Proto Mental

The proto-mental system I visualize as one in which physical and psychological or mental are undifferentiated. It is a matrix from which spring the phenomena which at first appear—on a psychological level and in the light of psychological investigation—to be discrete feelings only loosely associated with one another.

Bion’s canonical definition of the proto-mental system as an undifferentiated somatic-psychic matrix from which group emotions and basic assumptions emerge.

Bion, W.R., Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, 1959thesis

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I hope by this that I may come nearer to deciding whether to regard the idea of a proto-mental system as only a theory to draw together my observations, a hypothesis to stimulate further investigation, or a clinically observable fact.

Bion interrogates the epistemological status of the proto-mental system, holding it provisionally between speculative hypothesis, integrating theory, and clinical datum.

Bion, W.R., Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, 1959thesis

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The mental events to which tuberculosis is affiliated are necessarily, in my definition, neither cause nor effect; they are derivatives and developments from the same proto-mental phenomena as those from which tuberculosis itself arises.

Bion extends the proto-mental concept to account for somatic disease as a co-derivative of the same undifferentiated matrix that generates group-emotional phenomena.

Bion, W.R., Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, 1959supporting

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The proto-self is a coherent collection of neural patterns which map, moment by moment, the state of the physical structure of the organism in its many dimensions… We are not conscious of the proto-self. Language is not part of the structure of the proto-self.

Damasio’s neuroscientific analogue to the proto-mental: a non-conscious, pre-linguistic neural substrate that constitutes the organismic precursor to core consciousness and selfhood.

Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting

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Telling the story of the changes caused on the inaugural proto-self by the organism’s interaction with any object requires its own process and its own neural base.

Damasio argues that the proto-self’s modification by objects generates a second-order neural pattern that is the neural substrate of core consciousness, positioning the proto-self as the necessary precondition for knowing.

Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting

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The structures listed below are not required to implement the proto-self… all the early sensory cortices for external sensory modalities… all the temporal and most of the frontal higher-order cortices.

Damasio delimits the neural architecture of the proto-self by exclusion, demonstrating that it is instantiated in sub-cortical and interoceptive structures rather than in cortices governing external perception.

Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting

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proto-self and second-order maps depend largely on one set of paramidline structures—the brain stem, hypothalamic, basal forebrain, and the thalamic nuclei, as well as the centrally located cingulate cortices.

Damasio specifies the neuroanatomical substrate of the proto-self as centrally located midline structures, distinguishing it structurally from the cortices that map external objects.

Damasio, Antonio R., The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999supporting

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wergild may be regarded as an expression of the value the community sets upon the individual, so that it could be interpreted on some occasions as an aspect of baF and on others as an expression of baD.

Bion’s ethnographic exploration of currency and social exchange as surface manifestations of basic-assumption dynamics, contextually adjacent to the proto-mental framework.

Bion, W.R., Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, 1959aside

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