The unconscious not only fascinates us, but also frightens us: we are afraid to learn something about ourselves that we cannot live with peacefully. Is it possible to talk about contact with our unconscious, using not the terms of psychoanalysis, but visual images? Psychoanalyst Andrei Rossokhin talks about this.
Psychologies The unconscious is a fascinating and rather complex story. How would you answer the question: what is the unconscious?1
Andrey Rossokhin: Psychologists like to speak in terms, but I will try to describe this concept in a living language. Usually in lectures I compare the unconscious with the macrocosm and the microcosm. Imagine what we know about the universe. Several times I experienced a special state in the mountains: when you look at the stars, if you really overcome some internal resistance and allow yourself to feel infinity, break through this picture to the stars, feel this infinity of the cosmos and the absolute insignificance of yourself, then a state of horror appears. As a result, our defense mechanisms are triggered. We know that the cosmos is not even limited to one universe, that the world is absolutely infinite.
The psychic universe is, in principle, just as infinite, just as fundamentally not cognizable to the end, as is the macrocosm.
However, most of us have an idea about the sky and about the stars, and we love to watch the stars. This, in general, calms, because it turns this cosmic abyss into a planetarium, where there is a surface of the sky. The cosmic abyss is filled with images, characters, we can fantasize, we can enjoy, fill it with spiritual meaning. But in doing so, we want to avoid the feeling that there is something else beyond the surface, something infinite, unknown, indefinite, secret.
No matter how hard we try, we will never know everything. And one of the meanings of life, for example, for scientists who study stars, is to learn something new, to learn new meanings. Not to know everything (it is impossible), but to advance in this understanding.
Actually, all this time I have been speaking in terms that are absolutely applicable to psychic reality. Both psychoanalysts and psychologists strive not only to treat people (psychoanalysts and psychotherapists to a greater extent), but also to recognize their mental universe, realizing that it is infinite. In principle, it is just as infinite, just as fundamentally not cognizable to the end, as is the macrocosm. The point of our psychological, psychoanalytic work, just like that of scientists who investigate the external world, is to move.
The point of psychoanalytic work, just like that of scientists who investigate the outside world, is to move
One of the meanings of a person’s life is the discovery of new meanings: if he does not discover new meanings, if he is not every minute set to meet with something unknown, in my opinion, he loses the meaning of life.
We are in constant, endless discovery of new meanings, new territories. All ufology, fantasies around aliens, this is a reflection of our unconscious, because in fact we project our own desires and aspirations, fears and anxieties, and experiences, everything, everything into external reality in the form of a million fantasies about aliens that should fly in and save us, they must take care of us, or, on the contrary, they may be some insidious creatures, villains who want to destroy us.
That is, the unconscious is a much more serious, deep and large-scale thing than what we see in everyday life, when we do a lot unconsciously: we automatically control the car, leafing through the book without hesitation. Are the unconscious and the unconscious different things?
A. R .: There are some automatisms that have gone into the unconscious. How we learned to drive a car — we were aware of them, and now we drive it semi-automatically. But in critical cases, we suddenly become aware of some moments, that is, we are able to realize them. There are deeper automatisms that we are unable to recognize, such as how our body functions. But if we talk about the psychic unconscious, then here the fundamental point is the following. If we reduce all the unconscious to automatisms, as is often the case, then in fact we proceed from the fact that the inner world of a person is limited by rational consciousness, plus some automatisms, and the body can also be added here.
There comes a point when you really know that you can feel both love and hate for the same person.
Such a view of the unconscious reduces the psyche and the inner world of a person to a limited space. And if we look at our inner world in this way, then this makes our inner world mechanistic, predictable, controllable. It’s actually fake control, but it’s like we’re in control. And accordingly, there is no place for surprise or anything new. And most importantly, there is no place for travel. Because the main word in psychoanalysis, especially in French psychoanalysis, is travel.
We are on a journey into some world that we know a little because we have experience (each psychoanalyst goes through his own analysis before starting to work deeply and seriously with another person). And you also lived something in books, films or somewhere else — the whole humanitarian sphere is about this.
Why, then, is the journey into the depths of the psyche so frightening for many? Why is this abyss of the unconscious, the infinity that this journey may reveal to us, a source of fear, and not only interest and not only curiosity?
A. R .: Why are we afraid, for example, of the idea of going on a flight into space? It’s scary to even imagine. A more banal example: with a mask, in general, each of us is ready to swim, but if you sail too far from the coast, then such a dark depth begins there that we instinctively turn back to, in general, control the situation. There are corals, it’s beautiful there, you can watch the fish there, but as soon as you look into the depths, there are big fish there, no one knows who will swim up there, and your fantasies immediately fill these depths. You become uncomfortable. The ocean is the basis of our life, we cannot live without water, without the ocean, without the depths of the sea.
Freud discovered that very unconscious, that very inner world of a person, filled with completely different ambivalent feelings.
They give life to each of us, but in an obvious way they also frighten. Why is that? Because our psyche is ambivalent. This is the only term I use today. But this is a very important term. You can truly feel and live it only after a few years of analysis. There comes a moment when you accept the ambivalence of this world and your relationship to it, when you really know that you can feel both love and hate towards the same person.
And this, in general, does not destroy either the other or you, it can, on the contrary, create a creative space, a space of life. We still need to come to this point, because initially we are mortally afraid of this ambivalence: we prefer only to love a person, but we are afraid of the feelings of hatred associated with him, because then there is guilt, self-punishment, a lot of different deep feelings.
What is the genius of Freud? In the beginning, he worked with hysterical patients, listened to their stories and constructed the idea that there was some kind of sexual abuse on the part of adults. Everyone believes that this was the revolution carried out by Freud. But in fact it has nothing to do with psychoanalysis at all. This is pure psychotherapy: the idea of some kind of trauma that adults can inflict on a child or each other, and which then affects the psyche. There is an external influence, there is an external trauma that led to the symptoms. We need to process this injury, and everything will be fine.
There is no personality without sexuality. Sexuality Helps Personal Development
And Freud’s genius was precisely that he did not stop there, he continued to listen, continued to work. And then he discovered that very unconscious, that very inner world of a person, filled with completely different ambivalent feelings, desires, conflicts, fantasies, partial or repressed, mainly infantile, the earliest. He realized that it was not the injury at all. It is possible that most of the cases on which he relied were not true from a social point of view: there was no, say, violence from adults, these were the fantasies of a child who sincerely believed in them. In fact, Freud discovered internal unconscious conflicts.
That is, there was no external influence, it was an internal mental process?
A. R .: An internal mental process that was projected onto the surrounding adults. You cannot blame the child for this, because this is his psychic truth. It was here that Freud discovered that the trauma, it turns out, is not external, it is precisely the conflict. Various internal forces, all kinds of inclinations, develop within us. Just imagine…
So I once tried to feel what a small child feels when parents kiss. Why do they kiss on the lips, for example, but he can’t? Why can they sleep together, and I’m alone, and even in another room? This is impossible to explain. Why? There is tremendous frustration. We know from psychology that any human development goes through conflicts. And from psychoanalysis, we know that any development of a personality, including a person, goes not just through conflicts, but through sexually oriented conflicts. My favorite phrase, which I once formulated: «There is no personality without sexuality.» Sexuality helps personal development.
If you are really hooked by the work — this is the road to the unconscious
The child wants to go and get into bed with his parents, he wants to be with them. But he is forbidden, he is sent back, and this causes him anxiety and misunderstanding. How does he cope? He still gets into this room, but how? He gets there in his fantasy, and this gradually begins to calm him down. He gets in there, fantasizing about what is going on there. From here all these experiences are born, these surrealistic paintings of artists, infinitely far from biology and from the physiology of adult sexuality. This is the formation of mental space from sounds, ideas, sensations. But this calms the child, he feels that he actually begins to control the situation, gains access to the parent’s bedroom. And so it takes on a new meaning.
Are there other ways of gaining access to our unconscious besides psychoanalysis?
A. R .: Since the unconscious is everywhere, access is everywhere. Access to the unconscious is in every moment of our lives, because the unconscious is always with us. If we are more attentive and try to look beyond the surface of the sky, which I spoke about, then the unconscious will remind us of itself through books that touch us, at least a little, cause us feelings, not necessarily positive, different: pain, suffering , joy, pleasure… This is the meeting with some unconscious aspects: in pictures, in movies, in communication with each other. This is a special state. It’s just that a person suddenly opens up from some other side, and thus a new micro-universe opens up to me. It’s like this all the time.
Since we are talking about books and paintings, do you have any vivid examples of works in which the response of the unconscious is felt especially clearly?
A. R .: I will say one simple thing, and then one specific thing. The simple thing is that if you are really hooked by a work, this is the road to the unconscious, and if it excites your feelings, and not necessarily good feelings, this is, accordingly, something that can develop you. And the specific thing that I would like to share is extremely paradoxical. The best book I have read on psychoanalysis is a screenplay called Freud. Written by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Good combination.
A. R .: This is the same philosopher who criticized Freud all his life. Which built many theories on criticism of Freud. And so he wrote an absolutely fantastic film script, where the very spirit of psychoanalysis, the deep essence of psychoanalysis, is really felt. I have not read anything better than this «fake» biography of Freud, where it is important how Sartre fills it with meaning. This is an amazing thing, extremely simple, clear and conveying the spirit of the unconscious and psychoanalysis.
1 The interview was recorded for the Psychologies project «Status: in a relationship» on the radio «Culture» in October 2016.