Lesson 11
The Hypothesis of the Unconscious
The identity of the
subject would not be a problem were the subject entirely within his own
reach. Yet are we not prone to moments of absence? Are we always conscious?
Even during vigilance we are in any case more aware of the surrounding world
than of ourselves. The content of the mind is confined to whatever it lays
its attention on. We do not find in it anything it does not clearly perceive,
neither perhaps anything it does not want to see. Would this mean that there
is an area in the mind that remains obscure?
This is what is
designated by the term unconscious. But what does this word mean?
This is not a simple question because the unconscious cannot be viewed as an
object of the experience; it is a roundabout way to enquire into what is
actually taking place inside the field of consciousness. How much
importance should we give to the hypothesis of the unconscious? Ought we
to regard it as a fruit of fashion or are there weighty reasons for retaining
it?
A. The Paradigm of Consciousness and
the Unconscious.
In the West Freud is
venerated as the man who revolutionised the paradigm of Psychology. One says
that there is Psychology "before" and "after" Freud. In what way has the
hypothesis of the unconscious been so revolutionary?
Does it mean that the
unconscious has not been described before? In fact, well before the emergence
of Freudian Psychoanalysis there were already theories of the unconscious.
Jung, a disciple of Freud, even realised, when studying traditional cultures
outside the West, that the unconscious had been described on many levels. The
Indian Tantras for instance comprise a
theory of sexuality which, when compared to Freud, seems to indicate that the
Freudian theory only deals with part of the unconscious. Humanity did not wait
for Freud to develop systems of interpreting dreams. Hence what importance
should one give to the discovery of the unconscious by Psychoanalysis?
1) The hypothesis of the
unconscious is of primary importance because it leads to a reorientation of
the history of Western Psychology by provoking a change of paradigm -
or model - of Psychology as it had been viewed since Descartes. Indeed,
classical Psychology was a psychology of consciousness. If we follow
the indications laid out in the Cartesian model of consciousness, we shall
never find any idea of the unconscious. Descartes stipulates that the soul in
consciousness and defines this consciousness as an immediate capture of
the thought. Psychology, as indicated by its name, being a study of
the psyche, the soul, this means according to Descartes' model that it studies
consciousness as thought. If the soul is thinking substance,
this must mean that it is thinking activity through and through. How could
there be something in it that is would not be conscious of? How could there
be something like "unconscious thought"? It seems like a contradiction.
Thought is conscious or it is not at all. What does not belong to thought may
belong to matter, to extended substance, but cannot pertain to consciousness.
Descartes could never have spoken or "unconscious thought"; it is a formula
which, inside his own system, appears non-sensical.
Since we have all been
schooled in the Cartesian tradition, our own use of the word "thought" is
ambiguous. The problem stems from taking consciousness to mean
waking, or experience, and thought to mean mental activity,
object of consciousness and even representation. Are being awake and
thinking one and the same thing? If you do equate them, then the continuity
of the soul is taken to be the continuity of the act of thinking. Then you
must conclude that the soul, which is thought, must in order to exist be
continually thinking. Descartes states this clearly: "I find that thinking is
an attribute belonging to me: it alone cannot be detached from me. I am, I
exist, that much is certain, but for how long? For as long as I am
thinking, because it may well be the case that were
I to stop thinking I would also cease to be or to exist".
This point however is
open to criticism. The readers of the Meditations perceived that here
is an obscurity. What about sleep? Coma? What can
we say of the embryo inside its mother's womb? Does it think in the same way
as I do now? Can there not be something like the annihilation of thinking?
And blackouts? And deep sleep?
In deep sleep I stop thinking and yet I do not stop being. How should we
consider all these moments of inattention, of distraction?
Our slips of the tongue? Our
dreams? These objections have to be answered and the unconscious state
explained. There are two possible solutions:
either one maintains the idea that the soul
"is always thinking", in which case one shall have to account for the
possibility of gaps in consciousness that nevertheless do not challenge
the continuity of the soul. This is the core of the theory of mind in the West
and a point of view shared by all Cartesians (Leibniz,
Malebranche, Spinoza).
or we let go of the idea that the soul is
always thinking, and we posit that its true identity is on a metaphysical
level and does not depend on the mental activity of the conscious subject, an
activity which can effectively be interrupted. This is a point of view that we
find for instance in Indian philosophy.
A deciding factor in
the history of Western psychology is that the Cartesians choose the first
solution, maintaining an ambiguity in the word "thinking". Yet Descartes
writes in the replies to objections: "It is no wonder if we do not recollect
the thoughts we had in our mother's womb or when fainting because neither do
we remember many thoughts we have had when grown-up, sane and awake." The
soul is always thinking, but it forgets a large number of its
thoughts; these thoughts will necessarily have taken place, since the soul is
by essence a thinking thing. Descartes has to admit of a form of unconscious,
which he lets memory deal with. He takes consciousness to be the
thinking activity of which we are immediately aware, the activity in which we
are a will, an acting ego.
1) However this reply is
obscure. Consciousness is not of one piece and we are not conscious of
everything. What one should point out is that there are degrees of
consciousness; thus a content (of consciousness, that is a thought) is
either present inside the field of consciousness, or disappears from the field
of consciousness while being retained by memory. Leibniz' theory of small
perceptions solves this difficulty. Perception comprises infinitesimal
degrees. Once a threshold is reached, the object enters consciousness. If a
noise is too weak it will not be noticed, and yet it has entered in the
infinitesimal domain of sensation. If it reaches a sufficient
threshold it will enter the realm of perception. What we call a
conscious event is nothing other than the concurrence of "small
perceptions" making up a conscious perception. What is there, but outside the
field of consciousness, pertains to the unconscious. Therefore
" it is a major source of error to believe that
there are no other perceptions in the soul than those one notices". In other
words, conscious experience emerges from a condensation of unconscious
perceptions. We can also say that this means that any conscious experience is
surrounded by its own unconscious fringe. What would be naive would be
to believe that the only thing existing is that of which we are conscious.
This position is erroneous, both as regards its approach to the outside world
(of which I do not perceive all aspects) as its approach to the inner world (I
am not even aware of everything going on inside my own body). What I call a
thought can have arisen in the unconscious. When this thought appears in my
mind I only become aware of it. This point of view leads to new
perspectives. Yet Leibniz continues to sate along with Descartes that "the
soul is always thinking".
2) To be more specific, it
is possible to equate the power of consciousness to that of the will
and restrict the unconscious to the domain of automatisms. If we regard
consciousness above all as will, then the difference between conscious
and unconscious can be taken to be that of the wilful attention, a
reflective light on the objects of waking consciousness, and involuntary
inattention, which feebly and distractedly slips into
subconsciousness. Habits and mechanical reactions are unconscious,
while a reflective and voluntary act is conscious. To be awake is also to
will. This is all the difference between what is conscious because done
wilfully, and what is unconscious because it has become mechanical. This is
why Bergson distinguishes that which in the mind
is attention to life from that which has slipped away into
unconsciousness as memories. As soon as vigilance's alert interest its
surrounding ceases, the content of the mind is no longer operative and then
dreaming can begin: "Let's suppose", Bergson
writes, "that at a given time I lose interest in the present situation,
in acting in the present. Let's suppose in other words that I fall asleep.
Then these immobile souvenirs, sensing that I have just opened the trap-door
in the mind which kept them underground, begin to move. They rise. They
quicken. In the unconscious night they perform a huge and macabre dance. And
together they all rush to the door that has just half opened". Here dreaming
belongs to the dynamics of subconsciousness.
Bergson follows a
voluntarist tradition which goes from Descartes to Alain,
via Maine de Biran,
in which consciousness is always identified to thought and recognised as
will. Of course, in dreaming there is this dance of the memories, but it is
hard to view this as “thinking” in the Cartesian sense. The
voluntarist tradition has a tendency to equate the
unconscious with a mechanical activity of the body; this is an idea we find
for example in Alain.
True thinking is
organised and intentional; it is vigilant and hence necessarily conscious.
This consciousness in action is determined by choices. It is all the
more vivacious as the choice experience confronts us with is more dramatic.
It is not the mechanical thinking of habit and repetition. To be conscious is
to choose at every moment with respect to a prospective future; it is leaning
present wakefulness on the past so that it responds to its expectations. The
unconscious pertains above all to lack of attention and habit.
Again, to bodily automatisms.
B.
Latent Thought and Unconscious Desire
What is the originality
of Freud with respect to Cartesian tradition? In that he crossed the line
which consists in considering unconscious phenomena not as residual habits, a
kind of inert thinking stuck in matter, but as organised from within by an
intention and a desire of which the subject is not aware.
1) Let us first consider the
phenomenon of dreaming. For long it was considered a kind of wandering of the
mind, a nonsensical chaos. Of course a dream is a moment of inattention which
enables the manifestation of subconscious content. Yet what reasons can these
have to manifest? If we conform to the classical interprÉtation of dreams we
will say that they witness to the imagination’s release from the constraints
of waking in some kind of gratuitous and fanciful manifestation. To believe
that dreams are as void of meaning as a pure improvisation, something with no
purpose, is to give them little credit. However intentionality is also
present in dreams. It only disappears in deep sleep. Would there not be some
sort of intention in dreams? Freud underlines: “in my opinion the cause of
dreams is not indifferent and therefore dreams are not innocent…dreams are not
concerned with trivialities, they would not perturb our sleep for so little”.
Freud’s thesis is that the intention behind the dream is the realisation of
a desire. We say that the dream has a latent thought which is the
expression of a desire and which orchestrates the elaboration of the dream;
the dream as it manifests to the dreamer is the patent thought. The
dreamer experiences a more or less muddled story, but this story is conducted
by intentions which are the complete expression of a desire. The child
deprived of sweets during the day will dream he is eating endless amounts of
them. He will compensate through his dream a lack of fulfilment of his desire
when awake. Dreams have a meaning; they are the realisations of desires on
an imaginary plane.
This explanation is
satisfactory for children’s dreams; yet are no the dreams of grown-ups a
little more complicated? How is one to explain the fuzzy nature and chaotic
progress of their dreams? Does desire imply this confusion? The problem does
not arise in the case of children as long as their desires are not obstructed
by some major prohibition. The grown-up on the other hand has developed an
acute sense of what is allowed and what is not. His education has structured
the duality good/evil in rules of conduct enforced by sanctions. Hence he has
installed censorship in himself and he has a sharp sense of guilt. The child
has first experienced censorship as coming from outside, from his parents’
authority. Later on he has internalised this system of prohibitions and
appointed in his own mind a judge capable of invigilating his desires. This
inner judge is what Freud calls the superego. The result, according to
Freud, is that the conscious ego refuses the direct confrontation with its own
intentions if these stand in too great a contradiction with what morality can
tolerate. The shock would be too severe. In addition, if desires become too
transparent, the dreamer will awake in anguish, because the desire has not
been properly repressed. In general, even if the dream liberates unconscious
desires, it immediately veils them by displacing the intentions towards
more harmless objects.
Let’s take an example
from Jung. A lady comes to see her psychoanalyst friend to tell him of a
strange dream she has had. She says she has dreamt she strangled a little
white dog. She finds this odd and remarks that in the dream she proceeds in
the manner of killing poultry and then she goes on to observations about
capital punishment. The friend asks her if she bears a grudge against someone
in her vicinity. She says she does. Some days previously she threw out her
sister-in-law, telling her to leave because “I don’t want a biting dog
around”. The interprÉtation is quite clear. The dream realises in a
dramatic manner an aggressive conduct. Since she could not admit to herself
her murderous intentions, she displaced her intentions on the dog, while
keeping the equation dog = sister-in-law. The dream operated the
displacement. She satisfied her desire, yet without admitting it
consciously. If the dream has a manifest content (the patent thought) which
seems to be this chaotic story, it also has a latent content (the latent
thought), which is a desire for revenge. The conscious ego can well ignore
his latent thoughts and preserve a façade of self-mastery. Yet, there are
unconscious tendencies at work in him.
2) The mechanisms of
interactions between conscious and unconscious are thus quite simple: 1) an
unconscious desire manifests (If I could, I would strangle her…). This one
meets with conscious resistance (No, that would not be a good thing to
do, I must not have such thoughts). There is a
conflict in me between what I allow myself and what I don’t. 2) The conflict
between tendencies results in a victory of consciousness which repressed the
tendency in the unconscious. One then speaks of censorship. The
censorship is a barrier manufactured by education which rejects all
unacceptable thoughts. Censorship produces repression which is the
result of censorship. Since some desires are prohibited, a mental act must
intervene to get rid of them: this is repression. 3) Nevertheless, what is
repressed is not suppressed. Not only is it preserved in what is the primary
function of the unconscious, that of being memory, but it also keeps its
dynamic potential. The emotional charge contained in the repressed thought
persists. Thus a moment’s inattention suffices for the non-manifest
content to manifest. This is taking place in dreams, but not only. One
speaks then of unconscious acts or symptoms pertaining to the
unconscious. This quick analysis is taken from what we shall call the
first Freudian topic, let’s say his first theory.
3) There exist unconscious
psychical phenomena. An unconscious act is thus an act which has all
the characteristics of ordinary mental events except one: it is unknown to the
subject who performs it at the time when he performs it. Freud classifies
situations giving rise to unconscious acts in two categories: slips and
dreams.
One
calls slip acts which, in conformity with
the subject’s deliberate intention, are left uncompleted: a slip of the
tongue, of the pen, a mistaken identity, something forgotten, an inadvertent
gesture and so on, everything which appears to fall outside the ego and his
logic. Freud cites the example of the president of the Austrian
Reichtag, who upon opening the session said
“Gentlemen, I notice the presence of the majority of our members and therefore
declare the session closed….I beg you pardon,
opened…” In the Freudian interprÉtation one may suppose that the president
had no wish to open the session, that perhaps he foresaw problems. His slip
would have betrayed his true wish. The procedure is the same as above:
repression of the tendency, inattention and the tendency expresses itself
through a slip. Let’s suppose I am to do an errand in response to a request.
I forget. Here too this forgetfulness can be interpreted as a betrayal. I
may have secret reasons for not doing this favour, in which case I have
obtained what I wanted. The same goes for mistaken identities of someone in
the street. If I have an intense desire to see someone, I run a great risk of
unconsciously believing I see him many times. In all these cases there are
two conflicting tendencies in the mind. One is conscious activity, wilful and
conducted by the mind; the other is unconscious activity, involuntary, and not
under the control of the mind. Whenever there is inattention, censorship has
loosened its hold and then the repressed unconscious content tends to manifest
and provoke an unconscious act.
What an odd situation!
Slips, forgetfulness etc… seem unconnected to me. I do not notice
them. It eludes me. And yet they are part of me. They express an intention,
a desire, even though I dare not frankly admit that they are my intentions and
desires. The unconscious thinks, dreams, desires,
plans, it has its obsessions like my conscious self, but I know nothing of
it. Would it not therefore be legitimate to speak of “unconscious thinking”?
The theory of repression reveals a form of thought which incorporates an idea,
a goal, a desire. One is almost tempted to speak
of an identity. This being so, we should regard the psyche as consisting of
several different layers: on the surface consciousness which includes
experience, and below the subconscious, and deeper still the unconscious. The
ego would therefore be like an iceberg; its visible part would be the
conscious, but this visible part supposes an invisible part, the unconscious.
3) Freud does not stop there
and shows also that the dynamics of the unconscious is nothing other than that
of sexuality. In the psychoanalytical cure, the analysis always
involves the patient’s intimacy and this intimacy takes him to sexuality.
Freud wants to show that the repressed thoughts are first of all repressed
sexual thoughts, since desire is fundamentally the expression of
sexuality. Freud’s equation of psychical procedures is therefore:
desire = affectivity = sexuality = unconscious.
Starting with the idea
of repression, one arrives at the interdicts of sexuality, especially those of
incest. Freud take the unconscious tendencies back to traumas that derange
the patients’ mental life and which stem from early childhood. In addition he
interprets the notion of trauma only as relating to sexuality.
This explains why
Freudian psychoanalysis very quickly heeds towards a theory of sexuality.
This theory states that the vital energy, the libido, is nothing other
than the development of sexuality going through certain stages of which the
most well-known are the anal, the mirror stage and Oedipus complex. If the
development of the libido is obstructed, the individual will suffer and this
is the beginning of neurosis. The manner in which these stages are
experienced is not without consequences for grown-up life. This can explain
some forms of infantile behaviour in grown-ups: one says then that some stages
have not been successfully traversed. Something in the psyche is immature and
the individual wishes to return to the stage of a baby, or a young child, in
order to assimilate what he failed to in the past. Adopt a foetal position on
the sofa, sucking one’s thumb are regressive conducts. Freudian
psychoanalysis insists on these experiences of early childhood because it
assumes that they are crucial in the later construction of the grown-up.
This hypothesis of
desire ruled by the unconscious deals a severe blow to the self and its
prerogatives. We naively believed ourselves to be our own masters, we thought
we ruled on the territory of our intimacy, and we were wrong. I am not the
origin of all my thoughts, in the sense that these would all be logical and
deliberate constructions of conscious reason. After Freud we can no longer
believe in the supremacy of the wilful ego on its unconscious elaborations.
Psychoanalysis caused an earthquake in the field of psychology when
questioning the prerogatives of consciousness and in forcing us to take man’s
darker side into account.
But beware! Freudian
theory is one possible interprÉtation of unconscious phenomena and not the
only one. The problem of the complexity of the
unconscious remains to be dealt with. Neither have we studied the
problem of pathology and the unconscious. However we are at least better able
now to recognise the importance of the theory of the unconscious in
understanding everyday life.
C. The Unconscious
and the Emotions.
There are many compelling reasons the hypothesis of the
unconscious should help us understand everyday life and play a part in
self-knowledge.
The ego of
vigilance is, Freud says, like the owner of a house which is the soul.
Or at least this is what he thinks. He could rightfully think of himself as
the master of a well respected house controlling his every thought. However
neurosis and slips oblige us to think otherwise: this house of the soul is
haunted by unconscious spooks that are unfulfilled desires. “Thoughts arise
and one doesn’t know where they come from; neither can one chase them away.
These alien guests appear even stronger than those subjected to the rule of
the ego”. How many of our choices are truly deliberate and conscious? How
many of our thoughts are conscious, directed and organised? How many of our
acts elude us? Doesn’t our conduct mostly stem from impulses and not careful
thinking? It is this pretentiousness of the ego which is under attack in the
following text: “You believe you know everything of sufficient importance
going on in your soul because your consciousness would inform you. And when
you remain without news from anything in your soul, you state with perfect
assurance that it cannot be there. You even go to the extent of equating
“psyche” with “consciousness”, that is known to you and this despite the most
compelling evidence that many more things must constantly be taking place in
your psychic life than can be revealed to your consciousness.” The ego is not
aware that he is assuredly not the whole of mind and that the very thing he
takes to be his own is something he has first had to take possession of. The
ego has access to patent thoughts which are given in experience. He is only
the master of some of his thoughts which he is able to formulate himself. The
origin of his thoughts may well elude him. The conscious ego is in fact
tossed about by stirs taking place in his mind, stirs caused by agitations he
is not aware of. He does not see the extent to which his acts are ruled by
unconscious factors.
2) How then can we detect
the unconscious in action? By discerning everything which in thought and
behaviour pertains to reactions and automatisms, what is accomplished at
moments of inattention and absent-mindedness.
Let us consider the
example of emotions or more exactly emotional reactions. Let us suppose that
in the past I have been betrayed by a friend. My expectations were not
fulfilled and I have the feeling that I have been deceived. The years go by,
but the wound is still there. Somehow I nourish a desire for revenge and I do
not want to be betrayed again. Now life’s circumstances replace me in a very
similar situation to the one I knew previously. I will react in panic, maybe
aggressively, in any case out of proportion to the situation itself. Reacting
so emotionally deeply disturbs me, I shiver, I lose control. The outcome of
an emotional reaction is irrational. I shout insults I will regret later. I
am of course not aware of it, carried away as I am by my anger, my fear etc…I
do not realise how extreme my judgement, attitude and words are. I have been
touched where it hurts inside. A twist is there in the psyche, and it is this
twist which has just been expressed. Something tense inside has not been
resolved. A desire is there which want to be ex-pressed, precisely
because for long it has been re-pressed and the present situation and
experience gives it an opportunity. However, due to poor understanding, this
is only half accomplished: there is an emotional discharge, but the tension
in my heart is not eased. A trace from the past is there like a wound that
life’s circumstances have re-opened. It is under the influence of emotions
that we become unconscious, we do senseless things; one will howl, another
mortify himself, a third kill or kill himself. This is the sense of the
expression: “I didn’t know what I was doing”. When one loses control,
emotions flow. Yet what is done automatically is nevertheless conditioned by
the past.
Hence we have a model of
behaviour which looks like this:
|
Situation/experience A |
Reaction B |
Situation/experience C
analogous to A |
|
Refusal = no |
Response to the
situation: withdrawal, distress |
Inner agitation: return
of what had been repressed |
|
Suffering |
Internalisation: for
instance a suppressed anger |
Externalisation:
emotional explosion |
|
Trauma |
A model of
behaviour |
Repetition of that
model |
|
Non-acceptation |
Repression |
Incomplete expression |
In terms of Indian
philosophy, anything experienced in duality and suffering leaves traces in the
psyche (vasanas), which together
will form tendencies (samskara). Hence,
unbeknown to us, the past is present in our unconscious. This trace of
the past organises memory and lays out in advance the person’s emotional
reactions. We can ourselves observe what emotional collapse amounts to. It
easy to perceive it in others and this is what enables us to understand what a
fragile statue the ego is. Our self-control is often weak. There are
tensions inside us that demand to be resolved. The ego’s hold on its emotions
is never total and this hold demands to let go of these tensions so that they
can be resolved. An emotional explosion expresses without removing the twist
inside. Some emotional excess finds an outlet in dreams, yet this does not
seem to be enough to dissolve all tension. To resolve everything that is
twisted in the unconscious and which returns again and again it is necessary
to work at oneself.
Let us consider for
instance the mechanism of passion in a relationship. As soon as a discussion
becomes passionate, that pathos is released, that everyone sticks to
his position, we can be certain that unconscious factors are at work. Too
much passion in asserting and denying are the sign that something is not
right, that the mind is not serene, that words are tossed about
blindly, in short that fanaticism has made its
entrance. “When a person speaks vehemently and loses his calm this shows that
he is attached to what he is speaking of,” and this attachment is fabricated
by the ego out of the legacy of his own personal history. Because it erupts
all of a sudden, the emotion is a reaction to the sting of a wound and causes
the person to go wild. When one is no longer oneself, it means that the self
has left a void and this vacancy is occupied by the unconscious; this is what
happens in the madman’s lunacy (a madman is someone alienated, someone who has
become other than himself) when his mind so loses its coherence that
his instincts appear alone on stage. Emotion has to go if the self is to
recover itself.
The appearance of
emotional reactions offers us some guidance. “What is the touchstone on which
to sharpen the intellect? If you are troubled in
action. This is the yardstick. If you remain calm, serene and
unperturbed, then your action is correct.” Nevertheless, does this mean that a
conscious act is inevitably cold and cerebral? “It is not necessary to stay
cold and intellectual. There is place for feeling. There is a difference
between feeling and emotion. Emotion sends you into a state of
agitation, you feel sad or glad. Feeling on the contrary leads to contact or
oneness with the object.” Feeling is a sensitive openness to the present.
Emotion is sensitivity disturbed by its own past. For this reason anything
very emotional is deceptive. Ancient fears reappear, disappointed
expectations work themselves up and we no longer see things as they are. We
see them as we fear they might be or as we wish they were; our behaviour
reflects this illusion. We crystallise on present objects expectations,
apprehensions or worries, and this crystallisation distorts our vision
altogether. When emotions don’t erupt, this does not necessarily result in
coldness; on the contrary if sensitivity is left undisturbed it is free to
receive feelings.
Once we have seen
through the mechanism of emotions and realised how heavily the legacy of past
tendencies weighs, we also become more understanding. We then see how
most people around us are like bundles of nerves. They easily lose control,
leaving them at the mercy of their unconscious reactions. We also see our own
problems the result of twists within ourselves. What then becomes manifest is
the immense importance of the unconscious in our life and the necessity to
work at ourselves. Consciousness plays a smaller part than previously
believed and the ascendancy of the unconscious is all the greater precisely
because we do not want to see it. What would also be erroneous however would
be to take the unconscious to be another “self” manipulating the self without
it knowing. The unconscious is not another self but the immersed part of the
self, which is quite another matter. It is alienating only as the weight of
the past which weighs on the present, a past which is our own. Be this past
heavy or light, the nature of the subject remains the same, as does the role
he must play on the stage of life.
3) It follows that we can
represent the relation between conscious and unconscious in a picture. Let us
suppose that the psyche is comparable to an ocean. It is a little as if the
surface was consciousness, the level below the subconscious and the deepest
level the unconscious.
The self is made of the
same water as the ocean, but this water has frozen into an individual, part of
whom is conscious, the other part plunges its roots in the unconscious. The
middle zone is the subconscious where memory is at work to deliver accessible
content. Living in denial creates psychological twists expressing themselves
as emotions, slips, dreams, symptoms that cross the layers of the mind. The
individual unconscious is the level that harbours an ancient experience which
has left a deep trace. Some authors add that beyond the unconscious there is
a supra-personal level, also called the collective unconscious. The self is a
thought which recovers itself in vigilance. Part of it is immersed like an
iceberg plunging into the unconscious. This is where you find the traumas of
past experience. Whatever goes up to the surface must travel through the deep
layers and undergo their influence. The deepest layer of the unconscious goes
beyond the individual. Between conscious and unconscious there would be
according to Freud a middle region relating to censorship. Through the three
states of waking, sleeping and dreaming, the person would descend through
these different layers.
* *
*
Hence there are serious
reasons for retaining the hypothesis of the unconscious. One cannot conceive
of the conscious without the unconscious: perception, memory and habit suppose
that consciousness consists of degrees. The pathology of consciousness is
best explained with reference to the hypothesis of the unconscious. But we
also observe other situations in daily life where it would seem that the
unconscious is involved, for instance the workings of the emotions.
Yet we must not forget
that life is lived consciously. Vigilance is taking place conducted by
the conscious subject. It is in the light of consciousness that the content
of the unconscious is disentangled. It is the expansion of consciousness
which we should be aiming for. To put it more simply: we are
consciousness, but we have an unconscious. These are not equivalent
propositions.
The unconscious is a
hypothesis on behalf of a thesis which concerns consciousness itself.
It is not just a fashionable theory. The hypothesis of the unconscious has
the merit of questioning the status of personal identity. It compels us to
pay attention to what we would otherwise easily have left in the dark.
However it is not beyond question that the theory of sexuality would be the
only way to clarify the nature of the unconscious.
* *
*
