Angels and Demons: Affective Neuroscience and Trauma

[work in progress] Copyright 2009 by Christine M. Skolnik

According to the literature of affective neuroscience consciousness emerges from basic emotions as a means of monitoring internal experiences and external environments for purposes of survival (Damasio, LeDoux, Panksepp). Emotions help us to regulate bodily states and evaluate objects in our environment as either sources of nurture or potential threats. Cognition generally aids in this process, though emotions and memory also exert a top-down influence on perception and evaluation (Solms, Vygotsky).

Within this paradigm, trauma might be seen as a crises or failure of the emotions to navigate both threatening external conditions and overwhelming internal responses. Perhaps, such a crisis initiates a sort of psychological “back-flow” by which internal and external realities are simply altered in reaction to a perceived failure of emotional regulation, and in a desperate attempt to achieve homeostasis. In other words while emotions generally help us control ourselves and our environment, a failure of this regulatory system might engage psychological processes that effect “changes” to the environment through mechanisms of perception. The body is launched into an artificially heightened state of awareness and/or our perceptions of external reality are distorted to “create” safer environmental conditions.

Such a cognitive “back flow” or “override” might also lead to projections of others as either “angels” capable of protecting us, or “demons” who must be overcome or avoided at all costs. These are obviously coping mechanisms. Of course emotions are still exerting influence on cognition here as panic prompts cognitive distortion—the process is just unusual and the effects more extreme. Instead or making evaluations and decisions that may be somewhat distorted but fall within a spectrum of veridicality, we distort reality because we can no longer trust the faculties of discrimination which failed us in the past.

Helping a traumatized patient reestablish a sense of safety is the primary task of the therapist, and transference is obviously an integral part of this process. The same is true of every relationship. But both idealization and demonization are defense mechanisms, that must be “worked through.” Otherwise we can become dependent and the panic associated with the original trauma may become associated with the prospect of crises with a loved one: of loosing emotional connection with or being abandoned by the caregiver. The individual is not yet learning to deal with the trauma specifically or with feelings of helplessness in general. And these attachment issues play into basic survival fears that may very well be hard-wired into the brains of humans, as a species that simply cannot survive without strong early childhood attachments to caregivers.

Of course the process of attachment to a caregiver, therapist, or loved one may be considered, according to various developmental and analytic theories, a necessary step toward psychological health and independence. However to the extent that a strong transference is a distortion of reality, it is also a deferral or avoidance strategy. And since the transference plays into our most basic biologically-grounded fears and desires, the crises of the transference, may become as powerful as, or even more powerful than the initial trauma (if it strongly resonates with an early-childhood trauma, for example).

These arguments are not meant to suggest that transference should be avoided, but rather to foreground the deep biological roots of the transference and advise caution. The forces at work here are not merely the result of the cognitive work of therapy but of our most basic emotional drives and bodily responses. When transference or love becomes a psychological addiction a difference of degree may, in fact, become a difference in kind. A patient or lover may remain in a traumatized or dependent state indefinitely, having learned to either avoid or rely too heavily on their own “angels” or “demons.” Therapists, friends, and lovers may benefit from understanding the deep biological roots of emotional dependency and asking themselves if they are in a “co-dependant” relationship.