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Long before Freud, philosophers assumed that some part of our mental life is manifested in emotions, behavior and actions, but is inaccessible to consciousness. The unconscious remains a mystery today, with which everyone manages in their own way.
We are not masters in our own house: our “I” is partly subject to the forces of the unconscious. Our unconscious is not our enemy, even if it causes unpleasant symptoms. We fall into a trap when we do not hear his signals. By trying to decipher them, we can get to know ourselves better and get closer to our real selves.
Our distant ancestors attributed mental processes to the influence of higher forces. The ancient Greeks, falling into uncontrollable anger or panic, feeling passionate love or irrepressible desire, explained their condition as “obsession with the gods.”
Until about the XNUMXth century BC. people were simply incapable of being aware of themselves in the usual sense for us, believes the American psychologist, researcher in the history of consciousness, Julian Jaynes. They considered all their sudden inner impulses to be the result of divine intervention.
Such explanations (“God directed” or “the devil beguiled”) can be heard, by the way, to this day. The idea of some individual deity living in us, “daimon” (actually, “demon” comes from this Greek word), which, like an inner voice, induces to certain actions, is also present in the philosopher Socrates. However, the Socratic “daimon” is individual and inseparable from the personality. This was the first step towards a modern understanding of the unconscious.
Dark abysses
Gradually, the source of unconscious impulses began to be called the human soul.
“Events occur in our soul that we are not directly aware of,” said the ancient Roman physician Galen.1. Closer to our time, in the XNUMXth century, Cartesianism, the teaching of the French philosopher René Descartes, influenced ideas about the unconscious.
He identified the conscious and the psychic, so that the world was cut into two parts: on the one hand, the matter deprived of consciousness, our body, on the other, the spirit that lives in it.
Most of us like the notion that we could be extremely evil if we let ourselves go.
Descartes raised doubt in everything as a principle, and only one thing did not cause doubt in him: his own consciousness (“I think, therefore I am”). The next step in the XNUMXth century was made by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz.
For him, the unconscious appears as the lowest form of mental life, which lies beyond what we are aware of. He likens the zones of the conscious to “islands rising from the ocean of dark perceptions”2.
However, until the end of the XNUMXth century, it was widely believed that this form of mental life was related mainly to the mentally ill or hysterical, grimacing in hospitals like demoniacs. A healthy person in that era was not supposed to have any dark abysses.
“The prevailing public opinion continues to regard the concepts of “mental” and “conscious” as equivalent,” wrote the German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann in “Philosophy of the Unconscious”3.
After the publication of his work, the term “unconscious” became popular. Thus, the ground was prepared for the demon of Freud’s “unconscious” to fit into our stable Cartesian picture of the world.
Personality within a personality
In search of the causes of mental disorders, Freud turned to what is “repressed into the unconscious.” Of course, for him the “unconscious” did not consist only of the repressed.
However, he pays special attention to the repressed, considering the unconscious as a repository of impermissible desires, and not just any, but incestuous desires of the child. In us, impulses are triggered that our consciousness cannot bear, rejecting them or even not allowing them to reach us (which, in fact, is “repression” in the Freudian sense).
They hide from consciousness, but remain alive, continuing to murmur within us, and are looking for ways to come out into the light. Prolonged conflict between them and the conscious self, which builds numerous defenses against them, makes us sick.
Having heard our unconscious, we will become closer to ourselves and will be able to act in accordance with our nature.
Freud at first called the colony of these voluptuous impulses sent into exile “the system of the unconscious”, but when it became clear to him that other areas of the soul – “I” and “Super-I” – do not function only in the daylight of consciousness, he renamed this colony in “It”.
In this picture, the “system of the unconscious”, or “It”, creates an independent unity inside the psyche, which is filled with its own feelings, thoughts, desires and memories. “It” is like a secret personality within our own and differs from us in that this inner personality is more illogical, passionate, irresponsible, misanthropic, and we cannot find it even in the course of the most thorough searches.
Freud believed that unconscious states “can be described in terms of all those categories that we apply to conscious mental acts, that is, to ideas, aspirations, and the like. Yes, about some of these latent states we must say that they differ from conscious states precisely in the absence of consciousness.4.
Does not the medieval theory of the demonic look through the teachings of Freud?
The English philosopher Bertrand Russell believed that this was so, and joked: “The unconscious appears here as a kind of prisoner of the dungeon, which lives in a dungeon and only occasionally, with heavy groans and curses and bizarre atavistic lusts, catches the eye of a respectable public.
Most of us like the notion that we could be extremely evil if we let ourselves go. Therefore, the Freudian unconscious was a consolation for many quiet and nice people.5.
Non-Random Errors
No matter how much overly sober heads joke about Freud, the idea of the unconscious is deeply rooted in us, and we see its manifestations even where they do not exist. Often our reservations seem significant to others, they are looking for a hidden meaning. Meanwhile, not all linguistic oversights turn out to be “Freudian slips of the tongue.”
Our language can be led by the sound proximity of words, especially if we are tired. However, Freudian optics encourages us to perceive any contingency as due to “repressed” content. And sometimes tactless psychotherapists or relatives prone to psychological violence inspire us that they see through us.
In the 1990s, several American psychotherapists, convinced that the neurotic symptoms of their patients were associated with childhood sexual trauma, managed to create false memories of incest in them. These false memories were so clear that the patients even brought their fathers to justice.
What does cognitive science know about the unconscious?
Not only motives and motives remain outside our consciousness, but also a variety of information that affects our behavior and the interpretation of even the information that we are aware of. “For example, we can ignore or forget some advertisement, but when we see the advertised product in the store, we are more likely to buy it,” explains cognitive psychologist Maria Falikman. “Psychologists use “sub-threshold presentation” procedures in experiments, when an object is illuminated with a flash or shown for thousandths of a second so that a person cannot perceive it. But it affects the speed or accuracy of identifying the next object, and sometimes its interpretation: for example, even if we did not have time to consciously read the word “bow”, then we will perceive the next word “braid” as a hairstyle, and if we were presented with the word “ meadow”, we will perceive the same word “scythe” as a tool.
We may not be aware of the patterns we use, or our own actions, the execution of which is well mastered, automated. How do you fold your fingers when you turn the page? Difficult to answer? But that doesn’t stop you from reading a book or magazine. If everything goes according to plan, we do not need consciousness to perform automatic actions.
Maria Falikman – Doctor of Psychology, Senior Researcher, Lomonosov Moscow State University M.V. Lomonosov, Leading Researcher, Laboratory for Cognitive Research, National Research University Higher School of Economics.
collective other
Subsequent generations criticized Freud for the fact that for him the unconscious is inextricably linked with sexual desires. Carl Gustav Jung, a student of Freud, could not accept such a limitation. The Jungian unconscious includes the memory of all mankind and even the genetic memory of prehistoric times.
The collective unconscious can send us signals through the ages and regardless of cultural differences. For example, the “field behavior” of autistics – their rocking back and forth – Jungians associate with the rites of antiquity and the rituals of modern Africa.
Psychoanalyst Jean Lacan also argued that the unconscious is the voice of the “other”, but he significantly narrowed the circle of these others. We are the product of what our first “others”—parents, brothers, and sisters—said.
It is their thoughts and desires that live in us, influence, in addition to our will, our decisions in love and the professional sphere. Our unconscious is a product of our personal history, but it does not make us hostages of the past, it is a window to the future.
The unconscious is a “summary” of all our thoughts, conclusions we have made about ourselves, about the world, about other people.
Recent research in the field of neuroscience shows that the unconscious is the “summary” of all our thoughts, the conclusions we have made about ourselves, about the world, about other people. Such a “summary” helps us better learn the lessons of the past and face tomorrow with the right decisions.
Deciphering the messages of the unconscious is not just an intellectual game. It is work that yields practical results, whether we use psychoanalysis or another method. After all, if we manage to establish contact with the unconscious, we will not only better understand ourselves, but also get rid of the symptoms and behavioral patterns that do not suit us.
Trying to understand the hidden part of yourself is not a narcissistic exercise, the point of which is to feed self-esteem by discovering hidden possibilities in yourself. It is primarily a way to move to action. Ultimately, understanding your unconscious representations serves exactly this purpose: to begin to act in accordance with your own deepest nature.
1 K. Galen, Works, vol. 1 (News, 2014).
2 G.-V. Leibniz, Works in four volumes, vol. 1 (Thought, 1982).
3 E. von Hartmann “The Essence of the World Process or the Philosophy of the Unconscious” (Krasand, 2010).
4 Z. Freud “Psychology of the Unconscious” (Peter, 2010).
5 B. Russell “The Art of Thinking” (Idea-Press, 1999).