We have all these various styles for various activities, yet they have in common that they are our style, not somebody else's. We each have a style of styles. If we could put it into words, we could phrase the very style of our being.
That is what a psychotherapist does or part of it. The way we say things, our style of speaking and writing, consists of many, many choices. Our language provides the best evidence for a pervasive personal style. An analyst understands us through the way we say the things we say. The analyst listens for how we say what we say. The analyst listens with the third ear.
Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy build on that sense of a person's character or identity that will pervade everything he or she says in the session. Indeed, it will pervade everything the patient does in life. One important aim of therapy is to bring that style to consciousness and thus to conscious control.
So far as non-psychotherapists are concerned, we have to know how our fellow humans are going to behave--their style. Imagine yourself in the paleolithic hunter-gatherer band so beloved of evlutionary psychologists. You need to know your 150 or so companions. You need to be able to predict how this or that person will act in the different situations of life on the savanna. You need that knowledge to survive and to spread your genes. You need to know who is likely to do what in response to something that you do. And the same holds true for you yourself. Others need to know how you'll behave, even or especially in our complicated societies where hundreds of Facebook "friends" substitute for the 150-person hunter-gatherer band. The whole band needs to know that Bart Simpson will do one impish thing after another or that Lady Gaga will do more and more outrageously sexy things. Life needs to be, to that extent, predictable. Otherwise chaos.
And people do know you, just as you know about them. They know, even if you don't, how you are who you are. They can pick up your identity-from-outside, as opposed to your own sense of self. Your inner sense of yourself is something only you can feel and think from inside, and it varies widely from moment to moment. Your interior sense of yourself may or may not coincide with others' knowledge from outside of how you are likely to behave.
In brain terms, that interior sense of self seems to be connected to the so-called "default network." This is a set of midline structures that light up in the MRI scanner when you are not being asked to perform some task. These midline structures quiet down when you are asked to do something. Some link these sites to "mind-wandering." Some call them the "task-negative network." Neurologists detect it as very slow but coherent oscillations (less than one every ten seconds) among groups of neurons associated with memory, theory of mind, and integration of behavioral plans.
But that default network and/or interior sense of self is altogether different from somebody else's sense of how you act. When others recognize your posture, your walk, your handwriting, or your way of saying hello on the telephone, they are recognizing your particular, individual style as seen from outside.
Separate styles inform many, many different kinds of activities, writing, walking, talking, interpreting, greeting--you name it. Must not, then, their neurological embodiments be widely scattered in the brain?
I think they are, as I will explain in my continuation blog on this subject.
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