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From: Howard Baker
Date: 24 Mar 1997
Time: 21:35:45
I find Rose's comment about the problem with psychic stucture and relating it to brain to be important--I suppose because it fits with some of my thinking. At the Annual Meeting 1 1/2 years ago, my wife Maggie and I presented material on adult AD/HD, the biopsychosocial model (BPSM), and selfl psychology. The printed version did not contain our more recent thinking, but the talk did. We have come to think that the experience of self is continuously being constructed in working memory (WM). Input from the external world and our own brains is held in WM where it is organized into meaning on the basis of long term memories (LTM). The content of those LTM may be inherently conflicted, conflict with each other, functional, dysfunctional, or abscent. These memories are almost certainly stored in circuts of neurons that are capable of being altered (plasticity). As well, affects are associated with neuronal circuts as well as hormones, etc. The sum total of the input into WM and the activated LTM sets the condition for the lived experience. We think of the sum of the LTM as the psychological element of the BPSM. Clearly, this is consistent with Stolorow's term "organizing principles" as well as "transference", "schema", and "model scenes." The sensory input is relational, whether to a person or a thing. Some inputs offer and others deny the opportunity to generate a selfobject experience, but whether or not that experience is generated also depends on the content of the LTM--and whether or not the brain is capable of accessing the salient neuronal loops at that particular time (the bio- part of the BPSM). Various toxic and pharmacologic events alter what circuts are availabe. We think that psychic structure can be thought of as the content and the literal neuronal structure with it variable accessability. This preserves conflict, deficit, and distortion in psychological organization. Any thoughts?