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VII. INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVE: NEUROSCIENCE AND FREE ASSOCIATIONS
Summarizing the interdisciplinary research, Grotstein (1995) points out that Freud apparently “never realized that he had, in effect, discovered the right brain hemisphere!” (Grotstein 1995, p. 396). When a person lies down and does not make eye contact with the other person in the discourse, he or she seems to activate a cerebral hemispheric shift in terms of modes of data processing from the left to the right in right-handed persons and vice versa for left-handed persons. Correspondingly, researchers in infant observation also noted that there was a noticeable difference in infant alertness when the infant was observed sitting up as contrasted with lying down. This shift in the alertness of consciousness corresponded to electroencephalographic changes in states of alertness and also to a hemispheric shift. The shift is from a highly controlled, organized, linear, abstract mode to a looser, free-flowing, holistic/field-dependent mode. This ‘right-brain shift’ in the lying-down position in analysis would be manifested by the patient's free associations. These would be ‘free’ i.e., optimally disconnected from ‘left-brain editing’, censorship, and control, and would instead be increasingly organized by the unconscious. Some of notable North American contemporary psychoanalytically informed neuroscientific research relevant to free association derives its roots in Freud’s (1891) neurological study “On Aphasia”. Here, Freud posited that word meaning and word presentation needed to be distinguished if aphasic symptoms were to be accurately identified and understood. In this context, Freud’s later work on primary process mentation (Freud 1900, 1915) is a dynamic generalization of his previous proposition related specifically to aphasia. An example is the recent neuropsychoanalytic study of Villa, Shevrin, Snodgrass, Bazan and Brakel (2006), which specifically tests Freud’s hypothesis that word meaning and word presentation (e.g., phonemic and graphemic properties; p. 117) are functionally distinct when processed unconsciously (Freud 1891, 1915). Expanding on previous research on unconscious processes in cognition (Shevrin 1973, 2006; Shevrin, Williams, Marshall, Hertel, Bond, and Brakel 1992; Snodgrass, Bernat and Shevrin 2004), neurolinguistic models of parallel-distributive processing (Seidenberg and McClelland 1989), and dual-systems theories (Stanovich and West 2000), the present study, especially relevant to the concept of free associations, was to demonstrate an important qualitative difference between conscious and unconscious lexical processes described by Freud (1895, 1911) as primary and secondary process. These correspond to different modes of relationships between word meaning and word presentation: while in the secondary process the word meaning and word presentation are integrated, in the unconscious primary process the word meaning and its perceptual aspects are dissociated (when unrelated word meanings are activated by the word presentation). A complex methodology included the subliminal presentation of palindromic (reversible) words (e.g. dog-god) of variable affective charge; measures for anxiety; personality
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