Casey Schwartz

hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Casey Schwartz, a graduate of Brown University with a master's degree in

psychodynamic neuroscience from University College London. Casey has worked as a staff writer at Newsweek and The Daily Beast, where she covered neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times and The New York Sun. Her first book is called in the mine Fields Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis. I've got great news. Many of you have asked whether you could get a T shirt with the logo on it, and the answer is

finally yes. So if you're looking for some clothing to help you feed your good wolf on the go, check out our website One you Feed dot Net slash Shirt. They were handmade here in Columbus with a special edition line drawing of the one you Feed Wolf logo. The shirts are very comfortable well. I spent a lot of time being very picky on exactly what they felt like

to get the type of shirt that I wanted. So you can visit One you Feed dot Net slash Shirt to order one, and if you're interested, I would recommend doing it soon because we only had a certain number made in this first round and they seem to be going pretty quickly, so I hope you enjoy. And here's the interview with Casey Schwartz. Hi, Casey, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, thank you for taking the time to

come on. I read your new book, UH in the Mind Fields Exploring the New Science of Neuropsychoanalysis, which is a fascinating title. And we will get into all the things in that book here in a minute, but let's start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always

at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I

like that parable a lot. I've heard it before, um, and to me, it's it's meaning, it's sort of it seems clear, which is that what you pay attention to and what you engage in is what becomes real. And I apply it to the writing process because this was my first book, and it was a very panicky, uncertain experience trying to figure out how to write it. Um. And there were so many days where the issue of sort of self doubt could have become the thing that

I gave into Um, but um, it was. It was a constant battle not to I think that's a great way to frame it, because I think any of us involved in trying to do something outside of the order ary self doubt is a very frequent companion. How is it that you deal with self doubt? What were the things that you did that made you able to keep working? I mean they varied widely. Um. Sometimes it was um quitting work ridiculously early and slipping out and going to

the movies. Um. Sometimes it was meeting my brother and watching a baseball game. I mean, sometimes it was gone for a run. Um. I mean most of these, Most of these tactics involved sort of being with someone someone in my life was sort of sympathetic and could um talk to me and let me basically just air my fears. Um. And then you know, the next day you sort of

wake up and you get back to it. Yea. That idea of involving other people is such a can be such a valuable one, and and it's something that I think a lot of us tend to, at least I am am prone to overlook I'll figure this, you know, I'll deal with it myself, for you know, I'll just all I'll sort it out in my head exactly. And we're not all. I happen to have a wonderful brother who was so good at um just sort of reminding

me how to how to keep keep focus. Um. But I do think going to the movies is a wonderful trick as well. That's what Don Draper always suggests on mad ment if you remember he was onto something. Yeah, yeah, well just yet, changing the mental channel for a while can be really helpful. Uh. I find sometimes when I'm stuck in that negative thinking, there's no sort of just like, well, I'll just not I'll think positive and it just is more powerful than the negative. Sometimes it's just like I've

got to change the channel from thinking completely. Our brains are so flawed. So sometimes you really you just you really just need a mind bath. That's a great word. Yeah, So what led you to write this book? What was your path to becoming interested in this and then writing the book. It is not a subject I would have ever predicted. I would sort of begin my my career as a writer um with but um in my early twenties. I went off to graduate school thinking that I was

going to be a psychologist. I had this idea, UM that that's sort it was a momentary idea that that's what I wanted to do, and I I picked UM a very unusual program UM for training. It was brand new, This particular course had never existed before. It was two years long. First year was in London at the Anna Freud Center UM in North London, which was it's just sort of the like. It was this throwback fashion of of classical psychoanalytic thinking, actually funded founded by UM by

Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud's daughter in the nineteen forties. UM and UM just full of these these old school ideas about the mind, the ideas like the ego, the id, repression,

the unconscious. UM. I mean really I was there in two thousand and six, but I often had this like utterly beguiling feeling like it could be any year, it could be n But what what made this program unusual it was that the second year of it, we there were only nine of us, and the nine of us returned to the United States to study the brain at Yale. And so the premise of this thing was can something come of studying these two very very dissimilar disciplines kind

of side by side. So it was in the course of this schooling that, you know, a I realized, Okay, wow, there's an incredible culture clash going on here between how we think about the mind, how we think about the brain, what what we think is going to get us insight? Um, and that's interesting and be Um. It was because I was in in this program that I wound up meeting, um, the man who would become actually my main character, a

man named Mark Solms. In the book, I thought you you phrased up sort of what you were after in in Um a sentence which you said, with their starkly different goals methods and cultures, psychoanalysis and neuroscience can appear to be two different species, mutually alienated, as if preoccupied

with two altogether different pursuits. And so what you were trying to do, what this program did, and what Mark Psalms did, was to try and find a way to integrate these two very different approaches to the mind slash the brain. Right, You use those terms differently depending which discipline you're coming from exactly, and the differences extend so so far. I mean, it's impossible to overstate this because it's not only that, you know, psychoanalysis is all about well,

it's all about subjectivity. It's all about subjective experience. How does it feel to be any particular person? I mean, what what what does a person going and discuss to their psychoanalysts. It's it's what they're talking about, is what it feels like to be to be them. But neuroscience, the perspective is so different. It's it's like looking at a person from the outside in, like, um, what can we see when we look at your brain in an fMRI machine? And um? You know, so those basic building

blocks and ingredients are in of themselves radically different. But also, I would say, and what I've observed is that there's such a difference in culture and in personality type between the two disciplines. Like who wants to become a psychoanalyst is a very very different temperament than who wants to become a neuroscientist. So when you imagine how could a conversation begin in a meaningful way between these two fields,

you know, it gives you pause. You're not quite sure, right, Well, one of the things that I thought was interesting was and I thought about as I was reading the book, was psychoanalysis on one hand, you know, on one end of the spectrum, neuroscience on the far other end of the spec drum. Where are the places in between that that exists, um, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy, UM, some things that seem to me to be a a little bit more in the middle of those two. Is that

A Is that a reasonable way to think about those things? Yes, I mean, and you bring up cognitive behavioral therapy. I don't really get into that in the book, but UM, I think that's a good example because it's always been a version of psychotherapy that looks towards scientific evidence UM kind of more UM more regularly or sort of it shapes itself with proof of what works and what doesn't UM. And I think you know that that's not traditionally been

how psychoanalysis functions. So yeah, and that it probably is in between. Thanks, and now back to the interview with Casey Schortz. Psychoanalysis has always struck me as much more you're going into the past, you're unearthing the past, You're dealing with things like the unconscious and UM, cognitive behavioral therapy. You're working much more with the thoughts that you have right now. What can I you know, I've got a thought?

How can I work with it more skillfully? And do you think that cognitive behavioral therapy lends itself better to being studied scientifically or do you think that psychoanalysis does too? But the culture of it and the people that are in it are the reason that there's not more of that. Yeah, I think it's probably a combination of those things. But that said, actually there's been this this huge growth in the amount of evidence that now exists showing that psychoanalysis

is effective. Um. But that started sort of late, that only started about fifteen years ago or so. Um. Yet there is now actually a significant amount of research showing yes, this thing works. One of the things that I thought was interested and I didn't see it in the book, but I did read it in an article you wrote for a major publication I can't remember which, where you were talking about some people who are starting to be able to explore what parts of the brain, um come

to life when transference kicks in. Oh yeah, so this is a piece I did over the summer for the New York Times. Magazine, UM and UM it is related to the book, but UM, I focus on UM a man that I don't really explore in the book. His name is Andrew Gerber, very interesting psychiatrist who UM basically is taking this very old school of Freudian idea transference.

I mean, this is an idea Freud came up within about nineteen hundred when he realized, UM, you know what, we bring our histories into every encounter that we have in the present, every relationship we have in the present, Um, every new person we meet in the present is informed by our past experience. And that actually was one of some people think that's the boldest and most original idea

he came up with of all. And so Andrew Gerberg thought, UM, wouldn't it be interesting to figure out, um, where in the brain these functions that go into transference actually occur? So he UM, he's been working on that for almost a decade now. I'm kind of on the side sticking sticking people into an fMRI machine, giving them all these tasks that supposedly activate their transference patterns, and trying to

see what can you pinpoint it to here? Can you pinpointed to that one of the other ideas that Freud is well known for is this idea of the unconscious. UM. And it's interesting that there's a lot of science starting to show up these days that seems to be talking about the unconscious, although UM, I don't think it's really

referred to that way. But UM, you know, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink or or Thinking Fast and Slow, those books are talking about how there's something happening underneath our conscious brain that is driving what we're doing. How did those sort of newer ideas tie in at all with what the unconscious idea was in psychoanalysis. It's true the unconscious is suddenly everywhere. And what's so funny is that, Um, until about that, that wasn't the case at all. Until that

eight science kind of didn't believe in the unconscious. The unconscious was sort of a fairy tale. UM. That was you know, not really believable, not really provable. It was seen and sort of not true. Um. It was seen, as you know, very much in the purview of the freudiance. UM. But now um, it is completely axiomatic throughout neuroscience that most of what happens in our brains happens outside of our awareness. UM. So this is this is very gladwell Ian. You know, UM that UM, we have these sort of

processes of ways of assessing the world around us. We're not even aware of um yet. You know, we sort of we sort of arrived at conclusions all the time without exactly knowing why. UM. And by the way, Eric, thank god, because we'd be so overwhelmed by the details of our lives if we had to be aware of every single one. UM. But the big difference between between that version of the unconscious and what Freud meant by the unconscious is is basically repression. You know, Freud thought

that things are unconscious because they're unbearable. UM. And UM. Neuroscience kind of hasn't touched that yet. It hasn't quite gotten into why certain things would be outside of awareness and why certain things would be in awareness. One of the questions that I've had is I've had people on and we've talked about this idea of there being this unconscious that's happening, and and you know the studies. You know,

flip open any science magazine. You're going to read something about how some part of your brain is doing something that you don't know. How do you work with that. Is there anything you can do with that sort of information? And does psychoanalysis provide a method of using that unconscious differently? Is that part of what it can bring to the table. Psychoanalysis has never like sort of lent itself to these easy kind of takeaways, UM, and these kind of news

you can use um sound bites. I mean, in fact, that's its whole culture sort of slow, slow, slow insight, slow gradual process. So it's very much it sort of cuts against our moment of you know, help me by five pm, UM, But that's the very three pm please too late, I know, actually five pms way to it. But I think the very fact of being aware of how much exactly is outside of our awareness, UM, is in and of itself helpful. And so psychoanalysis, as you mentioned,

is a is a much longer process. You you talk about the book, you end the book really in sort of a place of complete uncertainty, and you you know, you thought back to the beginning of the book and about that sort of the word the phrase you used was sacred unknowability, UM, and that you were perfectly able to end this book with uncertainty because you believe in uncertainty, and it seems like that is much more the realm

of psychoanalysis, that there is a that there's a mystery here. Yes, I mean I think what actually one of the impetus is for for doing this book, UM, was when I

was studying neuroscience at Yale. UM, I was sort of secretly horrified by UM this field wanted to do, which was sort of to reduce us down to these very very generic little like schemas and these generic UM formulas for explaining all of human behaviors, grand grand questions like creativity and how we make decisions and how we and how we fall in love and with whom, and you know, neuroscience purported to be trying to answer these questions and

with very simplified in my mind orally simplified UM answers. And I secretly rooted against that ever happening UM because UM to me that that shrinks us all down to a very unappealingly small size UM. And so in that spirit, UM, I embarked on this book, which UM, as you know, kind of follows this one character in particular Mark psalms Um, who I think you know who advocates for uniting the two fields and never losing sight of individual complexity, very

much like all of our sacks beforehand. UM. And so when I got that ending, when I got the idea for that ending, um, it just felt so right because it brought me back to the root feeling that had inspired the book to begin with years before. That idea of the reductionism of neuroscience reminds me of there's you know, they're starting to be more conversation around from a nutritional perspective, like all these studies that boiled down you know, this

thing to isolated vitamin c um. You know, you extract this thing out of the whole and then you study just that little thing, but you sort of lose the whole picture that like you know that an apple is good for us in ways that go far beyond the the the individual vitamins that you extract from it. Yeah, now I think that's really true. I think, um, it's

very hard to keep the whole picture in mine. And it's sort of it's funny that you know, that whole holistic thing is sort of not that American or something. I've noticed that and if other doctors have sort of said that to me too. Um. But yeah, I think that is true. I wonder why. I don't know. Maybe it's it's we we we all have a fantasy of, oh, there will be you know, a trick, a silver bullet, a simple fix. Um, we'd like, we'd like there to be,

but there never really is. Yep. It's that magical thinking idea that that's one of the things this show sort of goes on and on about, is that that doesn't really exist, and that chasing that is usually a poor idea because it's likely to distract you from things that might actually be useful. Yeah, I mean exactly right, right right, And we're we're capable of so much more than than one tiny solution. And one of the other things that you wrote about recently which I thought was interesting was

the scientist Joseph lad Did I say that right? And he's widely known as the person who came up with the popularizing the amygdala as sort of the point of flight or fight of that fear response. And um, I mean and that you talked about another you know, the amygdala might be the most popular neuroscience thing to write. I mean, you know, it's come up on this show three or four times, and and so but he is now saying, Hey, I think it's a little bit more

complicated than that. Yeah. No, Joe, he's such a great

character in the field of narrow science. UM. So I always wanted to write about him, And when his new book, Anxious came out in July, I just thought, Okay, this is this is this is the perfect opportunity because his his new argument UM is really interesting, which is that you know, UM, for years, there's been this kind of assumption that because the amygdala, which is one of the brains sort of most central fear of threat detectors, it does, it detects threats, it detects danger and helps to kick

off the brain's defense responses. UM. But but there's been this sort of extrapolation from that UM and and this assumption that the amigoda is also what makes us feel afraid. UM. So Joe is arguing now that, UM, that's that's not true, that the actual feeling of fear, which is UM. He says, well, the whole question of animal consciousness is separate from this.

But he says that UM, the you that that the amigula is responsible for the feeling of fear is not is not right, and that it actually takes all kinds of um parts of the brain working working in concert to produce that feeling, that conscious feeling, and so the the amigula detects the threat, but then there are other

parts of the brain that take that information and interpret it. Yeah, and so the you know, he's he's sort of caused disturb among among many people for what he writes about this question of can we study animals and hope to understand human emotion um, Because you know, when Joe himself studies this all this stuff in rats and these big white rats at n y u um, and he basically is now arguing that he doesn't know whether animals have consciousness,

but science cannot prove that they do, and therefore it's really not useful to act like they do. If we want to understand human emotions, we need more than the animal research. Right. Well, there's this assumption that you know, you hear people talk about the different layers of the brain. There's the lizard brain, and then as if these are just you know, stacked on top of each other, and there's been no change between what that part of my brain and a lizard's brain, um, which strikes me as

being probably some truth to it, but probably a vast oversimplification. Yeah. I was just gonna say that, like that it does resonate, but that I would have a little lizard brain in my brain. But exactly, it's just it's an it's an oversimplification. One of the things that you spent a lot of time on in the book was that some of the places that this UM new neuropsychoanalysis was happening was in people who had brain damage and using that as an entry point to sort of see how these two things

could mix. And you tell a story about a man who UM, he's a phasic. Did I say that right? He has a phase where he sort of lost the ability to form meaningful sentences, to to communicate with the outside world, and yet he enters into psychoanalysis. Can you share that a little bit? Yeah? Sure so. Mark Psalm's UM my protagonist started UM a group in New York in about two thousands of psychoanalysts who UM are dedicated

to psychoanalyzing blain damaged patients. And this is this is so unorthodox because UM traditionally we think of brain damage patients is as not really needing or even as not being qualified to receive psychological intervention. Well, so Psalm says, that's absurd. No one could possibly need it more, And he recruited this group. UM and UM they all have

such interesting cases. I sat in on this group, as I described in the book, for about two years, listening to them UM on a month to month basis report on their patient's progress. And one of the members of this group was an absolutely wonderful man named named David Silvers, who had taken on this unbelievably difficult task in UM psychoanalyzing a young patient named Harry who had had a stroke very young in his late thirties and basically lost the ability to speak. UM. I mean he had a

scattering of words like UM. He could sort of sketch a couple of things on paper, but he really couldn't get meaning out. He had a phasia. UM. Yet they spent seven years UM in this in this treatment together and UM it gave this patient such a profound lifeline. UM that that he had someone who was willing to pay such close attention and make such a heroic effort to understand his experience. Yeah, I was struck by that.

It's a pretty profound and moving thing. And I was struck by what you just said a minute ago, where you know where Mark Psalm said there might not be anybody who's more in need of it. Like, once I read that, I was like, how obvious is that we take these people that have had these horrible things happened to them, who are confused and don't know how to relate, and and just sort of go, well, let's see if we can fix it. But if we can't fix it,

good luck. Yeah, exactly, Um, you know it was. I was actually so last week and I was in Boulder, Colorado, UM, talking about this exact thing, um, and this part of the book, and this woman in the audience raised her hand and said, you know, four years ago, I had a brain tumor. They removed it, and I became a phasic, I lost the ability to speak. And then she said, I was so devastated that none of the neurologists who treated me cared at all about what the actual experience

was like. They never asked me a single thing about what I was going through. And then she said that it was the first time that she had spoken aloud in public and four wow, yeah, well that must be a good feeling for you. To know that those people, You know that that the book is reaching some of those people. Yeah, it is very much though so one of the other areas that you talk about it is not in the book, Um, but I thought it was really interested. Back to Gerber, you know, he's done a

lot of study on psychoanalysis and and using neuroscience. But he said he saw a pattern in the patients who progressed the most. They didn't move in a linear way from worse to better, from neurotic to not neurotic. However, rather they were sort of in the middle of their treatment. They would go through a period of intense flux and then sort of come out the other side and improve. Can you share a little bit about that and what

he learned there? Yeah, I loved I loved when, um, when Gerber told me about this observation of his, because it's it's so interesting that you know, he he this was his um, this was his dissertation. He did this when he was in psychoanalytic training in his twenties and actually at the same place that I went to, at the Anna Freud Center, and he was trying to figure out, Okay, why do people get better in psychoanalysis? Like what actually

accounts for this? And so he had these psychoanalysts UM fill out weekly detailed detailed reports on everything going on with their patients, every aspect of behavior, relationship, everything, UM and what he finally knows. It took him like nine years to finish. But the patients who really made progress in psychoanalysis went through this middle period of being basically a total mess Um. They their lives would get messy, they would become erratic, they would become slightly even in

some cases unhinged. UM and and he he thought of this as their their molecules that you sort of throw them up in the air and they sort of danced around and rearrange themselves. And that has to happen before the real improvement can set in. Yeah, that's a really interesting concept. That idea that healing doesn't progress linear is

certainly an experience of mind that's interesting. I mean, even just if you look at like, you know, dealing with grief, it's like you feel better for a few days, like oh I finally accepted this, and you wake up the next day and you just feel as bad as you ever felt, and you're like, wait, what's going on? I thought this is supposed to be progressively getting better, and I've just noticed that doesn't seem to be the pattern

that it's better, It gets a little bit worse. The other thing that I've noticed, Um, is a tendency to swing to you know, to be at one extreme, swing over to the other extreme for a period of time, and then over an extended period of time, finally find the middle between those two things. I think that's there's a huge amount of truth. I think that's that is what Gerber would say he had observed those those kinds of patterns exactly. Well, thank you so much for taking

the time. The book is really fascinating and I'm I'm interested to see it. It really sounds like a field that is very much in its infancy, and so it's really interesting to see where that will go and how these two, if an approach is to trying to make people mentally better, can work together and inform each other. Oh, the fact that it's inventing itself is what drew it drew me to it, um, And Eric has been such a pleasure talking to you. Yeah, thanks so much for

coming on, Casey. Thank you, Okay, bye bye. You can learn more about Casey Schwartz and this podcast at one, new feed dot Net, slash Casey