The Brothers Karamazov,affective neuroscience,and reconsolidation of memories

And for the life of him he could not explain what was happening to him at that moment. He moved and walked as if in spasms. (The Brothers Karamazov, 274)

Why do Dostoevskian bodies throb, sob, and grimace in ways that seem so far from the civilized protocols of, for example, Henry James’ exhibitions of emotions? How precisely does the concept of unconscious motivation serve interpretation when complicated by neuroscientific ideas of “the body as ground reference,” of “the neural self” as a “repeatedly reconstructed biological state” that records memories (Damasio, 1994, pp. 246–7, 255)? How incommensurate is Dostoevsky’s language of the soul, as expressed through embodied gestures, with Damasio’s key concept of a “neurobiological core” (Descartes 189) or Joseph LeDoux’s “synaptic self”?

Physical movements of bowing, kissing, weeping, shouting, hysterical laughter, of gut spasms, and knocking people to the ground configure Dostoevsky’s representations of the passions. Dostoevsky’s religiously oriented word “soul, “like Damasio’s term “mind/body,” voids out the Cartesian idea that thinking and the feeling body can be separated.

Intense conversations and arguments, riddled with emotion and expressed in physical gestures, take up many pages of The Brothers Karamazov. Laughter, bellowing with rage, weeping with joy, or kissing brings several chapters to their ends. Ivan’s silent Jesus kisses the Grand Inquisitor “on his bloodless, ninety-year old lips” (p. 262); Alyosha experiences “weeping, sobbing, and watering [the earth] with his tears” as he sits by Zosima’s coffin (p. 362); Dmitri, under arrest, weeps after his dream of the “wee one” (p. 508). Ivan “tremble[s] all over with a spiteful trembling,” strikes Smerdyakov, “shouts in a frenzy” while his eyes “flash” and “something shook in his brain” (p. 603, 614, 623).

Ivan wants to annihilate Smerdyakov who has incorporated Ivan’s own worldview that argues for “‘egoism, even to the point of evildoing’” (p. 69). Smerdyakov’s “wasted eunuch’s physiognomy” and “lackey’s soul” (p. 267) makes visible his mind/body condition. Ivan’s impulse to go away to Chermashnya when something may happen at home (as Smerdyakov puts it) becomes, “in the inmost part of [Ivan’s] soul… the basest action of his whole life.” The choice to go to Chermashnya “suddenly escaped from Ivan Fyodorovich; again, as the day before, it flew out by itself, accompanied by a kind of nervous chuckle” (p. 276, 279). Ivan’s soul, his body-mind (if you will) is morally wracked, traumatized by depression and doubt. If “God is dead” for him, if “‘there exists no law in nature that man should love mankind,’” then “‘everything would be permitted’” (p. 69), even parricide. Ivan’s words carry modern skepticism’s most dangerous power for the Christian Dostoevsky.

Ivan’s body registers and expresses his temptation to be complicit in the murder his bastard brother will commit. Smerdyakov takes Ivan’s words literally. He suffers epileptic fits as did his creator, Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky believed that his own epileptic seizures signified his soul’s visitation by God. In Smerdyakov’s case epilepsy is a grotesque frenzy evoking devilish desire. Souls in The Brothers Karamazov are physically manifested. Because Smerdyakov can also “sham a falling fit” (p. 609), falling to the ground, frothing at the mouth, and passing out, he can murder their father as Ivan’s “minion” and “faithful servant” (p. 623) and let Dmitri take the rap.

Embodiment forges Dostoevsky’s plot. Illness and evil are not products of abstract thought, but rather feeling states working in what Damasio describes as an integrated map of the body/mind. After Smerdyakov insinuates that if Ivan leaves for Chermashnya, Dmitri may possibly kill their father, Ivan cannot explain what he feels. Yet his body speaks, and this is Ivan’s baseness, his emotional abyss.

The Brothers Karamazov emphasizes the abysses, the extremities of emotion as represented bodily, vocally, in muscles and clenchings. The prosecutor at Dmitri’s trial for parricide describes a “broad, Karamazovian nature…–capable of containing all possible opposites and of contemplating both abysses at once, the abyss above us, an abyss of lofty ideals, and the abyss beneath us, an abyss of the lowest and foulest degradation” (p. 699). Are these abysses cognitive or unconscious, and what explains their source? Ivan cannot answer this question, but he acts out their consequences.

Psychoanalytic critics employ Freud’s theories of unconscious motivation, of subliminal and repressed desire and psychic ambivalence as interpretive strategies. Joseph Frank describes Ivan and Smerdyakov as “linked by a secret, subliminal compact—one that [Ivan] resists but cannot shake off”(Frank, 2002, pp. 618–619). Life, in Dostoevsky’s polyphonic discourse, and despite his religious messianism, appears radically visceral. The discourse of neuroscience, with its precise terminology for various life processes, including chemicals—e.g. body–brain interaction, amygdala, hippocampus, subcortical, neocortex, oxytocin, testosterone, and primary maps—may someday appear no less arcane to Dostoevskian literary scholars than psychoanalytic or deconstructionist vocabularies (difference, logocentrism, metaphysics of presence, hermeneutics, trace, supplement) were some 50 years ago.

The following discussion investigates the way The Brothers Karamazov foregrounds bodily gestures, facial expressions, the memories and dreams which affective neuroscientists now study. The Karamazov brothers appear as good candidates for neuro lit crit experiments. Affective neuroscience, based on the researches of Antonio Damasio, Mark Solms, Jaak Panksepp, Joseph LeDoux, and Johnston and Olson, can supplement when they do not revise approaches to the novel’s characters. “In the elaborate brains of complex creatures,” Damasio writes, “networks of neurons eventually come to mimic the structure of part of the body to which they belong. They end up representing the state of the body, literally mapping the body for which they work” (Self, p. 41). ¹ The theory of body mapping fortifies Kenneth Burke’s notion of language as “symbolic action.” It suggests how Ivan’s “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” is a symbolic prelude to the murderous actions that Ivan needs Smerdyakov to accomplish. In How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art, Paul B. Armstrong argues that “to see language as a kind of action that sets in motion our motor capacities suggests an embodied, experientially based view of imitation.” For Armstrong, Damasio’s research into body-maps and as-if processing “allows narrative to refigure experience in the way [the literary critic] Ricoeur describes” (p. 155).

How brain/body circuitries involved in emotion, memories, and self-transformations are achieved is currently an ongoing subject of neuroscience. Very few conclusions remain decisive. Damasio theorizes that memorization, as neural mapping, is not like a “passive, innocent camera” that records. Rather, this interaction indicates how “our memories are prejudiced…by our past history and beliefs,” what Damasio call the “Proustian effect” (Self, pp. 141–142). The neuropsychoanalyst Mark Solms revises Freud’s idea that the Id is unconscious. Solms writes that although “Freud’s localization of consciousness underwent many vicissitudes… it is now clear that instinctual processes are conscious in themselves.” ² What the “cortex contributes to consciousness,” Solms claims, is “a representational memory space that can be activated by bodily processes and therefore reconsolidated” (Conscious Id, 1). Solms follows Jaak Panksepp’s “clinical observations [that] oppose the equation of consciousness with cognition”:

Revolutionary neurologists and neuropsychologists are now pointing out that even our higher cognitive minds could not work without the low subcortical systems that permit them to do so … . In other words, the primary-process emotional feelings are raw affects that automatically make important decisions for us, at times unwise decisions … . (Archeology, 648, 660).

Alongside Panksepp, Damasio provides the most coherent and persuasive background for understanding Ivan’s bodily responses to Smerdyakov. Damasio’s research provides an anatomized version of Ivan’s “unwise decision.” Ivan’s responses are somatic markers in precisely Damasio’s sense, connected to Ivan’s miserable childhood, to being “sent packing” by his hated father (p. 10). In Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Damasio’s research demonstrates how emotional arousals provide, through “inter-neural triggering, “a summary of past experiences with similar events. Damasio critiques the “high-reason view” associated with Plato, Kant, and above all Descartes, that the body is not involved with memory or decision-making:

When the bad outcome connected with a given response option comes into mind, however fleeting, you experience an unpleasant gut feeling. Because the feeling is about the body, I gave the phenomenon the technical term somatic marker…[I]t functions as an automated alarm signal which says: Beware of danger ahead if you choose the option which leads to this outcome. (Descartes, p. 194).

Dmitri, who represents the “low” instinctual embodiment that contrasts with Ivan’s high-cognitive strategies of displacing grief and rage to his poem about the Inquisitor, experiences danger directly. Hating his father even more than Ivan, he responds to an inner “alarm signal” that stops him at the last moment from murdering his father Fyodor. Dmitri, who calls his brother Ivan a “tomb” (p. 229), alerts Dostoevsky’s reader to Ivan’s need for the shock of emotional disinterment, for an arousal of memories through “signals” that remain inhibited by Ivan’s compulsive “intellectual altercations” (p. 17).

Dmitri’s access to childhood memories, linked to his physical impulsiveness, become part of his salvation. Dmitri quotes Schiller’s poem to Alyosha as Ivan quotes the Inquisitor’s words to Alyosha in counterpart. What each brother reads or studies becomes part of his memory bank. Through his “Confession of an Ardent Heart,” in both “verse” and “anecdotes,” Dmitri works through his self-identification with “insect” sensuality and Karamazovian brutality. His evocation of Schiller’s “To Joy” exposes his desire for love and maternal care as he identifies himself with “Man the son, and Earth the mother” (pp. 107–108). Dmitri represents Panksepp’s idea of the need for maternally symbolic CARING, the brain–body circuit involved in nurturing connected to oxytocin. “The hormone oxytocin, along with some other chemicals, plays a crucial role in generating maternal behaviors within the CARE system, while also reducing separation distress from the PANIC/GRIEF system” (Archeology, 1127).

Hooked to memories of Grushenka, Dmitri seeks love as Ivan seeks evidence that love and god are dead. Smerdyakov tests Ivan’s theory as he depends upon Dmitri’s capacity for rage.

As the “son” of the nurturing mother, “earth,” Dmitri seeks direct fulfillment and finds it in loving Grushenka, erotic mother-substitute and eventual caregiver. Ivan’s “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” substitutes power and control for intimate relations. But Ivan’s Inquisitor’s story ironically, even paradoxically, evokes Ivan’s identification with the “weak masses” his strong intellect despises—those who find choice, which in Damasio’s sense involves memory as visceral experience, unbearable. For Ivan’s heretic-burning Inquisitor, humans are “pitiful creatures… a weak rebellious tribe” who need to find someone to “bow down to” (pp. 253–255). Ivan’s tragedy is that he is compelled to bow down to Smerdyakov.

To enable a devil like Smerdyakov is, for Dostoevsky, to block the power of autobiographical as well as cultural/religious memory. Alyosha remembers his mother, the “shreiker,” holding him up to the icon of the Mother of God. The reader is told nothing of Ivan’s relation to his mother; he bears no such maternal imprinting. Ivan’s resistance to remembering his childhood deprivation is a rebellion registered in his body, symbolized by his distance from Katerina (who loves him) and ideologized in his rhetoric: “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” Ivan is driven by what Panksepp calls subcortical GRIEF-RAGE linked to deprivations of hormonal oxytocin. Ivan’s distress is aggravated by his “interesting” conversations with Smerdyakov. Ivan does not connect the temptation Smerdyakov offers with Ivan’s own insight as articulated by his fictive inquisitor: “He alone can take over the freedom of men who appeases their conscience” (p. 255). By yielding to Smerdykov’s insinuations, Ivan moves Smerdyakov into a grotesque version of the Grand Inquisitor’s subject position. He gives his half-brother “idiot” the ultimate power over life and death.

Using Panksepp’s schema of the seven “primary affective processes – SEEKING (expectancy), FEAR (anxiety), RAGE (anger), LUST (sexual excitement), CARE (nurturance), PANIC/GRIEF (sadness), and PLAY (social joy)” (p. 78), ³ —readers may envision each Karamazov brother as living out basic, subcortical paradigmatic emotional tendencies humans share with animals. The distinctions between the neocortex, subserving intellectual functions, and the visceral or limbic parts of the brain become less sharp when the reader also considers what LeDoux calls the “emotional keyboard” (Emotional brain, p. 92) so vivid in Dostoevsky’s style.

The visceral range of Dostoevsky’s emotional keyboard is implied in Zosima’s discourse on animal–human continuity: “Love the animals. God gave them the rudiments of thought and an untroubled joy” (p. 319). The force of Dostoevsky’s bodily focused animal/human imagery is suggested by the name Skotoprigonyevsk, translated animal pen or more precisely, cattle round-up village, which appears late in the pages of The Brothers Karamazov. It is “the name of our town; I have been concealing it all this time,” says Dostoevsky’s narrator with a wink (p. 573).

Ivan returns to Skotoprigonyevsk as an inquisitor who will metaphorically judge and burn his father, mirroring his fictive Grand Inquisitor burning humans in the auto da fe. The subcortical instincts involved in rage, in spasm, grimacing, striking, weeping, and falling down, so continuous in Dostoevsky’s imagery, support descriptions of Dostoevsky’s “cruel talent” (cf. Mikhailovsky ⁴ ). Dostoevsky’s cruelty may outrage readers who believe that cognition or thinking is one thing, the body another; or that mind controls body. But what Damasio calls “the abyssal separation between body and mind” and the idea that “reasoning as well as pain and emotional upheaval” is linked “to cognition only”—(Descartes’, p. 267) is undermined by Dostoevsky’s anti-Cartesianism. As Liza Knapp notes, Dostoevsky’s critique of this philosophy was already represented in Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov’s “Cartesian reliance on the mind, abstract reasoning and mathematics” contributes to his being a murderer, one who “does not take ‘life’ into account” (Annihilation, p. 7). Neither does Ivan.

In contrast to Ivan, Dmitri’s sudden transformation, represented through the “In the Dark” chapter, exemplifies the idea that higher cognitive minds and ethical impulses could not work without the “low subcortical systems” to which they are linked: that is, to the neuroscientist’s idea of a core self-system that mirrors what Dostoevsky calls the soul. Dmitri’s soul is brutally passionate, devoid of his brother Ivan’s higher intellectual constraints and projected self-deceits. “In the Dark” is the novel’s fulcrum (p. 393 out of 796 pages). It serves here to illustrate Damasio’s idea of a somatic marker and Solms’ theory of reconsolidation of memories.

In love with Grushenka whom his father tries to lure with 3000 rubles, Dmitri stands at his father’s window looking in, feeling that his “personal loathing was increasingly unbearable….Suddenly he snatched the brass pestle from his pocket,” intending murder. A break in the page follows, segmented by 17 elliptical marks indicating an emotional spasm, a discontinuity. No other such marks interrupt the flow of text of The Brothers Karamazov. What does Dostoevsky intend the reader to imagine here? The reader knows nothing of what happens in the dark until later when Dmitri interprets the intervention into his murderous impulses as miraculous. “God was watching over me then,” he says (p. 393).

For contemporary readers poised between the religious faith versus science divide, or staggering in despair on its cusp as does Ivan, interpretation is shaken up. For Dostoevsky as for Dmitri, “God” does not serve as a metaphor for a neurological event involving memory reconsolidation, but Dmitri experiences a somatic marker, a gut reaction in this soul that leads him to love and caring. As such, Dostoevsky, in Pankseep’s words, seeks to “open[] a window on the ancestral sources of our deepest affective values” (p. 1272) that in Dmitri’s case involve religious faith. Dmitri’s parricidal intention is transformed in an instant. If the caring we name “spiritual” concern is subcortical and in the neurons, as Damasio and Panksepp argue, debates about love and the problem of consciousness do not extinguish links between scientific and religious discourses unless one is a philosophical absolutist.

In affective neuroscience terms Dmitri’s sudden evocation of “God” indicates how memory subserves a higher cognitive-ethical function, even if this appears (as it did for Freud) as a regressive fantasy of parental care. Dmitri’s God-moment is a case of sudden emotional triggering, a recovery of the cultural memory bank he shares with Alyosha and with the monk Zosima who kneels before him earlier in the novel after Dmitri shouts in rage at his father, “Why is such a man alive!” Zosima’s physical gesture, his “full, distinct, conscious bow” (p. 74) before Dmitri is both a prediction of parricide and a religious supplication against it. This memory trace is implicitly located in Dmitri’s impulse to bow out and flee from his father’s window. He is saved from the ultimate crime even as his violence spills over to beating the servant Grigory.

If access to childhood memories sculpts adult psychological recovery, as Diane Oenning Thompson shows so beautifully in The Brothers Karamazov and the Poetics of Memory, ⁵ in mimetic terms a kind of psychotherapy also results when the reader is engaged in emotional reprocessing of the fictional character’s past. “The brain can simulate…certain body states,” Damasio writes,

as if they were occurring. The as-if body loop hypothesis entails that the brain structures in charge of triggering a particular emotion be able to connect to the structures in which the body state corresponding to the emotion would be mapped. (Self, p. 102)

In our contemporary commodified and confusingly multivoiced climate, the reader’s need for emotional succor and the remapping of emotion may be illuminated by Dostoevsky’s detailing of redemptive experiences available outside the shrink’s office. Polemically, Dostoevsky urges the reader toward Zosima’s mantra: “love is a teacher, difficult to learn” (p. 319). Ivan’s experience stages this challenge and difficulty.

Ivan’s third meeting with Smerdyakov represents a moment when his autobiographical state as a westernized intellectual begins to mutate, when the contrast with Dmitri and Alyosha is most salient. Smerdyakov’s response to Ivan’s stuttering out that “perhaps I too, was guilty, perhaps I really had a secret desire that my father…die” (p. 631) arouses Ivan’s memory of his childhood. Smerdyakov tells Ivan: “‘[I]t’s you of all [Fyodor Pavlovich’s] children who came out resembling him most, having the same soul as him, sir.’” In response Ivan says “‘you’re not stupid’…as if struck; the blood rushed to his face.” His disassociation slips; he sees himself in the mirror of his father. His action is now one of deliberate and impulsive countering of this identity. When he rushes away from Smerdyakov into the blizzard, “a sort of joy now descended into his soul,” and he returns to what in the snow appears as a frozen body, symbolically his own. He “made out at his feet the little peasant he had struck down…Ivan suddenly pulled him up and took him on his back” to have him “immediately examined by a doctor” (pp. 632–633).

Ivan’s impulse of CARE is not sustained. Not until the novel’s finale are the themes of learning love and arousing memories fused. Only Alyosha is represented as achieving what neuroscientists name homeostasis, what Dostoevsky understands as sustained loving kindness. “One good and sacred memory from childhood,” says Alyosha to the boys before he parts from them, “can keep a man from evil all his life” (p. 775). Alyosha “rotat[es] memories…in the mind’s eye in different ways” so that “positive affects can counteract negative affects,” a result of brain–body recircuiting in Panksepp terms (Archeology, 4571). But this recircuiting also involves moments of horror, fear, and deep recall as stirred by each brother’s dreams.

Freud’s notion of remembering, repeating, and working through is structured, as Thompson notes, in each brother’s dream/hallucination experiences. What Damasio calls the “core” or “autobiographical self” emerges from brain regions that link memory (associated with the hypothalamus) with the frontal cortex (consciousness), both regions in a “closed loop device” (Self, p. 250) ⁶ associated with dreaming. Dreaming makes episodic memories available through hallucinated imagery (the visual cortex). Damasio notes that the same neurophysiological mechanisms are employed while dreaming as when we retrieve memories when awake. Thus, affective neuroscience confirms the anatomical grounding of Williams James’ idea that “an experience may be so exciting as to almost leave a scar on the cerebral tissue”(Principles, p. 650).

A “scar” related to Dmitri’s idea of neurons in his head appears after he is arrested for killing his father. The text is oddly interrupted by a Dostoevskian parody of 19th-century neuroscience. Talking to Alyosha in prison, Dmitri laughs “maliciously” and says he’s “lost.”

Why am I lost…the fact is…I’m sorry for God… Imagine: … there are these nerves in the brain (devil take them!)….there are little sorts of tail, these nerves….and when they start trembling there… an image appears.…that is, an object or an event- and that why I contemplate and then think…because of the little tails, and not at all because I have a soul….It’s magnificent, Alyosha, this science!…And yet, I’m sorry for God! (p. 589)

Dmitri imagines “nerve” processes as mechanistic, soul-less, even devilish as the “tails” on the “nerves” indicate. For Dostoevsky, 19th-century neuroscience is Cartesian, a destroyer of the soul, blind to Descartes’ error. Yet Alyosha’s influence as a “holy fool” (p. 21) comforts and calms his despairing brother. This relation of loving attachment, as Panksepp writes, “may also shape prefrontal cortical regions that link our widely separated higher and lower neural areas” (p. 367). Alyosha’s meditative prayer practices with Zosima influence Dmitri’s despairingly “scientific” moment. Such practices create in Alyosha certain mental habits (and brain circuits) of the sort proscribed by Yoga or Zen. ⁷ Neuroscientists confirm that such meditative practices not only “activate[] motor self-control” but “boost emotion regulation systems.” The claim that religious practices such as prayer “stimulate the parasympathetic system” and heal “psychological disorders” (Johnston & Olson, 2015, 3074, 5483) underscores Dostoevsky’s choice of Alyosha as his “hero.” The narrator insists that Alyosha is “more of a realist than the rest of us” (p. 25).

Yet this youngest brother Alyosha has much to learn about life, as Dostoevsky’s intention to write a sequel to The Brothers Karamazov suggests. Dmitri’s emotional scarring is deeper and is healed not only by Alyosha but by his dream of the “wee one.” His identification with the starving, neglected baby in his dream—“‘why is the wee one poor?’”—transforms him. “‘For that wee one I’ll go to Siberia now,’” Dmitri says, even as he knows he’s not his father’s murderer (p. 569). In Panksepp’s sense, this parable of CARING echoes Alyosha’s dream of Zosima appearing at the marriage at Cana of Galilee, urging him to “do your work…my meek one” (p. 361).

Refathered so tenderly, Alyosha weeps with emotion. Remothered so blissfully after his dream identification with the burnt-out starving baby, Dmitri wakes to find Grushenka speaking beside him: ‘“And I am with you, too. I won’t leave you now. I will go with you for the rest of my life’” (pp. 507–508). Grushenka’s words signify at least one ultimate endgame of neuropsychotherapy in its maternal aspect. She feels love, she feels pity, and she understands Dmitri’s helpless distress. Her response suggests the way “oxytocin…acts to increase maternal behaviors and decrease separation distress in young animals that are left alone” (Johnston & Olson, 2015, 1212). The former femme fatal undergoes a deeply embodied change. She will not abandon Dmitri. She carries Solms’ theory of memory reconsolidation as it fuses here with Panksepp’s idea of being flooded with the chemicals of CARE.

Alyosha’s and Dmitri’s wounded childhoods are transformed through dreams connecting them to nurturing and love. Ivan’s nightmare of the devil is their counterpart in the dialectical Pro and Contra (the title of Book Five) explored in Dostoevsky’s novel. Ivan experiences his cerebral scar as “a throbbing in my brain like a persistent nightmare” (p. 647) when his devil, another doppelganger like Smerdyakov, comes to him. Dostoevsky’s narrator appears uncertain as to whether this “Russian gentleman” is merely a hallucination or distinctly corporeal, dissolving the barriers between mind and body. He appears as “someone suddenly sitting there, though God knows how he had got in, because he had not been in the room when Ivan Fydorovich came back from seeing Smerdyakov” (p. 635). “No longer young…with a pointed beard” and “wearing a sort of brown jacket, evidently from the best of tailors, but already shabby,” the gentleman accuses Ivan of practicing “geometry” and mathematics, that is of Cartesian thinking. He refers to Ivan’s problem of freedom of choice obliquely: “‘indeterminate equations,’” he says, are “‘no help in faith’” (p. 638).

Ivan’s devil arouses frightening memories Ivan has worked to forget: “‘Everything in my nature,’” Ivan tells him, “‘that is stupid, long outlived, mulled over in my mind, flung away like carrion—you are now offering to me as some kind of news!’” When the devil refers to “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” and the theme of correcting Christ’s “deed” of offering men freedom of choice, Ivan shouts, “‘Shut up, or I’ll kill you.’” He demands: “‘I forbid you to speak of the Grand Inquisitor’” (p. 648), as if his own “poem” were a rent in his neurological tissue.

The conclusion of The Brothers Karamazov hinges on Dmitri’s arrest and trial but also on whether Ivan, emblem of modern atheist skepticism and (existential) pessimism, can reconsolidate his memories. Ivan’s mantra, “‘it’s precisely one’s neighbors that one cannot possibly love’” (p. 236) is an embodied feeling overturned not by cognitive, intellectual processes but by his horrific mind/body soul traumas: first, by emotional arousals experienced with Smerdyakov, and second by “fever” and hallucinations of the devil. The reader approaches the core of Ivan’s philosophical/religious problem—in Panksepp’s language his subcortical grief—through the devil’s discourse on the “man-god.” This discourse runs through Dostoevsky’s works from Crime and Punishment and The Possessed (Demons) to this key moment in The Brothers Karamazov when the devil speaks to Ivan:

I believe that this period… will come [and] then the entire old world view will fall of itself….Man will be exalted with the spirit of divine, titanic pride, and the man-god will appear….conquering nature every hour….Where I stand, there at once will be the foremost place…‘everything is permitted,’ and that’s that! It’s all very nice. (p. 649).

The Devil’s and Inquisitor’s version of man-god-ism, reciprocally evoked at the beginning and end of Dostoevsky’s text, is not “very nice.” The word echoes the narrator’s ironic description of the Karamazov’s as a “nice little family.” Ivan’s question to Alyosha, “‘Am I my brother Dmitri’s keeper or something?’” (p. 231) undergoes mutation only when Ivan learns of Smerdyakov’s suicide. He reacts to this suicide as if he himself were about to be hanged. Ivan is then aroused to a prescient hysteria of confession at Dmitri’s trial. Only when he confesses with a “twisted laugh” that Smerdyakov killed their father “‘on my instructions’”—for “‘Who doesn’t wish for his father’s death’”—does Ivan begin the redemption/reconsolidation process (p. 686). By confronting his responsibility for parricide, his “mirror neurons” intersecting with Smerdyakov’s, Ivan can finally feel his way toward an answer to his Inquisitor’s argument.

Damasio describes the kind of emotion Ivan undergoes as “an upset of the ongoing life state at multiple levels of the organism, from the brain itself to most divisions of the body proper” (Self, p. 120). For Dostoevsky this is the soul-transforming moment. Falling into mental “illness,” which leads him to self-revelation, Ivan is carried out of the court. In neural terms multiple circuits loop through the amygdala and hypothalamus, regions of anger and memory. Damasio refers to the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s commentary on “upheaval” (Self, pp. 120–121) to describe this state of mind/body crisis. Dostoevsky exhibits the consequences of Ivan’s experience of not warning his brother or father about Smerdyakov’s plans. Ivan’s hubristic Inquisitor “man-god” embodied in Smerdyakov and described by the devil, is a killer, not only of humans but of nature. The devil chapter scores Dostoevsky’s vision of ecological–spiritual–psychological disaster when the “man-god” appears. (And has he not already made appearances in our time?)

Ivan is susceptible to bodily upheaval in ways that Alyosha and to some extent Dmitri escape. Yet each Karamazov brother with the exception of Alyosha, who remembers his mother’s caresses “‘as if she were standing alive before me’” (p. 18), is mother-deprived and father-scorched. In neurological terms, Dmitri and Ivan, and especially the epileptic Smerdyakov suffer an early lack of care and love. CARE, as linked to subcortical “animal” drives, as contrasted to hubristic human fantasies of power, is articulated through Zosima’s “Talks and Homilies.” It is expressed in Alyosha’s tutelage of his group of boys. The human–animal continuity of CARE is played out in the scene where the boy Kolya brings a puppy to dying Ilyusha’s bedside. But the substitution of the dog Perezvon for Ilyusha’s dead dog Zhuchka is precocious Kolya’s deceit, a false resurrection, a twisted kind of caring. Kolya mimics Ivan’s mimicking of Voltaire: “if there were no God, he would have to be invented” (p. 553). Rebellion and intellectual pride is always ready to undermine love and caring for others, as Alyosha knows too well. Yet the impulse to care has saturated Alyosha’s every action since he sat beside Zosima’s coffin dreaming, and his mission with the boys is sustained.

In the novel’s Epilogue, Katerina becomes Ivan’s caretaker. “Katerina Ivanovna had ordered the sick and unconscious Ivan Fyodorovich moved to her house, scorning any future and inevitable talk from society and its condemnation.” Katerina’s loving impulses now conjoin with Grushenka’s, her former rival. Katerina tells Alyosha that Ivan has made contacts to plan for Dmitri’s escape “at the third halt” toward Siberian exile (p. 757). The reader is impelled to imagine how Ivan has incorporated, through the sufferings of painful memory arousal, the Zosiman ethic of love as a “teacher.” Reconsolidated memory, a working through of grief involving physical symptoms and painful resistance, drives Ivan to finally identify himself as his brother Dmitri’s “keeper.”

What philosophers of mind call “the hard problem of consciousness” ⁸ nevertheless appears as a stumbling block to this literary-neurological conjunction, exacerbated by the concept of the human brain as a computational machine controlling the body. As LeDoux points out, “To the extent that cognitive science was the science of information processing, rather than a science of conscious content, then emotion, being an aspect of consciousness, did not necessarily fit comfortably in the program” (Emotional brain, p. 37).

In the last decade several influential hypotheses are challenging this program. Research based on fMRI brain probes indicates that “feelings are just as cognitive as other percepts” and that recurrence of memories in time preserves no “hard copies” because the “self” is a “perpetual re-created neurobiological state” (Descartes, p. 19, 115–122). Dostoevsky represents the “souls” of Ivan and Dmitri as perpetually recreatable and evolving. Both Grushenka and Katerina transform themselves from erotic game-players into women who care for the men they love. The Brothers Karamazov is a story, in this sense, of how interventions of love rewire brain/body circuits, of the plasticity of emotions; of what in Eastern spirituality is called Satyagraha (soul force). Zosima’s idea of “active love, though it cannot be proved here” (p. 56), serves as Dostoevsky’s weapon against Ivan’s Inquisitor’s loveless Cartesianism, his terrible mind games.

Experiencing The Brothers Karamazov by way of neuroscientific concepts, readers may realize how physically embodied the act of reading can become. Breathing, sighing, leaving this sentence to move our bodies and answer the cell phone, we may also recognize the Cartesian traces that habitually weave through our acts of reading. But as Panksepp writes, the “neurobiology of ‘the soul’” (p. 1067) is no longer impossible.