brain damage, cognitive neuroscientist Antonio Damasio posits the existence in human functioning of two levels of conscious self — the ‘core self’ or ‘core consciousness’ (consciousness for Damasio is always accompanied by a sense of self) and the ‘autobiographical self’ — neither of which rely on language for their existence, although in humans the latter becomes enhanced by language (he calls this the ‘extended self’ or ‘extended consciousness’). The core self emerges out of what Damasio calls, following Panksepp (1998), the non-conscious3 ‘protoself’, which he locates in the most ancient parts of the brain.4 The protoself results from the brain's perpetual activity of ‘mapping’, that is sensing and feeding back to itself information about the body's internal states, such as metabolic processes (e.g. temperature control) and innate drives and motivations (e.g. hunger, thirst, curiosity, sexuality), for the purpose of maintaining physiological balance (homeostasis) and ensuring the organism's survival (Damasio, 2003: 34–5). The global ‘map’ of the state of the body that results from this feedback loop emerges in the form of ‘primordial feelings’, which occur spontaneously and continuously whenever we are awake. They have a definite quality, ‘somewhere along the pleasure-to-pain range’ and provide a background sense of bodily ongoingness. They are the basis of the emotions, which constitute a central part of the homeostatic process, enabling the organism to evaluate the safety or otherwise of external environments (Damasio, 2010: 21, 109–10, 185, 193, 201).5 The protoself and its primordial feelings constitute for Damasio the basic ‘material me’ or the ‘selfas- object’ (ibid.: 9, 202). Panksepp (1998) calls it the ‘affective core’6 of the self, which we share with many animals.
The conscious core self emerges in pulse-like fashion whenever the protoself has to adjust the body as a result of the organism's encounters with ‘objects’, by which Damasio means here events in the external world such as sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and bodily movements, and when those encounters are momentarily linked in a series of ‘images’ or mental patterns resulting from these sensory experiences (Damasio, 2000: 318); that is, the image of the organism, the image of the object now enhanced by attention, and the image of the emotional response to the object (Damasio, 2010: 203). At the experiential level this series of images (or moments of felt awareness, as Mark Johnson more intelligibly calls them)7 provides a momentary ‘feeling of knowing’, consisting of a bodily felt perspective, or orientation, from which objects are being encountered, a sense of ownership of the phenomenal experience of the objects, and a sense of agency with regard to any actions carried out in relation to the objects. Damasio calls this the ‘simple self at the bottom of the mind’. It is our basic experience of the self-as-subject, the bodily-felt first person of consciousness in the present moment which is not yet reflected upon (Damasio, 2010: 9, 180–86, 202–4; 2003: 208).
Damasio attempts to capture the experience of this pre-reflective bodily self-awareness (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008) from the perspective of higher consciousness as a form of aesthetic cognition: it is being ‘the music while the music lasts’ (Damasio, 2000: 191) or ‘a lot like music but not yet poetry’ (Damasio, 2010: 186). These musical metaphors of movement are echoed in phenomenologist Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's attempts to capture it. She draws on Luria's terms ‘kinetic’ or ‘kinaesthetic melodies’ (Luria, 1973) to describe the feeling of ‘a certain dynamic fl ow’ in the body that is different from sensory perception (Sheets-Johnstone, 2009: 332). Developmental psychologist Daniel Stern's term ‘vitality affects’ is also an attempt to capture the ‘dynamic, kinetic’ quality of this bodily-felt experience; they are sensations of ‘surging, fading away, fleeting, explosive, crescendo, decrescendo, bursting, drawn out …’. These vitality affects, he argues, are the earliest form of self-experience in infants and remain with us throughout our lives as the source of thought (Stern, 1998: 54, 67). However, this subtle bodily-felt self-experience is difficult to access once extended consciousness has developed. As Damasio says: ‘the images that constitute knowing and sense of self’ at the level of the core self ‘generally remain to the side … are in subtle rather than assertive mode. It is the destiny of subtle mental contents to be missed’ (Damasio, 2000: 128). In fact the core self could easily be described as ‘the self as other’, in the terms of my starting definition of reflexivity. To become aware of it we have to relax our familiar, everyday sense of self-identity or actively shift our attention inwards for the purpose of introspection (Petitmengin, 2007). This happens most readily, of course, in psychotherapy, so it is not surprising to find psychoanalysts trying to conceptualise it.
Indeed this is what I believe Karen Horney was trying to do with the concept of the ‘real self’ (Horney, 1939b: 130), which she coined to capture her own and her patients’ experience of connecting or reconnecting in the therapeutic process with ‘the most alive center of psychic life’ (Horney, 1942: 291), and on the basis of which it then became possible to develop a sense of agency and individual values (Horney, 1999: 132–42). For Horney the real self is an innate, positive ‘force toward individual growth and fulfilment’. It consists of ‘temperament, faculties [and] propensities’, which constitute a set of ‘intrinsic potentialities’ that are part of the individual's genetic make-up and are likely to develop in favourable life circumstances (Horney, 1951: 13, 158). That she refers to the real self as a ‘force’ makes it sound like a process, although reifying it as a noun makes it sound like an entity, but her descriptions in her last book, drawing on William James (1901: 296–305), move it more towards a temporal bodily process:
[The real self] provides the ‘palpitating inward life’; it engenders the spontaneity of feelings, whether these be joy, yearning, love, anger, fear, despair. It also is the source of spontaneous interest and energies, ‘the source of effort and attention from which emanate the fiats of will’; the capacity to wish and to will; it is the part of ourselves that wants to expand and grow and to fulfil itself. It produces the ‘reactions of spontaneity’ to our feelings or thoughts, ‘welcoming or opposing, appropriating or disowning, striving with or against, saying yes or no’. All this indicates that our real self, when strong and active, enables us to make decisions and assume responsibility for them. It therefore leads to genuine integration and a sound sense of wholeness, oneness. Not merely are body and mind, deed and thought or feeling, consonant and harmonious, but they function without serious inner conflict.
(Horney, 1951: 157)
The key elements here are the spontaneous, dynamic experience of bodily feeling, its role as a basis of agency and cognition, and the sense of wholeness it brings, all of which are features of Damasio's core consciousness. Under the influence of her friendship with Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki towards the end of her life, Horney comes even closer to thinking of the real self as a temporal process, conceiving of it as ‘something akin to Suzuki's “state of utmost fluidity or mobility”’ (Westkott, 1998: 297–99; Suzuki, 1959: 14). This is visible in her Final Lectures where, in describing ‘real self’ experience, she puts a much stronger emphasis on being able to tolerate the movement of emotional feelings, the importance of ‘accepting oneself feelingly’ and the ‘feeling of liberation’ this brings (Westkott, 1998; Horney, 1987: 98–9). In fact, Horney's ‘real self’ could be thought of as a composite of Damasio's bodily-felt core self and elements of what he calls the ‘genomic unconscious’ such as drives and motivations, and ‘spontaneous preferences one manifests in early life’ (Damasio, 2010: 278–9), of which we can become aware through higher or extended consciousness. This comes close to the idea of reflexivity I am developing here (cf. Danielian, 2010).
Higher consciousness and the agency of the autobiographical self
In Damasio's schema the higher ‘autobiographical self’ emerges out of the bodily-felt sense of agency in the living present provided by the core self. Once language is acquired this becomes the ‘extended self’ or ‘extended consciousness’, an awareness of existing not just in the present, but across past, present, and future. This has been called the ‘narrative self’, where narrative or storytelling is seen as a natural mode of the broad temporal sweep of extended consciousness (Oatley, 2007). Damasio refers to the autobiographical self as both the ‘social me’ and the ‘spiritual me’ in William James's terms, where ‘spiritual’ means the inner psychic faculties or dispositions (Damasio, 2010: 23, 168–9); it is what we think of as our identity, our personhood (Damasio, 2000). This higher level of self emerges into consciousness when memories of lived experience or anticipated future experience ‘interact with the protoself and produce an abundance of core self pulses’ (Damasio, 2010: 181, 212–3). This category of felt ‘objects-to-beknown’ — this time internal rather than external — are brought together and transiently held in what Damasio calls ‘image space’ in the most recent part of the brain, the cerebral cortex. This facilitates forethought and planning, as well as complex mental processes such as creativity, which ‘require the display and manipulation of vast amounts of knowledge’ (Damasio, 2003: 177).
In psychodynamic thinking the autobiographical self has been equated with Freud's ego (Solms and Turnbull, 2000). However, the ego is the inhibiting function of the psyche, keeping at bay the unruly instincts of the id on the one hand and on the other defending itself against the demands of the civilizing forces manifested in the superego and is therefore much narrower than Damasio's formulation.8 Karen Horney's holistic concept of the ‘actual self’ has certain similarities with the autobiographical self, as she, like Damasio, was working with William James's ideas. She describes the ‘actual self’ as everything a person actually is in the present, mind and body, whether well-functioning or not (Horney, 1951: 110). This is clearly derived from James's description of the ‘empirical self’ as ‘all that [a person] is tempted to call by the name of me’, including not only ‘his body and psychic powers’ but all the things invested with the sense of ‘me’, including the sense of who one is in the world. Thus, as in Damasio's formulation, Horney's actual self embraces the self in the world James calls the ‘social self’, including different self-concepts9 and self-narratives10 derived from immersion in society and culture, and the inner psychic faculties or dispositions he calls the ‘spiritual self’ (James, 1901: 291).
Neither Horney nor Damasio devote much attention to the development of James's ‘I’ or agency at the higher level of self-functioning. However, Damasio does mention that the ‘I’ (which he associates with the extended self) is created by language, whilst the autobiographical self is not (Damasio, 1994: 243), which indicates that he distinguishes between the two. Freud's ego is closer to James's ‘I’ than to the autobiographical self as a whole, but Horney rejects Freud's concept as essentially too weak and defensive to be the central agency of the psyche (Horney, 1939a: 184): it is ‘an employee who has functions but no initiative and no executive powers’ (Horney, 1951: 173). Indeed she sees Freud's ego as a defence which, when dismantled in therapy, will lead to the retrieval of spontaneity and the ‘faculties of willpower, judgment and decision making’ (Horney, 1939a: 190; 2000: 214–5). Damasio also identifies the will as a central feature of the agency of the extended self (Damasio, 2010: 280), drawing on Wegner's view that the conscious will is ‘an emotion that authenticates the action's owner as the self’ (Wegner, 2002: 327).
Attachment theorist Peter Fonagy, who sets out to explore the distinction between James's ‘me’ and ‘I’, sees the agency or ‘I’ of the autobiographical self not as a given but as a ‘developing or constructed capacity’ that is ‘hard won’ across a number of stages (Fonagy et al., 2002: 3–4). He acknowledges that infants manifest an innate sense of bodily agency. This enables them ‘to represent their bodily self as a differentiated object in space that can initiate action and exert causal influence on its environment’. A non-verbal self-concept is thought to develop during the second year of life, once the neural equipment for autobiographical memory is in place. But this is a ‘present self’ — the ‘single representation of the self's actions and physical features’ — rather than a self across time.
The higher-level self-agency or ‘I’ does not emerge until 4–5 years of age when language is in place and when infants can be seen to understand that their desires and beliefs are the cause of events in the world. This implies an ability to conceptualise themselves as an object and to connect this self-concept with external reality (ibid.: 3–4, 206–8). A unified self-concept that includes a sense of continuity across time requires the ability to hold in mind multiple representations or models of the world simultaneously (ibid.: 247), a description which echoes Damasio's concept of ‘image space’ at the level of extended consciousness. So the autobiographical ‘I’ or higher self-agency can be understood as the infant's ability to conceptualise the autobiographical self as a felt, holistic structure and to link this self-concept with its desires and beliefs, which gives rise to a more conscious sense of intention to act in the world. It has been suggested that ‘higher-order, conceptually informed attributions of ownership or agency may depend on [the] first-order experience of ownership or agency’ derived from the core self (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008: 161). Thus, what is being objectified in the higher-order self-concept is (at least in part but importantly) the orientation, sense of ownership and agency provided by the bodily core self, as discussed above.
Crucial for the development of higher self-agency or the ‘I’ is what Fonagy calls the ‘reflective function’ or ‘mentalization’ — the ability to make sense of one's own mind as well as recognise mind states in others — which emerges out of the engagement with carers in the early stages of the child's life (Fonagy et al., 2002: 23–64). For this to occur, carers need to be able to reflect back to their infants their mental processes, that is, their perceptions and intentions. Also important is the reflecting back of infants' spontaneous affects, but through simulation rather than direct mirroring, to enable the child to recognise that these are its own feelings rather than the carers'. This ability to experience affects whilst simultaneously thinking them, rather than reflecting on them ‘from a position of distance’, Fonagy calls ‘mentalized affectivity’ (ibid.: 439). I translate this as ‘thinking feelings’. It is a core feature of reflexivity and a good description of a central dimension of the work of the CWPD programme (see Part III).
Feeding back to the child its own experience of mental states and affects facilitates, on this view, not only its cognitive development but also, crucially, the discovery of, and developing ability to regulate, its feelings. Thus developing a robust sense of agency at the level of the autobiographical self involves beginning to understand one's own mental states and making sense of what feelings mean, which leads to the ability to manage or regulate the self as a whole (ibid.: 436). It facilitates the development of what is known as the ‘executive function’ of the mind, which includes metacognition (i.e. the ability to reflect consciously on one's own mental processes), selective attention (i.e. the willed shifting of attention), working memory (i.e. the area of memory readily available to consciousness), inhibitory control (e.g. of automatic mechanisms such as emotions), and rule use, and is responsible for ‘flexibly and dynamically’ organising phases of problem solving in the pursuit of specific goals (Zelazo and Cunningham, 2007: 136–8). This is precisely the part of the mind we associate with the will, so corresponds to what Horney and Damasio see as the central agency of the actual or autobiographical self.
The role of agency in reflexivity
How, then, do these two levels of conscious self with their different senses of agency help to understand the concept of reflexivity and, by extension, what is happening in transformative learning? Damasio does not use the term reflexivity, but his description of the way consciousness ‘fluctuates’ between the temporal frames of core and extended consciousness sounds very much like the mechanism I am seeking to understand. Core consciousness provides the mind with ‘minimal scope’, the sensing of the self in the present moment, whilst extended consciousness provides ‘big scope’, the sensing of the self over time past, present, and future. The shift upwards and downwards between big and minimal scope happens fluidly all the time as if ‘on a gliding cursor’ (Damasio, 2010: 168–69), so that one minute I can be immersed in the sensation of the sun on my face whilst sitting quietly in the garden, and the next negotiating with my neighbour about his plans to rebuild the dividing wall that involves knowledge of previous discussions and the projected outcome. As Damasio says, in the former state the big scope of extended consciousness is not needed: ‘it would have been a waste of brain-processing capacity, not to mention fuel’. The ‘downshift to core self’ provides the brain with rest, but it also opens the mind to a less focused and more daydreaming state (ibid.: 169–70). This latter point indicates that there is a spatial as well as a temporal dimension to this switch, for if the downshift to core self facilitates a less focused, more daydreaming state, then it can be thought of as a shift from narrow focused attention on specific objects or events taking place within the broad time-frame of extended consciousness to a broader bodily-felt immersion in spontaneous phenomenal experience provided by core consciousness.
The existence of two such spatial modes of consciousness is exactly what psychoanalyst Marion Milner discovers in her reflections on her attempts to draw. She calls them ‘thinking mode’, the sharp-pointed focusing with the mind, and ‘feeling mode’, the broad, hovering attention with the body, which she calls the ‘imaginative body’, because it feels like an extension of her bodily self into space (Milner, 1971: 36). In order to animate her drawings she found that she had to let go of thinking mode, which usually resulted in lifeless, unsatisfying representations, and shift into feeling mode. She describes this as an ‘internal gesture’, which involved relinquishing control of her everyday sense of self and taking an inner ‘step back’, so that psychic space could open up. She experienced it as a physical sensation of becoming ‘fatter’, even though it was a gesture of the mind (ibid.: 70–4). In Damasio's terms Milner's internal gesture — a good example of Damasio's images or Johnson's moments of bodily felt awareness (cf. Nicholls, 2006) — involves the softening of the autobiographical ‘I’ to make way for the agency of the bodily-felt core self, but the former remains in the background holding the space open for sensuous thought processes at the level of core consciousness to emerge. As Damasio puts it, a sense of self as the protagonist of the psyche never goes away completely. If it did, ‘the mind would lose its orientation, the ability to gather its parts’ (Damasio, 2010: 170). It always functions as a frame for thinking.
It is significant that both Damasio and Milner highlight the flexible shifting of attention as the core mechanism of the experiences they are describing, with attention at the level of bodily feeling characterised as a relaxation from, or loosening of control of, the demands of sharply focused attention. Damasio regards attention as a key component of the ‘feeling of knowing’ provided by the bodily core self (Damasio, 2000: 182–3), presumably part of the orientation, ownership, and agency the core self provides, although at this level it is not reflective attention. Attention is also a central feature of ‘executive function’, as noted above, where it regulates thoughts and feelings, and processes such as planning and decision making (Raz and Buhle, 2006: 374). Damasio's description implies that the oscillation between higher and lower level attention (or between attention and immersion) takes place effortlessly and without conscious awareness. By contrast Milner has to ‘open up’ to the mechanism and bring it into conscious reflection so that she can ‘practice’ it. This involves loosening her usual cognitive control, so that the two modes of attention can begin to work together and become spontaneously reflexive. This connection between openness and self-reflection as a prelude to reflexivity is also at the core of Daniel Siegel's discussion of mechanisms underlying mindfulness, a method of attention training which, he argues, renders the executive function simultaneously robust and flexible for the purpose of self-regulation. In his view reflexivity is a deeper and ‘more automatic meta-awareness within the larger framework of reflection’. It ‘implies a more immediate capacity of the mind to know itself, without effort, without conscious observation, without words’; it facilitates openness to whatever arises into awareness in the moment whether ‘sensations, images, feelings, thoughts’ (Siegel, 2007: 126–33; cf. Gunnlaugson, 2007). This description supports the understanding of reflexivity I am developing here.
Thus I would now describe the role of the self in reflexivity as follows: the autobiographical ‘I’, that is, the higher self-agency of extended consciousness, when in spontaneous contact with the bodily agency of the core self, provides a robust but flexible temporal and spatial frame for the mind's attention, enabling it to operate spontaneously and fluidly between higher cognition located in the prefrontal cortex of the brain and bodily cognition located in the reality-evaluating function of the more ancient emotion-based functions of the brain. Optimally this process takes place effortlessly, without full conscious awareness, although it can be brought to conscious awareness and reflected upon in order to improve its functioning (see Chapter 8 re ‘practising reflexivity’). Seeing that the function of the self is to enhance the mind's operation (Damasio, 2010: 267), it is reasonable to conclude that when the self functions optimally, the mind will function well too. Thus the consequence of refl exivity is that the mind and the affects can be flexibly regulated rather than controlled (Fonagy et al., 2002: 95–6), so that the psyche as a whole becomes simultaneously grounded and agentic and open to change. To put it another way, it functions as a dynamic system.
The psyche as a dynamic system
The idea that the psyche is a dynamic system has been suggested by a number of writers (e.g. Tershakovec, 2007; Siegel, 1999) and helps to consolidate the picture of reflexivity I have been working towards. Systems theory was developed originally by Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) and has been widely applied to understanding how complex organisms — from eco-systems, to large-scale social organisations such as schools or businesses, to small-scale social units such as families, to the biological structure of the brain — function holistically. Dynamic systems are seen as having inherent self-organising processes that are naturally motivated to move from (relative) disorder,11 towards maximal complexity,12 with holistic structures emerging out of the interaction between different parts (Lewis, 2005: 173–4; Siegel, 2003: 4). They tend to evolve hierarchically toward ever higher levels of organisation, with new and more advanced organising principles emerging spontaneously at each level. This is achieved not through linear causality but through constant cycles of feedback, or circular causality. As dynamic systems develop, the operation of lower levels tends to become mechanised, whilst higher levels become more specialised and segregated (Tershakovec, 2007: 27–31). So there is a drive to differentiate the parts of the organism, but the overall trajectory is towards integrating them into a maximally complex whole that is both stable and flexible (Siegel, 2003: 23–4).
In the model of the psyche as a dynamic system the mind is seen as an energy and information processing system, with the two hemispheres of the brain fulfilling different functions and having different modes of operation that complement each other. The left hemisphere is a serial processor that contains the main language faculty. Its mode of operation is characterised by logic and clarity, and linear sequencing in time. It interprets and makes explicit what is experienced by the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere is a parallel processor with a holistic mode of operation that means that it is has a broader scope for establishing levels of meaning and context (Tershakovec, 2007: 56–63; Bowden et al., 2005) and can tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty (McGilchrist, 2009: 82, 187). The holistic mode of operation of the right hemisphere comes from its being connected to the body through the protoself's global mapping (Devinsky, 2000), and it is therefore more spatially oriented than the left. It is also dominant for the understanding, expression and regulation of the emotions, particularly the primary emotions,13 although the left hemisphere is involved in the expression of anger and the social emotions. The right hemisphere is therefore more relational, empathic, and responsive to nonverbal aspects of language, such as tone of voice and gesture, all of which are emotion-based (McGilchrist, 2009: 58–64; Tershakovec, 2007: 78–9; Siegel, 2003: 14–15).
Importantly for understanding reflexivity, the right hemisphere is associated with unconscious modes of processing and the left with conscious modes (McGilchrist, 2009: 187), although there is evidence indicating that both hemispheres are ‘capable of supporting personal consciousness’ (Trevarthen, 2009: 162). In the context of Damasio's two-tier model of consciousness one could perhaps think of the hemispheres as rendering different degrees of consciousness, rather than the either/or of conscious/unconscious, with focused attention bringing sharper conscious awareness to phenomena previously in low level consciousness. Indeed attention and intention are key factors in the different modes of operation of the hemispheres, with the right yielding attention that is broad, flexible, and ‘patiently open to whatever is’ and the left yielding attention that is narrow, focused, and purposefully active (McGilchrist, 2009: 25–9, 171–5). As these modes are very similar to those identified by Damasio and Milner in connection with reflexive mental functioning, it sounds as if reflexivity is fundamentally an inter-hemispheric mechanism involving different degrees of consciousness and will. This also follows from the dependence on the right hemisphere of the sense of self as bodily and holistic (Damasio's core self) and the basic self-concept and theory of mind (key features of the pre-linguistic autobiographical self), and the dependence on the left hemisphere of ‘the objectified self’, which I take to include social self-concepts, and ‘the self as an expression of will’ (ibid.: 57, 87–8).
However, whilst reflexivity can be understood as an inter-hemispheric mechanism, for optimal functioning of the psyche the right hemisphere needs to be the ‘leading edge’ (Tershakovec, 2007: 40–2).14 This is von Bertalanffy's term for the mechanism of the dynamic system that governs the behaviour of the organism at the highest level of the hierarchy and promotes integration. This finds support in McGilchrist's argument for the ‘primacy of the right hemisphere’ in human functioning (McGilchrist, 2009: 176–208), according to which the right hemisphere is the primary interface with the world, whilst the language-based left hemisphere receives and interprets what is transmitted to it by the right and then transmits it back again, that is a ‘bottom-up’ (bodily-felt) rather than ‘top-down’ (linguistic) structure. Indeed the top-down nature of the left hemisphere seems particularly unsuited to being the leading edge, seeing that its characteristics include ‘stickiness’, which I take to be a tendency to psychic perseveration, the need to be right, a ‘black and white style’, a lack of realism, and a tendency to confabulation (ibid.: 82–91), all of which feature significantly in Group 2 students’ difficulties with being creative. By comparison, the right hemisphere's mode of operation is characterised as ‘betweenness’, which evokes relationality, getting close up to ‘whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves’ (ibid.: 93). Thus, when the psyche is led by the right hemisphere the ‘objectified self’ or autobiographical ‘I’ in the left hemisphere can remain in reflexive contact with the core bodily self, rendering open and flexible the relationship with social self-concepts and the self as an expression of the conscious will. This collaboration is crucially important for the formulation of a realistic mental model of the self-in-the- world (internal mental self-representation) that, whilst implicit, will be open to reflection and modification in the light of experience (Tershakovec, 2007: 122–4, 155; Johnson-Laird, 1983). Such a mental model would make it possible to be a ‘social agent’ in Archer's sense, able to engage reflexively with familial, social, and cultural narratives and discourses.
Reflexivity, then, turns out to be a right hemisphere-led function that facilitates collaboration with the left hemisphere and renders the psyche both stable and flexible. It could be described as a fundamental mechanism of learning involving two different modes: one broad, intuitive and bodily-based, which I will call embodied-experiential learning, and the other sharply-focused and language-based, which I will call critical reflection. These are, in fact, the two modes of learning articulated by the Jungian and Mezirowian strands of transformative learning theory, which can thus be seen as two parts of what I am calling the ‘cycle of transformation’, with the embodied-experiential mode preceding the critically reflective (see Chapter 10). According to Daniel Siegel, it involves a process of beneficial neural integration (Siegel, 2007: 119–20; cf. Cozolino, 2002).
Reflexivity, however, is difficult to achieve and, even if achieved, is a precarious process. The psyche's constant openness to change means that it is always in process between order and (relative) chaos (Siegel, 2003: 3–4, 23). Indeed, very small changes in the leading edge can trigger massive changes throughout the whole dynamic system (Tershakovec, 2007: 28–30). For example, if spontaneous access to everyday reality via the feeling- and emotion-processing right hemisphere becomes too painful or difficult, the left hemisphere is likely to become dominant, shifting the leading edge from bottom-up to top-down and limiting the amount of information that can be processed (Ward, 2001: 320). Without a spontaneous grounding in bodily agency, the left hemisphere tendency to ‘stickiness’ and control will result in psychic inertia or stasis, with adverse consequences for thinking and creativity. Seeing that for many Group 2 students there is a marked shift from top-down cognitive control towards bottom-up reflexivity as a result of their studies, as demonstrated by their marked increase in cognitive flexibility, it seems reasonable to suggest that a change in the leading edge of the psyche has occurred, freeing up the bodily flow of experience.
Thus I would suggest that the mechanism underlying students' experience of change can be understood as a fundamental shift in the functioning of the self. It involves the relaxing of the autobiographical ‘I’ in the left hemisphere, which allows more spontaneous access to core consciousness in the right hemisphere. This in turn gives rise to a more authentic and holistic sense of self, which facilitates the development of a more grounded sense of bodily agency and the ability to regulate rather than control the affects. The result of this development is an enhanced ability to think creatively and independently. But why did the shift to top-down control occur in the first place? The next chapter offers some possible answers to this question.
Notes
1 I use the view of cognition as ‘any mental operations and structures that are involved in language, meaning, perception, conceptual systems and reason’, which are at least 95 per cent unconscious and fundamentally bound up with emotion (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999: 11–13).
2 Archer discounts the role of carers in the development of bodily agency.
3 Damasio distinguishes between ‘non-conscious’ mechanisms, which will never become conscious, and ‘unconscious’ mechanisms that may.
4 Damasio has moved towards Panksepp's position on this (Gallagher, 2008: 106–7; Damasio, 2010: 322–3, n.17).
5 Damasio distinguishes between emotions, which are non-conscious, and emotional feelings, which are conscious.
6 The term ‘affect’ encompasses emotions, feelings and moods (Fox, 2008).
7 Johnson suggests that the term ‘images’ is problematic, as they are generally thought of as visual. He suggests understanding them as ‘just our awareness of certain aspects of our current body state’ (Johnson, 2007: 64). This makes more immediate sense.
8 Laplanche and Pontalis (2004: 134) suggest that: ‘Freud does not identify the ego with the individual as a whole, nor even with the whole of the mental apparatus: it is a part. […However…] he does locate the ego in a privileged position in regard to the individual’ considered both biologically and psychically.
9 I understand self-concepts as dominant categories of self-understanding available in a society or culture (Neisser, 1988).
10 Self-narratives are the ways of self-telling available in a society or culture (Bruner, 1990).
11 ‘Relative’ because there will always be internal and external constraints to the disorder (Siegel, 2003) (see below pp. 147–8).
12 Dynamic systems theory has become incorporated into what is known as complexity science.
13 Damasio defines the primary emotions as fear, anger, disgust, surprise, sadness and happiness and regards them as innate, although their expression will be influenced by cultural factors (Damasio, 2003: 44).
14 Tershakovec suggests that Horney's ‘real self’ located in the right hemisphere is the leading edge of the optimally functioning psyche (Tershakovec, 2007: 42–4). This makes sense if, as I suggested, the real self is a combination of core consciousness and aspects of the genomic unconscious of which we can become aware via extended consciousness. Horney's idea of reconnecting with the real self could be thought of as the process of becoming more reflexively aware of right hemisphere functioning, which brings us a more spontaneous and authentic feeling of our engagement with the world than the left hemisphere.