Toward a Neural Understanding of Emotional Oscillation and Affect Regulation: Investigating the Dynamic Unconscious and Transference. An Interdisciplinary Study

Abstract

The dynamic unconscious is a key concept of psychoanalysis that has remained particularly elusive in experimental investigations. Previous attempts to operationalize the dynamic unconscious have mainly focused on processing perceptually unconscious (i.e., subliminal) stimuli. However, from a psychodynamic viewpoint, these studies investigate preconscious processes rather than the dynamic unconscious. The latter depends crucially on repressed conflicts—that is, unresolved conflict situations associated with negative feelings that have not been worked through and therefore cannot be fully coped with. In contrast, resolved conflict situations may still involve negative feelings, but these have been accepted and integrated into the autobiographical self. Here, we investigate the dynamics of negative and positive feelings while presenting resolved and unresolved conflicts during fMRI. In a naturalistic experimental paradigm, we scanned participants of a psychodynamic group therapy while they were being confronted with reports of their unresolved and resolved conflicts. These reports were read by the subjects’ therapist (A.H.), recorded to audiotape, and then presented to the participants in an fMRI scanner where they indicated their negative or positive feelings by button-press. This experimental setting allowed us to evoke intense negative and positive feelings while confronting the subjects with psychodynamically relevant autobiographical conflicts. In a group of 30 participants, we found that negative feelings were associated with different activation patterns when unresolved (presumably dynamically unconscious) and resolved conflicts were presented. During unresolved conflicts, negative feelings were associated with activation of the bilateral insulae; when resolved conflicts were presented, negative feelings activated the bilateral superior temporal gyrus. These findings show that the neural activation patterns related to psychodynamically relevant conflicts can be studied using fMRI. Further applications may involve longitudinal designs and patient populations with different abilities to oscillate between negative and positive feelings.