What sort of reality pertains to the subjective psyche? The reality of the inner psyche is the same reality as that of the sign. Outside the material of signs, there is no psyche; there are physiological processes, processes in the nervous system, but no subjective psyche as a special existential quality fundamentally distinct from both the physiological processes occurring within the organism and the reality encompassing the organism from outside, to which the psyche reacts and which one way or another it reflects. By its very existential nature, the subjective psyche is to be localized somewhere between the organism and the outside world, on the borderline separating these two spheres of reality. It is here that an encounter between the organism and the outside world takes place, but the encounter is not a physical one: the organism and the outside world meet here in the sign. Psychic experience is the semiotic expression of the contact between the organism and the outside environment. That is why the inner psyche is not analyzable as a thing but can only be understood and interpreted as a sign.

• psyche
• logic
• nervous system
• existential
• experience
• expression
• environment
• situation
• perception
• self
• other
• conceptual self
• semiotics
• boundaries
• biogram
• logogram
• complexes
• translation
• transformation

The content and composition of the unofficial levels of behavioral ideology (in Freudian terms, the content and composition of the unconscious) are conditioned by historical time and class to the same degree as are its levels 'under censorship' and its systems of formulated ideology (morality, law, world outlook). For example, the homosexual inclinations of an ancient Hellene of the ruling class produced absolutely no conflicts in his behavioral ideology; they freely emerged into outward speech and even found formulated ideological expression (e.g., Plato's Symposium). \nAll those conflicts with which psychoanalysis deals are characteristic in the highest degree for the European petite bourgeoisie of modern times. Freud's 'censorship' very distinctly reflects the behavioral-ideological point of view of a petit bourgeois, and for that reason a somewhat comical effect is produced when Freudians transfer that point of view the psyche of an ancient Greek or a medieval peasant. The monstrous overestimation of Freudianism's part of the sexual factor is also exceedingly revealing against the background of the present disintegration of the bourgeois family. \nThe wider and deeper the breach between the official and unofficial conscious, the more difficult it becomes for motives of inner speech to turn into outward speech (oral or written or printed, in a circumscribed or broad social milieu) wherein they might acquire formulation, clarity, and rigor. Motives under these conditions begin to fail, to lose their verbal countenance, and little by little really do turn into a 'foreign body' in the psyche. Whole sets of organic manifestations come, in this way, to be excluded from the zone of verbalized behavior and may become asocial. Thereby the sphere of the 'animalian' in man enlarges. \nOf course, not every area of human behavior is subject to so complete a divorce from verbal ideological formulation. After all, neither is it true that every motive in contradiction with the official ideology must degenerate into indistinct inner speech and then die out - it might well engage in a struggle with that official ideology. If such a motive is founded on the economic being of the whole group, if it is not merely the motive of a déclassé loner, then it has a chance for a future and perhaps even a victorious future. There is no reason why such a motive should become asocial and lose contact with communication. Only, at first a motive of this sort will develop within a small social milieu and will depart into the underground - not the psychological underground of repressed complexes, but the salutary political underground. That is exactly how a revolutionary ideology in all spheres of culture comes about.

• biogram
• logogram
• behavior
• ideology
• unconscious
• censorship
• morality
• law
• conflict
• speech
• expression
• psyche
• integration
• struggle
• communication
• complexes
• evolution
• revolution
• culture
• ancient greece
• moral relativism
• relativity
• relationship
• social norms

This is Rank’s devastating Kierkegaardian conclusion: if neurosis is sin, and not disease, then the only thing which can “cure” it is a world-view, some kind of affirmative collective ideology in which the person can perform the living drama of his acceptance as a creature. Only in this way can the neurotic come out of his isolation to become part of such a larger and higher wholeness as religion has always represented. In anthropology we called these the myth-ritual complexes of traditional society. Does the neurotic lack something outside him to absorb his need for perfection? Does he eat himself up with obsessions? The myth-ritual complex is a social form for the channelling of obsessions. We might say that it places creative obsession within the reach of everyman, which is precisely the function of ritual. This function is what Freud saw when he talked about the obsessive quality of primitive religion and compared it to neurotic obsession. But he didn’t see how natural this was, how all social life is the obsessive ritualization of control in one way or another. It automatically engineers safety and banishes despair by keeping people focussed on the noses in front of their faces.

• rank
• kierkegaard
• neurosis
• sin
• disease
• ideology
• collective
• humanity
• isolation
• integration
• religion
• culture
• anthropology
• myth
• ritual
• rites
• society
• obsession
• creativity
• freud
• control
• magick
• belief
• authorization
• life
• complexes

Although consciousness is a product of the unconscious, it is a product of a very special sort.  All unconscious contents have, as complexes, a specific tendency, a striving to assert themselves.  Like living organisms, they devour other complexes and enrich themselves with their libido.  We can see in pathological cases, in fixed or compulsive ideas, manias, and states of possession, and again in every creative process where 'the work' absorbs and drains dry all extraneous contents, how an unconscious content attracts all others to itself, consumes them, subordinates and co-ordinates them, and forms with them a system of relationships dominated by itself.  We find the same process in normal life, too, when an idea - love, work, patriotism, or whatever else - comes to the top and asserts itself at the cost of others.  One-sidedness, fixation, exclusiveness, etc., are the consequences of this tendency of all complexes to make themselves the center.\r\n \r\nThe peculiarity of the ego complex, however, is twofold; unlike all other complexes it tends to aggregate as the center of consciousness and to group the other conscious contents about itself; and secondly, it is oriented towards wholeness far more than any other complex.

• complexes
• consciousness
• ego
• unconscious
• love
• life
• work
• ideas
• consequences
• unconscious content
• relationships
• other

Fundamental to analytical psychology is the theory of complexes, which recognizes the complex nature of the unconscious and defines complexes as 'living units of the unconscious psyche.'  It also recognizes the complex nature of the ego, which, as the center of consciousness, forms the central complex in the psychic system.\r\n\r\nThis conception of the ego, substantiated by the psychological and psychopathological findings, is one of the distinctive features of analytical psychology:\r\n \r\n>The ego complex is a content of consciousness as well as a condition of consciousness, for a psychic element is conscious to me so far as it is related to the ego complex.  But so far as the ego is only the center of my field of consciousness, it is not identical with the whole of my psyche, being merely one complex among other complexes.\r\n\r\n>Jung, Psychological Types

• consciousness
• ego
• jung
• unconscious content
• complexes
• psychology
• relationship
• identification
• many i"s
• nature
• unconscious
• theory
• psyche
• other