One - THE HEART’S CASTLE

One

THE HEART’S CASTLE

SCIENCE JOINS THE SEARCH FOR LOVE

Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.

I who don’t know the secret wrote the line.

They told me (through a third person) they had found it but not what it was not even what line it was.

No doubt by now, more than a week later,

they have forgotten the secret, the line, the name of the poem.

I love them for finding what I can’t find, and for loving me for the line I wrote,

and for forgetting it so that a thousand times,

till death finds them, they may discover it again, in other lines in other happenings.

And for wanting to know it,

for assuming there is such a secret,

yes, for that, most of all.

—Denise Levertov, “The Secret”

Some might think it strange that a book on the psychobiology of love opens with a poem, but the adventure itself demands it. Poetry transpires at the juncture between feeling and understanding—and so does the bulk of emotional life. More than three hundred years ago, the French mathematician Blaise Pascal wrote, The heart has its reasons whereof Reason knows nothing. Pascal was correct, although he could not have known why. Centuries later, we know that the neural systems responsible for emotion and intellect are separate, creating the chasm between them in human minds and lives. The same rift makes the mysteries of love difficult for people to penetrate, despite an earnest desire to do so. Because of the brain’s design, emotional life defeats Reason much as a poem does. Both retreat from the approach of explication like a mirage on a summer’s day.

Although the nature of love is not easy to define, it has an intrinsic order, an architecture that can be detected, excavated, and explored. Emotional experience, in all its resplendent complexity, cannot emerge ex vacuo: it must originate in dynamic neural systems humming with physiologic machinations as specific and patterned as they are intricate. Because it is part of the physical universe, love has to be lawful. Like the rest of the world, it is governed and described by principles we can discover but cannot change. If we only knew where and how to look, we should be able to find emotional laws whose actions a person could no more resist than he could the force of gravity if he fell off a cliff.

Locating love’s precepts is a daunting task. Every conception of love inevitably depends on a view of the broader totality of the emotional mind. Until the most recent snippet of human history, however, a science of the mind did not exist. Classical Greek disciplines included geometry, astronomy, medicine, botany—but no conception of human emotions that could claim more credibility than their contemporaneous and vivid myths. That empirical emptiness endured for thousands of years. Philosophers expounded and debated on emotional life—four bodily humors here, demonic possession there—but the world waited until the end of the nineteenth century A.D. for systematic investigation into feelings and passion.

When scientific attention first turned to the heart’s mysteries, the technologies essential to solving them were inconceivable. At the end of the nineteenth century, a handful of thinkers— Sigmund Freud, William James, Wilhelm Wundt—worked on assembling the earliest scientific accounts of human mental faculties. Brilliant pioneers though they were, they could know nothing about the mind’s physicality, about the minuscule neural mechanisms that combine and conspire to create the stuff of mental life—sights, sounds, thoughts, ambitions, feelings. Love’s secrets remained buried within the most impenetrable treasure chest the world has ever known: a tangle of a hundred billion cells, whose innumerable electrical currents and chemical signals come together to create a single, living human brain.

From the beginning of the twentieth century to its end, influential accounts of love included no biology. It has been said that neurotics build castles in the sky, while psychotics live in them, and psychiatrists collect the rent. But it is the psychiatrists and psychologists who have been living within a palace of theory suspended over a void. When they built their understanding of the emotional mind, the brain was a cipher. The foundations of their edifice had to be fashioned out of the only substance in plentiful supply—the purest speculation.

The first explorers of humanity’s passions met that challenge with bold invention. In a sanctuary safe from refutation, they conjured up mental contraptions and metaphors that had no physical referent. Sigmund Freud was not the only dreamer who sketched an impressionistic vision of the mind, but he was the most relentless in crediting his concoction with a solidity it could not possibly possess. And so the towers and walls of the Freudian citadel sprang into midair, where they remain: the looming turret of the censoring superego, the lofty arches of insight, the squat dungeon of the id. Despite the insubstantial base, that old model of emotional life cast a long shadow. Freud is delivered anew to each generation. His conclusions permeate our culture in a multitude of ways, and his assumptions have endured for so many years that they are mistaken for fact.

The cultural atmosphere in Freud’s time was suffused with suspicion about the moral and physical hazards of masturbation. Freud, who disapproved of masturbation for the duration of his life, was convinced that onanism and coitus interruptus were responsible for anxiety, lassitude, a plethora of hysterical symptoms—the emotional dysfunctions of his day. Next he concluded that childhood sexual seduction was the real culprit; then his focus shifted to youthful fantasies of copulation with parents. When his clinical encounters revealed that most patients denied all varieties of precocious eroticism, Freud did not question his original conviction. He concluded that patients did not remember young, sensuous adventures because the mind had spirited memories out of consciousness. When he sifted through his patients’ symptoms and dreams, he believed he could see cleverly encrypted clues pointing to a dark sexual history—the same one, he failed to notice, that he had envisioned from the outset.

This prototype of the emotional mind contains familiar Freudian machinery: desire’s cauldron bubbling beneath the surface of awareness; the sunlit quotidian existence of the self, incognizant of lurking nether regions; and the healing power of insight into a sinister erotic past that, by definition, has to be there. This account of humanity’s heart binds love inextricably to sexual pleasure and perversion—indeed, it holds that love is but a convoluted representation of forbidden, repellent, incestuous urges. For his emblem and standard-bearer, Freud scanned the roster of the Greek theater and chose Oedipus—who, cursed by the gods, an inadvertent pervert and parricide, blinds himself and wanders in misery. The adopted story’s transfigured moral is that the civilizing forces of reason and intellect must reign if humanity’s bestial nature is not to descend toward unspeakable horror.

“Man is a credulous animal and must believe something, ” wrote Bertrand Russell. “In the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones.” Wherever and whenever they are, people vastly prefer any explanation (however flawed or implausible) to none. When Freud announced that he had plumbed once and for all the inky depths of human passions, a world desirous of reassuring certainty flocked to his vision.

As in a dictatorship, however, embracing the end of anarchy came at a price. Freud’s logic was a veritable Möbius strip of circularity. When patients complied with his insistence that they remember early sexual material, he called them astute; when they did not, he said they were resisting and repressing the truth. (Equating denial with confession is a versatile, albeit ignoble, tool that has served diverse enterprises, from the burning of Salem’s witches to the persecutions of the Inquisition.) Today, Freud’s conclusions are said to be regularly validated by the practice of insight-oriented psychotherapy—but that activity is the sole purview of those who have already accepted the tenets they subsequently purport to confirm. Such revolving door reasoning could corroborate any proposition, no matter how faulty.

Psychoanalytic concepts captivated popular culture as have no other ideas about humanity’s mind and heart. But the Freudian model belongs to a prescientific era in the search to unravel the enigmas of love. The demise of such mythologies is always probable. As long as the brain remained a mystery, as long as the physical nature of the mind remained remote and inaccessible, an evidential void permitted a free flow of irrefutable statements about emotional life. As in politics, the factor determining the longevity and popularity of these notions was not their veracity but the energy and wit devoted to promoting them.

In the years when unrestrained presumptions about the mind roamed free, outlandish claims piled up like election year promises. Seizures are covert expressions of orgasmic ecstasy, one theory maintained. Children who lag in their reading and writing skills are exacting revenge on parents who expelled them from the marital bed. A migraine headache discloses sexual fantasies of defloration. All of these colorful assertions were living on time borrowed from the prevailing scientific ignorance about the brain.

Because we three are clinicians, we must answer to the daily demands of pragmatism. The purpose behind discerning the nature of love is not to satisfy ivory tower discussions or to produce fodder for academic delectation. Instead, as our work makes all too clear, the world is full of live men and women who encounter difficulty in loving or being loved, and whose happiness depends critically upon resolving that situation with the utmost expediency. However inelegant or mythological a model of the mind might be, if we found it clinically effective—if we could use it to help people know their own hearts—we would be loath to reject it.

When we sought to make use of the Freudian model and its numerous offshoots, however, we discovered that efficacy was not among the model’s advantages. When each of us came to grapple with the emotional problems of our patients, we saw that the old models provide diagrams to a territory that cannot be found anywhere within a real person. Our patients never behaved as predicted. They did not benefit from what the models prescribed, and what did help them had never been taught to us. Unless we stretched and contorted it past the breaking point, that framework for understanding emotional life failed to elucidate the stories of the patients we met in our offices every day. And so we sought elsewhere for clues to the heart’s perplexing conundrums.

The science of the emotional mind got off to a slow start in the first half of the twentieth century, but in the latter half it found a second and adventitious wind. While French doctors searched for antihistamines, they created antipsychotic medications. Drugs for tuberculosis were observed to improve mood, and a few short chemical steps later, antidepressants blossomed. An Australian accidentally discovered that lithium makes guinea pigs docile, and in so doing he stumbled upon a treatment for manic depression. Tiny molecules, when ingested and transported to the brain, were capable of erasing delusions, removing depression, smoothing out mood swings, banishing anxiety—how could one square that with the supposed preeminence of repressed sexual urges as the cause of all matters emotional?

In the 1990s, the collision of pharmacological efficacy with psychoanalytic explanations all but reduced the latter to flinders. At the same time, the displacement of this dominant paradigm left all of us without a coherent account of our lives and loves. Freud’s collapse in the last decade of the twentieth century has rendered our yearnings, desires, and dreams, if not inexplicable, then at least unexplained.

Although science has risen to take its place as Freud’s successor, it has not been able to sketch a framework for love that is both sound and habitable. Two persistent obstacles block the way.

First, a curious correlation has prevailed between scientific rigor and coldness: the more factually grounded a model of the mind, the more alienating. Behaviorism was the first example: brandishing empiricism at every turn, it was thoroughly discomfiting in its refusal to acknowledge such staples of human life as thought or desire. Cognitive psychology bristled with boxes and arrows linking perception to action and had nothing to say about the unthinking center of self that people most cherish. Evolutionary psychology has shed welcome light on the mind’s Darwinian debts, but the model declaims as illusions those features of human life lacking an obvious survival advantage—including friendship, kindness, religion, art, music, and poetry.

Modern neuroscience has been equally culpable of propagating an unappealing and soulless reductionism. If the psychoanalysts spun an intangible castle in the air for humanity to inhabit, neuroscience has delivered a concrete hovel. Is every mood or manner best understood as the outcome of molecular billiard balls caroming around the cranium? When emotional problems arise, is a steady diet of Ritalin for children and Prozac for adults to be our only national response? If a woman loses her husband and becomes depressed, does her sorrow signify, or is she just a case of chemistry gone awry? Science is a newcomer to the business of defining human nature, but thus far it has remained inimical to humanism. Seekers of meaning are turned away at the door.

The second impediment to a wholly scientific description of love is the dearth of hard data. Systematic investigation holds out enticing promises for those who wish to understand the brain— and what empiricism gives with one generous gesture, it takes back with another. Despite galactic strides in technology, brain science remains a frustrating collection of pillow-soft hints, bulging with ambiguity. These intimations may point in the right direction, but they will not take us with clean finality to conclusiveness. Science has come far on the path to understanding the brain, but that road stretches on to the horizon. The student of love still confronts a venerable relationship between certainty and utility in matters of the heart: only a few things worth knowing about love can be proven, and just a few things amenable to proof are worth knowing at all.

When he ventures into love’s domain, the uncompromising empiricist is left with little to discuss. A child’s fierce and inarticulate longing for his parents, the torrential passion between young lovers, any mother’s unshakable devotion—all are elusive vapors that mock objectivity’s earnest attempt to assign them to this gene or that collection of cells. Someday, perhaps, everything will be known, but that day beckons from an unimaginable distance. And yet without some tethers to verifiable facts, anybody can spin limitless high-blown fancies about love that have the same evidential status as the emanations of a Ouija board.

If empiricism is barren and incomplete, while impressionistic guesswork leads anywhere and everywhere, what hope can there be for arriving at a workable understanding of the human heart? In the words of Vladimir Nabokov, there can be no science without fancy and no art without facts. Love emanates from the brain; the brain is physical, and thus as fit a subject for scientific discourse as cucumbers or chemistry. But love unavoidably partakes of the personal and the subjective, and so we cannot place it in the killing jar and pin its wings to cardboard as a lepidopterist might a prismatic butterfly. In spite of what science teaches, only a delicate admixture of evidence and intuition can yield the truest view of the emotional mind. To slip between the twin dangers of empty reductionism and baseless credulity, one must balance a respect for proof with a fondness for the unproven and the unprovable. Common sense must combine in equal measure imaginative flight and an aversion to orthodoxy.

While science provides a remarkably serviceable tool for exploring and defining the natural world, human beings come equipped with an older means of discerning the nature of the hearts around them. That second way is every bit as influential as logic—in many circumstances, considerably more so. This book imparts the legitimacy and necessity of both methods of reading emotional secrets—a friend’s, a partner’s, a child’s, your own.

For years, the three of us combed the neuroscientific literature looking for the lustrous facts that could illuminate relatedness, for the studies that could unravel the knots and untwine the fibers of the ties that bind. We searched, in short, for the science of love. Finding no such system in our own field, we went hunting in other disciplines. Before we were through scavenging, we had gathered together elements from neurodevelopment, evolutionary theory, psychopharmacology, neonatology, experimental psychology, and computer science.

Although this book traffics in those scientific discoveries, we cannot endorse the myopic assumption that academic papers hold the key to the mysteries of love. Human lives form the richest repository of that information. Those who attempt to study the body without books sail an uncharted sea, William Osler observed, while those who only study books do not go to sea at all. And so, wherever possible, we compared what research had to say against the emotional experience of our patients, our families, and ourselves.

After several years of cross-pollination from a panoply of disciplines, the interdisciplinary maelstrom coalesced. We began to think of love and to describe it to one another in terms we had never heard. A revolutionary paradigm assembled itself around us, and we have remained within it ever since. Within that structure, we found new answers to the questions most worth asking about human lives: what are feelings, and why do we have them? What are relationships, and why do they exist? What causes emotional pain, and how can it be mended—with medications, with psychotherapy, with both? What is therapy, and how does it heal? How should we configure our society to further emotional health? How should we raise our children, and what should we teach them?

The investigation of these queries is not just an intellectual excursion: people must have the answers to make sense of their lives. We see the need for this knowledge every day, and we see the bitter consequences of its lack. People who do not intuit or respect the laws of acceleration and momentum break bones; those who do not grasp the principles of love waste their lives and break their hearts. The evidence of that pain surrounds us, in the form of failed marriages, hurtful relationships, neglected children, unfulfilled ambitions, and thwarted dreams. And in numbers, these injuries combine to damage our society, where emotional suffering and its ramifications are commonplace. The roots of that suffering are often unseen and passed over, while proposed remedies cannot succeed, because they contradict emotional laws that our culture does not yet recognize.

Those laws are written in stone somewhere within the heart, regardless of how long they manage to elude discovery. And given the microscopic maze wherein such secrets dwell, centuries may pass before the brain yields up its last mysteries. None of us will live to see beyond the dawn of that revelatory age.

In these pages, we take up the challenge that science puts within reach today—exploring the nature of love, drawing upon imagination, invention, and the ascendant scientific knowledge that biotechnology places at our disposal. By design, we have not produced a comprehensive encyclopedia of brain science. No multi-lettered neuroanatomical diagrams lurk within these pages. We have set out not to map the mind in numbing detail, but to lead an agile reconnaissance over landscapes that lie hidden within the human soul.

As we do so, we will travel afield from what many people consider the proper territory of the psyche. Before we are through, we will touch upon the mewling of lost puppies, the mathematics of memory, the marital fidelity of prairie dogs, and the facial expressions in the South Pacific. We will consider the child-rearing experiment of a medieval emperor, psychotherapeutic techniques, the intuitive genius of newborns, and why people hold hands at the movies. We will ask why families exist, what feelings are, and what love is not; how blind babies know how to smile, and why reptiles don’t. A new understanding of love takes form at the intersection of these disparate areas, wherein we can start to describe emotional life in a way true to known physiology and the life experience of human beings, their passions and anguish.

The scientist or the physician is not that terrain’s sole surveyor, and certainly not its first. The aspiration to distill and transmit the secrets of the heart can attain a moment of matchless lucidity within a novel, a play, a short story, a poem. Through a symmetry as compact and surprising as the equivalence between matter and energy, love’s poetry and its science share an unexpected identity. Each avenue uses the tools of the intellect to reach beyond; each seeks to lay hold of the ineffable and render it known, with the warm shock of recognition that truth so often carries. Now that science has traveled into the realm of the poetic, the efforts of one endeavor can inform those of its twin.

Long before science existed, sharp-eyed men and women told each other stories about how people are, stories that have never lost their power to enchant and instruct. The purpose of using science to investigate human nature is not to replace those stories but to augment and deepen them. Robert Frost once wrote that too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. That principle is mirrored in the study of the brain, where too many experts, out of plain fear, avoid mentioning love.

We think the heart is dangerous and must be left in. The poetic and the veridical, the proven and the unprovable, the heart and the brain—like charged particles of opposing polarity—exert their pulls in different directions. Where they are brought together the result is incandescence.

Within that place of radiant intersection, love begins to reveal itself. The journey we embark on here is by no means complete: the science of our day hints at structures but cannot define them. The castle of the emotional mind is not yet grounded in fact, and there is ample room left within its domain for conjecture, invention, and poetry. As neuroscience unlocks the secrets of the brain, startling insights into the nature of love become possible. That is what this book is about—and if that’s not the secret of life, then we don’t know what is.