/tag/unconscious

76 quotes tagged 'unconscious'

Author: Erich Neumann
Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)

The picture we have drawn of our age is not intended as an indictment, much less as a glorification of the 'good old days'; for the phenomena we see around us are symptoms of an upheaval which, taken by and large, is necessary.  The collapse of the old civilization, and its reconstruction on a lower level to begin with, will justify themselves because the new basis will have been immensely broadened.  The civilization that is about to be born will be a human civilization in a far higher sense than any has ever been before, as it will have overcome important social, national, and racial limitations.  These are not fantastic pipe dreams, but hard facts, and their birth pangs will bring infinite suffering upon infinite numbers of men.  Spiritually, politically, and economically our world is an indivisible whole.  By this standard, the Napoleonic wars were minor coups d'état and the world view of that age, in which anything outside Europe had hardly begun to appear, is almost inconceivable to us in its narrowness.



The collapse of the archetypal canon in our culture, which has produced such an extraordinary activation of the collective unconscious - or is perhaps its symptom, manifesting itself in mass movements that have a profound effect upon our personal destinies - is, however, only a passing phenomenon.  Already, at a time when the internecine wars of the old canon are still being waged, we can discern, in single individuals, where the synthetic possibilities of the future lie, and almost how it will look.  The turning of the mind from the conscious to the unconscious, the responsible rapprochement of human consciousness with the powers of the collective psyche, that is the task of the future. No outward tinkerings with the world and no social ameliorations can give the quietus to the daemon, to the gods and devils of the human soul, or prevent them from tearing down again and again what consciousness has built. Unless they are assigned their place in consciousness and culture they will never leave mankind in peace. But the preparation for this rapprochement lies, as always, with the hero, the individual; he and his transformation are the great human prototypes; he is the testing ground of the collective, just as consciousness is the testing ground of the unconscious.


The tendency of unconscious contents to swamp consciousness corresponds to the danger of being 'possessed'; it is one of the greatest 'perils of the soul' even today. A man whose consciousness is possessed by a particular content has an enormous dynamism in him, namely that of the unconscious content; but this counteracts the centroversion tendency of the ego to work for the whole rather than for the individual content.


Humanity as a whole and the single individual have the same task, namely, to realize themselves as a unity.  Both are cast forth into a reality, one half of which confronts them as nature and external world, while the other half approaches them as psyche and the unconscious, spirit and daemonic power.  Both must experience themselves as the center of this total reality.


The identification of the ego with consciousness robs it of contact with the unconscious and thus of psychic wholeness.  Consciousness can now claim to represent unity, but this unity is only the relative unity of the conscious mind and not that of the personality.  Psychic wholeness is lost and is replaced by the dualistic principle of opposites which governs all conscious and unconscious constellations.


The development of the persona is the outcome of a process of adaptation that suppresses all individually significant features and potentialities, disguising and repressing them in favor of collective factors, or  those deemed desirable by the collective.  Here again, wholeness is exchanged for a workable and successful sham personality.  The 'inner voice' is stifled by the growth of a superego, of conscience, the representative of collective values.  The voice, the individual experience of the transpersonal, which is particularly strong in childhood, is renounced in favor of conscience.  When paradise is abandoned, the voice of God that spoke in the Garden is abandoned too, and the values of the collective, of the father, of law and conscience, of the current morality, etc., must be accepted as the supreme values in order to make social adaptation possible.\n\n 'Whereas the natural disposition of every individual inclines him to be physically and psychically bisexual, the differential development of our culture forces him to thrust the contrasexual element into the unconscious.  As a result, only those elements which accord with the outward characteristics of sex and which conform to the collective valuation are recognized by the conscious mind.  Thus 'feminine' or 'soulful' characteristics are considered undesirable in a boy, at least in our culture. Such a one-sided accentuation of one's specific sexuality ends by constellating the contrasexual element in the unconscious, in the form of the anima in men and the animus in women, which, as part souls, remain unconscious and dominate the conscious-unconscious relationship.  This process has the support of the collective, and sexual differentiation, precisely because the repression of the contrasexual element is often difficult, is at first accompanied by typical forms of animosity towards the opposite sex.  This development, too, follows the general principle of differentiation which presupposes the sacrifice of wholeness, here represented by the figure of the hermaphrodite.


An important goal of childhood development and education is the utilization of the individual in the sense of making him a useful member of the community.  This usefulness, achieved through differentiation of the separate components and functions of the personality, is necessarily bought at the cost of wholeness.  The need to renounce the unconscious wholeness of the personality is one of the most formidable developmental difficulties for the child, and particularly for the introverted child.


The line runs, as we saw, from the archetype as an effective transpersonal figure to the idea, and then to the 'concept' which one 'forms.'  A good example of this is the concept of God, which now derives wholly from the sphere of consciousness - or purports to derive from it, as the ego is deluded enough to pretend.  There is no longer anything transpersonal, but only personal; there are no more archetypes, but only concepts; no more symbols, only signs.\n\n 'This splitting off of the unconscious leads on the one hand to an ego life emptied of meaning, and on the other hand to an activation of the deeper-lying layers which, now grown destructive, devastate the autocratic world of the ego with transpersonal invasions, collective epidemics, and mass psychoses.  For an upsetting of the compensatory relationship between conscious and unconscious is not a phenomenon to be taken lightly.  Even when it is not so acute as to bring on a psychic sickness, the loss of instinct and the overaccentuation of the ego have consequences which, multiplied a millionfold, constellate the crisis of civilization.


Compensation is the first requisite for a productive relationship between the ego and the unconscious.  This means that the princess, the soul, is lost to the ego just as much in the patriarchal as in the matriarchal form of castration.\r\n \r\nBut, as we have made clear in Part I of this book, behind both forms there looms the original uroboric castration, where the tendencies to differentiation cancel out.  To put it in psychological language: just as mania and melancholia are merely two forms of madness, of the devouring uroboric state which destroys all ego consciousness, so regression to the unconscious, i.e., being devoured by the Great Mother, and the flight to 'nothing but' consciousness, i.e., being devoured by the spiritual father, are two forms in which any truly compensated consciousness, and the striving for wholeness, are lost.  Deflation as well as inflation destroys the efficacy of consciousness, and both of them are defeats for the ego.\r\n \r\nSpiritual inflation, a perfect example of which is the frenziedness of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, is a typical Western development carried to extremes.  Behind the overaccentuation of consciousness, ego, and reason - sensible enough in themselves as the guiding aims of psychic development - there stands the overwhelming might of 'heaven' as the danger which goes beyond the heroic struggle with the earthly side of the dragon and culminates in a spirituality that has lost touch with reality and the instincts.


Characteristic of the process of differentiation in childhood is the loss and renunciation of all the elements of perfection and wholeness, which are inherent in the psychology of the child so far as this is determined by the pleroma, the uroboros.  The very things which the child has in common with the man of genius, the creative artist, and the primitive, and which constitute the magic and charm of his existence, must be sacrificed.  The aim of all education, and not in our culture alone, is the expel the child from the paradise of his native genius and, through differentiation and the renunciation of wholeness, to constrain the Old Adam in the paths of collective usefulness.\n\n '...The drying up of imagination and of creative ability, which the child naturally possesses in high degree, is one of the typical symptoms of impoverishment that growing up entails.  A steady loss of the vitality of feeling and of spontaneous reactions in the interests of 'sensibleness' and 'good behavior' is the operative factor in the conduct now demanded of the child in relation to the collective.  Increase in efficiency at the cost of depth and intensity is the hallmark of this process.\n\n 'On to the ontogenetic plane there now ensue all the developments which we have described as indispensable for ego formation and the separation of the conscious and unconscious systems.  The child's primarily transpersonal and mythological apperception of the world becomes limited owing to secondary personalization, and is finally abolished altogether.  This personalization is necessary for the growth of personality now beginning and is effected with the help of ties to the personal environment upon which the archetypes are at first projected.  As the personal ties grow stronger, the archetype is gradually replaced by the imago, in which personal and transpersonal characteristics are visibly blended and active.


Evil, no matter by what cultural canon it be judged, is a necessary constituent of individuality as its egoism, its readiness to defend itself or to attack, and lastly, as its capacity to mark itself off from the collective and to maintain its 'otherness' in face of the leveling demands of the community.  The shadow roots the personality in the subsoil of the unconscious, and this shadowy link with the archetype of the antagonist, i.e., the devil, is in the deepest sense part of the creative abyss of every living personality.  That is why in myths the shadow often appears as a twin, for he is not just the 'hostile brother,' but the companion and friend, and it is sometimes difficult to tell whether this twin is the shadow or the self, the deathless 'other.


One of the most important attainments of consciousness is its ability to dispose at will of the libido supplied to its system, and to use it more or less independently of the source from which it came.  Just as the animation occasioned in the reader by a 'stimulating' book can be applied to a poem, a walk, a bridge party, or a flirtation, without there necessarily being any connection between the book and the ego's reaction, so the ego can apply as it pleases a portion of the libido accruing to it from the conscious realization of an unconscious content.  This relative freedom of the ego, no matter how much it is abused, is one of its most precious accomplishments.


This progressive assimilation of unconscious contents gradually builds up the personality, thus creating an enlarged psychic system which forms the basis of man's inner spiritual history as this makes itself increasingly independent of the collective history going on all around him.  This process, initiated in the first instance by philosophy, has today reached what is chronologically its latest stage in psychology, still of course only in its infancy.  Hand in hand with this there goes a 'psychization' of the world.  Gods, demons, heaven and hell are, as psychic forces, withdrawn from the objective world and incorporated in the human sphere, which thereupon undergoes a very considerable expansion.  When we give the name of 'sexuality' to what was once experienced as a chthonic divinity, or speaking of 'hallucination' instead of revelation, and when the gods of heaven and the underworld are recognized as dominants of man's unconscious, it means that an immense tract of external world has dropped into the human psyche.  Introjection and psychization are on the other side of the process by which a world of physical objects becomes visible, and this world can no longer be modified by projections to the degree that it could before.


Pure existence in the unconscious, which primitive man shares with the animal, is indeed nonhuman and prehuman.  The fact that the dawn of consciousness and the creation of the world are parallel processes which throw up the same symbolism indicates that the world actually 'exists' only to the degree that it is cognized by an ego.  A differentiated world is the reflection of a self-differentiating consciousness.  The multiple archetypes and symbol groups split off from a primordial archetype are identical with the ego's greater range of experience, knowledge, and insight.  Under the total impact of experience in the dawn period no particularized forms could be recognized, for the tremendous force of it extinguished the ego in a sort of numinous convulsion.  But a more informed human consciousness can experience, in the multiplicity of religions and philosophies, theologies and psychologies, the innumerable facets and meanings of the numinous, now anatomized into image and symbol, attribute and revelation.  That is to say, although the primal unity can only be experienced fragmentarily, it has at least come within range of conscious experience, whereas for the undeveloped ego it was utterly overwhelming.


The more complex a content is, the less it can be grasped and measured by consciousness, whose structure is so one-sided that it can attain to clarity only over a limited area.  In this respect consciousness is built analogously to the eye.  There is one spot where vision is sharpest, and larger areas can be perceived clearly only by continuous eye-movements.  In the same way, consciousness can only keep a small segment sharply in focus; consequently it has to break up a large content into partial aspects, experiencing them piecemeal, one after he other, and then learn to get a synoptic view of the whole terrain by comparison and abstraction.\n\n 'An advanced consciousness will therefore split the bivalent content into a dialectic of contrary qualities.  Before being so split, the content is not merely good and bad at once; it is beyond good and evil, attracting and repelling, and therefore irritating to consciousness.  But if there is a division into good and evil, consciousness can then take up an attitude.\n\n 'Rationalization, abstraction, and de-emotionalization are all expressions of the 'devouring' tendency of ego consciousness to assimilate the symbols piecemeal.  As the symbol is broken down into conscious contents, it loses its compulsive effect, its compelling significance, and becomes poorer in libido.  Thus the 'gods of Greece' are no longer for us, as they were for the Greeks, living forces and symbols of the unconscious requiring a ritualistic approach; they have been broken down into cultural contents, conscious principles, historical data, religious associations, and so on.  They exist as contents of consciousness and no longer - or only in special cases - as symbols of the unconscious.


The uroboric tendency of the unconscious to reabsorb all its products by destroying them so as to give them back in new, changed form is repeated on the higher plane of ego consciousness.  Here, too, the analytical process precedes the synthesis, and differentiation is the prime requisite for a later integration.\n\n 'In this sense all knowledge rests on an aggressive act of incorporation.  The psychic system, and to an even greater extent consciousness itself, is an organ for breaking up, digesting, and then rebuilding the objects of the world and the unconscious, in exactly the same way as our bodily digestive system decomposes matter physiochemically and uses it for the creation of new structures.


At first the ego is overpowered by the content newly emerging into consciousness - namely, the archetype of the antagonist - and goes under.  Only gradually, and to the degree that the ego recognizes this destructive tendency as being not just a hostile content of the unconscious, but as part of itself, does consciousness begin to incorporate it, to digest and assimilate it, in other words, to make it conscious.  The destruction is now separable from its old object, the ego, and has become and ego function.  The ego can now use at least a portion of this tendency in its own interests.  In fact, what has happened is that the ego, as we have said, 'turns the tables' upon the unconscious.


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.


Pain and discomfort are among the earliest factors that build consciousness.  They are 'alarm-signals' sent out by centroversion to indicate that the unconscious equilibrium is disturbed.  These signals were originally defense measures developed by the organism, though the manner of their development is as mysterious as that of all other organs and systems.  The function of ego consciousness, however, is not merely to perceive, but to assimilate these alarm signals, for which purpose the ego, even when it suffers, has to hold aloof from them if it is to react appropriately.  The ego, keeping its detachment as the center of the registering consciousness, is a differentiated organ exercising its controlling function in the interests of the whole, but is not identical with it.


The instincts of the collective unconscious form the substrate of this assimilative system.  They are repositories of ancestral experience, of all the experience which man, as a species, has had of the world.  Their 'field' is Nature, the external world of objects, including the human collective and man himself as an assimilative-reactive, psychophysical unit.  That is to say, there is in the collective psyche of man, as in all animals, but modified according to species, a layer built up of man's specifically human, instinctive reactions to his natural environment.  A further layer contains group instincts, namely experiences of the specifically human environment, of the collective, race, tribe, group, etc.  This layer covers herd instincts, specific group reactions which distinguish a particular race or people from others, and all differentiated relationships to the nonego.  A final layer is formed by instinctive reactions to the psychophysical organism and its modifications.  For example hunger, hormone constellations, etc., are answered by instinctive reactions.  All these layers intercommunicate.  Their common factor is that the reactions are purely instinctive, the psychophysical unit reacting as a whole by means of meaningful acts which are not the outcome of individual experience, but of ancestral experience, and which are performed without the participation of consciousness.


The unconscious state is the primary and natural one, and the conscious state the product of an effort that uses up libido.  There is in the psyche a force of inertia, a kind of psychic gravitation which tends to fall back into the original unconscious condition.


Common descent from the same tribe, the sharing of a common life, and, above all, common experiences create emotional bonds even today, as we well know.  Social, religious, aesthetic, and other collective experiences of whatever coloring - from the tribal head-hunt to the modern mass meeting - activate the unconscious emotional foundations of the group psyche.  The individual has not yet broken loose from the emotional undercurrent, and any excitation of one part of the group can affect the whole, as a fever seizes upon all parts of the organism.  The emotional fusion then sweeps away the still feebly developed differences of conscious structure in the individuals concerned and continually restores the original group unity.


We must not regard our modern, waking consciousness as the obvious point of departure and then, on the analogy of hypnosis, take the participation mystique of the group psyche to be a limitation of this waking state.  The reverse is true; the conscious state is the late and uncommon phenomenon, and its complete attainment is far more of a rarity than modern man so flatteringly pretends, while the unconscious state is the original, basic, psychic situation that is everywhere the rule.


We know that trees, idols, holy places, and human beings are recognizable objects of the external world, into which early man projected his inner psychic contents.  By recognizing them, we withdraw such 'primitive projections,' we diagnose them as autosuggestions or something of the sort, and thus the fusion effected by participation between man and the objects of the external world is nullified.  But when it comes to experiencing God's intervention in world history, or the sanctity of the Fatherland symbolized by flag or king, or the devilish intentions of nations beyond the latest Iron Curtain, or even the bad character of those we dislike or the good character of those we love; when it comes to experiencing these as a projection, then our psychological powers of discernment incontinently fail us, not to mention the fact that we cannot lay our finger on the most blatant examples of all for the simple reason they they are entirely unconscious and belong to the preconceptions which we accept without question.


This indivisibility of group, individual, and external world is found wherever psychic contents - contents, that is to say, which our present-day consciousness recognizes as psychic and which it therefore relegates to the world within us - are projected upon the world at large and are experienced as though they were outside ourselves.  Contents of this kind are recognized readily enough as projections when they derive from earlier epochs, from alien spheres of culture, or from other people, but it becomes increasingly difficult for us to do so the more closely they approximate to the unconscious conditions of our own time, our own culture, and our own personality.


Myth figures are archetypal projections of the collective unconscious; in other words, humanity is putting something outside itself in its myths, something of whose meaning it is not conscious.\n\n Just as unconscious contents like dreams and fantasies tell us something about the psychic situation of the dreamer, so myths throw light on the human stage from which they originate and typify man's unconscious situation at that stage.


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


As though a Copernican revolution has taken place within the psyche, consciousness faces inward and becomes aware of the self, about which the ego revolves in a perpetual paradox of identity and nonidentity.  The psychological process of assimilating the unconscious into our present-day consciousness begins at this point, and the consequent shifting of the center of gravity from the ego to the self signalizes the latest stage in the evolution of human consciousness.


In relation to the ego, the mother image has both a productive and a destructive aspect, but over and above that, it preserves a certain immutability and eternality.  Although it is two-faced and can assume many shapes, for the ego and consciousness it always remains the world of the origin, the world of the unconscious.  In general, therefore, the mother represents the instinctual side of life, which, compared with the changing positions of the ego and consciousness, proves to be constant and relatively unalterable, whether it be good or bad, helpful and productive, or hurtful and terrible.


The spiritual collective as we find it in all initiations and all secret societies, sects, mysteries, and religions is essentially masculine and, despite its communal character, essentially individual in the sense that each man is initiated as an individual and undergoes a unique experience that stamps his individuality.  This individual accent and the elect character of the group stand in marked contrast to the matriarchal group, where the archetype of the Great Mother and the corresponding stage of consciousness are dominant.  The opposed group of male societies and secret organizations is dominated by the archetype of the hero and by the dragon-fight mythology, which represents the next stage of conscious development.  The male collective is the source of all the taboos, laws, and institutions that are destined to break the dominance of the uroboros and Great Mother.  Heaven, the father, and the spirit go hand in hand with masculinity and represent the victory of the patriarchate over the matriarchate.  This is not to say that the matriarchate knows no law; but the law by which it is informed is the law of instinct, of unconscious, natural functioning, and this law subserves the propagation, preservation, and evolution of the species rather than the development of the single individual.


The masculine trend, however, is towards greater co-ordination of spirit, ego, consciousness, and will.  Because man discovers his true self in consciousness, and is a stranger to himself in the unconscious, which he must inevitably experience as feminine, the development of masculine culture means development of consciousness.


Ego formation can only proceed by way of distinction from the non-ego and consciousness only emerge where it detaches itself from what is unconscious; and the individual only arrives at individuation when he marks himself off from the anonymous collective.


In the great religions, the primal deed, the separation of the World Parents, is theologized.  An attempt is made to rationalize and moralize the undeniable sense of deficiency that attaches to the emancipated ego.  Interpreted as sin, apostasy, rebellion, disobedience, this emancipation is in reality the fundamental liberating act of man which releases him from the yoke of the unconscious and establishes him as an ego, a conscious individual.  But because this act, like every act and every liberation, entails sacrifice and suffering, the decision to take such a step is all the more momentous.


Opposition between ego and body is, as we have said, an original condition.  Containment in the uroboros and its supremacy over the ego mean, on the bodily level, that ego and consciousness are at the outset continually at the mercy of the instincts, impulses, sensations, and reactions deriving from the world of the body.  To begin with, this ego, existing first as a point and then as an island, knows nothing of itself and consequently nothing of its difference.  As it grows stronger, it detaches itself more and more from the world of the body.  This leads finally, as we know, to a state of systematized ego consciousness where the entire bodily realm is to a large extent unconscious, and the conscious system is split off from the body as the representative of unconscious processes.  Through the split is not in effect so drastic as this, the illusion of it is so powerful and so real for the ego that the body region and the unconscious can only be rediscovered with a great effort.  In yoga, for instance, a strenuous attempt is made to reconnect the conscious mind with the unconscious bodily processes.


In the myth of Narcissus, the ego, seeking to break the power of the unconscious through self-reflection, succumbs to a catastrophic self-love.  His suicidal death by drowning symbolizes the dissolution of ego consciousness, and the same thing is repeated in modern times in young suicides like Weininger and Seidel.  Seidel's book Bewusstsein als Verhängnis and the work of the misogynist Weininger bear the clear imprint of having been written by lovers of the Great Mother.  They are fatally fascinated by her, and even in the futile resistance they put up they are fulfilling their archetypal fate.


The youth struggling for self-consciousness now begins, in so far as he is an individual, to have a personal fate, and for him the Great Mother becomes the deadly and unfaithful mother.  She selects one young man after another to love and destroy.  In this way she becomes 'the harlot.'  The sacred prostitute - which is what the Great Mother really is, as the vessel of fertility - takes on the negative character of the fickle jade and destroyer.  With this, the great revaluation of the feminine begins its conversion into the negative, thereafter carried to extremes in the patriarchal religions of the West.  The growth of self-consciouness and the strengthening of masculinity thrust the image of the Great Mother into the background; the patriarchal society splits it up, and while only the picture of the good Mother is retained in consciousness, her terrible aspect is relegated to the unconscious*.\n\n *Author's footnote: The splitting of the Great Mother into a conscious 'good' mother and unconscious 'evil' one is a basic phenomenon in the psychology of neurosis.  The situation then is that consciously the neurotic has a 'good relation' to the mother, but in the gingerbread house of this love there is hidden the witch, who gobbles up little children and grants them, as a reward, a passive, irresponsible existence without an ego.  Analysis then uncovers the companion picture of the Terrible Mother, an awe-inspiring figure who with threats and intimidations puts a ban on sexuality.  The results are masturbation, real or symbolic impotence, self-castration, suicide, etc.  It makes no difference whether the picture of the Terrible Mother remains unconscious or is projected; in either case the very idea of coitus, of any connection with the female, will activate the fear of castration.'


Jung therefore defines the transpersonal - or the archetypes and instincts of the collective unconscious - as 'the deposit of ancestral experience.


Even today we can see from primitives that the law of gravity, the inertia of the psyche, the desire to remain unconscious, is a fundamental human trait.  Yet even this is a false formulation, since it starts from consciousness as though that were the natural and self-evident thing.  But fixation in unconsciousness, the downward drag of its specific gravity, cannot be called a desire to remain unconscious; on the contrary, that is the natural thing.  There is, as a counteracting force, the desire to become conscious, a veritable instinct impelling man in this direction.  One has no need to desire to remain unconscious; one is primarily unconscious and can at most conquer the original situation in which man drowses in the world, drowses in the unconscious, contained in the infinite like a fish in the environing sea.  The ascent toward consciousness is the 'unnatural' thing in nature; it is specific of the species Man, who on that account has justly styled himself Homo sapiens.  The struggle between the specifically human and the universally natural constitutes the history of man's conscious development.


Creative evolution of ego consciousness means that, through a continuous process stretching over thousands of years, the conscious system has absorbed more and more unconscious contents and progressively extended its frontiers.


Perseus defeats the unconscious (symbolized by the Gorgon) through the typical act of conscious realization.  He would not be strong enough to gaze directly upon the petrifying face of the uroboros, so he raises its image to consciousness and kills it 'by reflection.


The attention given to the unconscious has the effect of incubation, a brooding over the slow fire needed in the initial stages of the work; hence the frequent use of the terms decoctio, digestio, putrefactio, solutio. It is really as if attention warmed the unconscious and activated it, thereby breaking down the barriers that separate it from consciousness.


These paradoxes culminate in an allegedly ancient 'monument,' an epitaph said to have been found in Bologna, known as the Aelia-Laelia-Crispis Inscription. It was appropriated by the alchemists, who claimed in the words of Michael Maier, that 'it was set up by an artificer of old to the honour of God and in praise of the chymic art.' I will first give the text of this highly remarkable inscription: \n*Aelia Laelia Crispis*, neither man nor woman, nor mongrel, nor maid, nor boy, nor crone, nor chaste, nor whore, nor virtuous, but all.\nCarried away neither by hunger, nor by sword, nor by poison, but by all. - Neither in heaven, nor in earth, nor in water, but everwhere is her resting place.\n*Lucius Agatho Priscius*, neither husband, nor lover, nor kinsman, neither mourning, nor rejoicing, nor weeping, (raised up) neither mound, nor pyramid, nor tomb, but all.\nHe knows and knows not (what) he raised up to whom.\nThis is a tomb that has no body in it.\nThis is a body that has no tomb round it.\nBut body and tomb are the same. \n\nLet it be said at once: this epitaph is sheer nonsense, a joke, but one that for centuries brilliantly fulfilled its function as a flypaper for every conceivable projection that buzzed in the human mind. It gave rise to a 'cause célèbre,' a regular psychological 'affair' that lasted for the greater part of two centuries and produced a spate of commentaries, finally coming to an inglorious end as one of the spurious texts of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, and thereafter passing into oblivion. The reason why I am digging up this curiosity again in the twentieth century is that it serves as a paradigm for that peculiar attitude of mind which made it possible for the men of the Middle Ages to write hundreds of treatises about something that did not exist and was therefore completely unknowable. The interesting thing is not this futile stalking-horse but the projections it aroused. There is revealed in them an extraordinary propensity to come out with the wildest fantasies and speculation - a psychic condition which is met with today, in a correspondingly erudite milieu, only as an isolated pathological phenomenon. In such cases one always finds that the unconscious is under some kind of pressure and is charged with highly affective contents. \n... \nHowever nonsensical and insipid the Aelia-Laelia epitaph may look, it becomes significant when we regard it as a question which no less than two centuries have asked themselves: What is it that you do not understand and can only be expressed in unfathomable paradoxes?


Author: Julius Evola
Publisher: Inner Traditions International (2003)

In general, drugs can be divided into four categories: stimulants, depressants, hallucinogens, and narcotics. The first two categories do not concern us; for example, the use of tobacco and alcohol is irrelevant unless it becomes a vice, that is, if it leads to addiction. \nThe third category includes drugs that bring on states in which one experiences various visions and seemingly other worlds of the senses and spirit. On account of these effects, they have also been called 'psychedelics,' under the assumption that the visions project and reveal the hidden contents of the depths of one's own psyche, but are not recognized as such. As a result, physicians have even tried to use drugs like mescaline for a psychic exploration analogous to psychoanalysis. However, when all is reduced to the projection of a psychic substratum, not even experiences of this kind can interest the differentiated man. Leaving aside the perilous contents of the sensations and their artificial paradise, these illusory phantasmagoria do not take one beyond, even if one cannot exclude the possibility that what is acting may not be merely the contents of one's own subconscious, but dark influences that, finding the door open, manifest themselves in these visions. We might even say that those influences, and not the simple substratum repressed by the individual psyche, are responsible for certain impulses that can burst out in these states, even driving some compulsively to commit criminal acts. \nAn effective use of these drugs would presuppose a preliminary 'catharsis,' that is, the proper neutralization of the individual unconscious substratum that is activated; then the images and senses could refer to a spiritual reality of a higher order, rather than being reduced to a subjective, visionary orgy. One should emphasize that the instances of this higher use of drugs were preceded not only by periods of preparation and purification of the subject, but also that the process was properly guided through the contemplation of certain symbols. Sometimes 'consecrations' were also prescribed for protective purposes. There are accounts of certain indigenous communities in Central and South America whose members, only while under the influence of peyote, hear the sculpted figures on ancient temple ruins 'speak,' revealing their meaning in terms of spiritual enlightenment. The importance of the individual's attitude clearly appears from the completely different effects of mescaline on two contemporary writers who have experimented with drugs, Aldous Huxley and R. H. Zaehner. And it is a fact that in the case of hallucinogens like opium and, in part, hashish, this active assumption of the experience that is essential from our point of view is generally excluded. \nThere remains the category of narcotics and of substances that are also used for total anesthesia, whose normal effect is the complete suspension of consciousness. This corresponds to a detachment that would exclude all intermediate 'psychedelic' forms and the insidious, ecstatic, and sensual contents, leaving a void. However, if consciousness were maintained, with the pure I at the center, it could facilitate the opening to a higher reality. But the advantages would be outweighed by the extreme difficulty of any training capable of maintaining detached consciousness. \nIn general, one must keep in mind that drug use even for a spiritual end, that is, to catch glimpses of transcendence, has its price. How drugs produce certain psychic effects has not yet been determined by modern science. It is said that some, like LSD, destroy certain brain cells. One point is certain: Habitual use of drugs brings a certain psychic disorganization; one should substitute for them the power of attaining analogous states through one's own means. Therefore, when one has chosen a path based on the maximum unification of all one's psychic faculties, these drawbacks must be kept firmly in mind.


It is no wonder that today's man feels a need for physical reintegration, relaxation of nerves, and invigoration of the body away from the environment of large, modern cities. For this reason, natural living, the culture of the body, and even certain types of individual sport may be useful. Things appear otherwise, however, when people start to claim that some kind of spiritual factor is involved; that is, when it is thought that natural surroundings and physical strength make a man feel closer to himself than in the experiences and tensions of civilized life, and above all when it is supposed that physical sensations of well- being and comfort have any profound significance, or anything to do with human integrity considered from a higher point of view. \nApart from that position, which leads to the 'animal ideal' and modern naturalism, I deplore the general confusion of a 'return to origins' with a return to Mother Earth and even to Nature. Although it has often been misapplied, that theological doctrine that holds that a purely natural state for man has never existed is still legitimate; at the beginning he was placed in a supranatural state from which he has now fallen. In fact, for the true type of man, it can never be a question of those origins and that 'mother' wherein the individual cannot differentiate himself from his fellow men, or even from the animals. Every return to nature is a regressive phenomenon, including any protest in the name of instinctual rights, the unconscious, the flesh, life uninhibited by the intellect, and so forth. The man who becomes 'natural' in this way has in reality become denatured.


I have never yet met a saint or sage who did not have some human frailties. For so long as you manifest yourself in human or animal form, you must eat at the expense of other life and accept the limitations of your particular organism, which fire will still burn and wherein danger will still secrete adrenalin. The morality that goes with this understanding is, above all, the frank recognition of your dependence upon enemies, underlings, out-groups, and, indeed, upon all other forms of life whatsoever. Involved as you may be in the conflicts and competitive games of practical life, you will never again be able to indulge in the illusion that the 'offensive other' is all in the wrong, and could or should be wiped out. This will give you the priceless ability of being able to contain conflicts so that they do not get out-of-hand, of being willing to compromise and adapt, of playing, yes, but playing it cool. This is what is called 'honor among thieves,' for the really dangerous people are those who do not recognize that they are thieves— the unfortunates who play the role of the 'good guys' with such blind zeal that they are unconscious of any indebtedness to the 'bad guys' who support their status.


I believe,' said Tertullian of Christianity, 'because it is absurd.' People who think for themselves do not accept ideas on this kind of authority. They don't feel commanded to believe in miracles or strange doctrines as Abraham felt commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. As T. George Harris put it: The social hierarchies of the past, where some boss above you always punished any error, conditioned men to feel a chain of harsh authority reaching all the way 'up there.' We don't feel this bond in today's egalitarian freedom. We don't even have, since Dr. Spock, many Jehovah-like fathers in the human family. So the average unconscious no longer learns to seek forgiveness from a wrathful God above. But, he continues— Our generation knows a cold hell, solitary confinement in this life, without a God to damn or save it. Until man figures out the trap and hunts... 'the Ultimate Ground of Being,' he has no reason at all for his existence. Empty, finite, he knows only that he will soon die. Since this life has no meaning, and he sees no future life, he is not really a person but a victim of self-extinction. (2) 'The Ultimate Ground of Being' is Paul Tillich's decontaminated term for 'God' and would also do for 'the Self of the world' as I put it in my story for children. But the secret which my story slips over to the child is that the Ultimate Ground of Being is you. Not, of course, the everyday you which the Ground is assuming, or 'pretending' to be, but that inmost Self which escapes inspection because it's always the inspector. This, then, is the taboo of taboos: you're IT! Yet in our culture this is the touchstone of insanity, the blackest of blasphemies, and the wildest of delusions. This, we believe, is the ultimate in megalomania—an inflation of the ego to complete absurdity.


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.


Author: Guy Debord
Publisher: kindle import (0)

The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of a profoundly historical time, because it is the time corresponding to an economic production that continuously transforms society from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remains the predominant form of labor, the cyclical time that remains at the base of society reinforces the joint forces of tradition, which tend to hold back any historical movement. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates those vestiges throughout the world. History, which until then had seemed to involve only the actions of individual members of the ruling class, and which had thus been recorded as a mere chronology of events, is now understood as a general movement—a relentless movement that crushes any individuals in its path. By discovering its basis in political economy, history becomes aware of what had previously been unconscious; but this basis remains unconscious because it cannot be brought to light. This blind prehistory, this new fate that no one controls, is the only thing that the commodity economy has democratized.


The alienation of the spectator, which reinforces the contemplated objects that result from his own unconscious activity, works like this: The more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him. The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.


As animals, we have natural urges...but we are taught that we can only satisfy those needs under conditions allowable by our parents (initially), then later by other authorities (teachers, ministers, scout leaders, coaches, etc.), still later by society itself in all its personified forms, and eventually only if those needs satisfy some abstract moral code that we carry inside us. \r\nThese psychic prohibitions create an inner conflict between the needs of society and the needs of our body. Because of that conflict, our body generates emotions that have no acceptable outlet. We conceal not only the initial urge - the lust, the hunger - but also the emotion generated within us by the conflict between the unfulfilled urge and the prohibition of morality: our anger, sadness, frustration. We turn those emotions inward upon ourselves. When the emotion needs to come out badly enough, we get mental illness as an attempt to resolve the impasse. \r\nIn a depth analysis, these conflicts emerge a little bit at a time, and hopefully are resolved. A patient discovers that his parents need no longer dominate his life; as an adult he can choose actions that satisfy his needs despite the fact that his parents punished him for those same actions as a child. He learns to develop a broadened morality that better fits his adult personality. \r\nBut there are many levels to the human psyche. After resolving the conflicts with parents and other external authority figures, much still remains; in fact, most still remains. Jung found that, stripped of the personal experiences which we all accumulate over the course of our development, there are deeper impersonal levels to the psyche. These levels are aspects of the collective unconscious.


Our brains are continuously projecting the future from the past, and feeding that information to our sensors. We proceed on the basis of that extrapolated future unless the sensors note some discrepancy which has to be dealt with. This seems to correspond exactly to what we know of the operation of the collective unconscious. It is continually drawing on pas experience in order to feed forward its best estimate of the future. At any given moment in time, the collective unconscious is composed of all the experiences of the past, all that is going on presently anywhere among humans, and organic projections into the future based on the first two components. \r\n\r\nHowever, we find ourselves at a unique point in history. Very soon, we will reach the point where there are more people alive in the world than have lived and died in all previous ages put together; as one radio sage put it: 'the dead will become a minority.' I believe this shift is the same as the shift which we have been discussing throughout this book. As long as past experience vastly exceeded current experience, the collective unconscious was inherently conservative: ritual and structure outweighed novelty. Archetypes changed so slowly as to seem eternal. When current experience exceeds past experience, the situation reverses: novelty and change reign supreme. Archetypes should come into existence in dizzying numbers, many staying around too shortly to register. But some stable new archetype, some 'living symbol,' should emerge in an astonishingly quick fashion (by comparison with the glacial scale on which archetypes normally emerge), an archetype powerful enough to overwhelm the archetypes created by the entire past experience of mankind.


Differentiation is the essence, the sine qua non of consciousness. Everything unconscious is undifferentiated, and everything that happens unconsciously proceeds on the basis of nondifferentiation - that is to say, there is no determining whether it belongs or does not belong to oneself.


When combined with German materialism, as it was in the wantonly abrasive Huxley, as we saw in the Introduction to this essay, the theory of evolution by natural selection was the hollow-ing knell of all that ennobling tradition of man as the purposed creation of Majestic Greatnesses, the elohim, tnat goes straight back into the unconscious depths of the Bicameral Age. It said in a word that there is no authorization from outside. Behold! there is nothing there. What we must do must come from ourselves. The king at Eynan can stop staring at Mount Hermon; the dead king can die at last. We, we fragile human species at the end of the second millennium A.D., we must become our own authorization.


We do not ordinarily think of learning a new unconscious mentality, perhaps a whole new relationship between our cerebral hemispheres, as we think of learning to ride a bicycle. Since this is the learning of a now difficult neurological state, so different from ordinary life, it is not surprising that the cues of the induction had to be wildly distinctive and have an extreme difference from ordinary life. And they certainly were different: anything odd, anything strange: bathing in smoke or sacred water, dressing in enchanted chitons with magical girdles, wearing weird garlands or mysterious symbols, standing in a charmed magic circle as medieval magicians did, or upon charakteres as Faust did to hallucinate Mephistopheles, or smearing the eyes with strychnine to procure visions as was done in Egypt, or washing in brimstone (sulphur) and seawater, a very old method which began in Greece, as Porphyry said in the second century A.D., to prepare the anima sfiritalis for the reception of a higher being. All these of course did nothing except as they were believed to do something — just as we in this latter age have no 'free wil' unless we believe we have.


Scholars have long debated the reason for the decline and fall of prophecy in the post-exilic period of Judaism. They have suggested that the nabiim had done their work, and there was no more need of them. Or they have said that there was a danger that it would sink into a cult. Others that it was the corruption of the Israelites by the Babylonians, who were by this time as omen-ridden from the cradle to the grave as any nation could be. All of these are partly true, but the plainer fact to me is that the decline of prophecy is part of that much larger phenomenon going on elsewhere in the world, the loss of the bicameral mind. Once one has read through the Old Testament from this point of view, the entire succession of works becomes majestically and wonderfully the birth pangs of our subjective consciousness. No other literature has recorded this absolutely important event at such length or with such fullness. Chinese literature jumps into subjectivity in the teaching of Confucius with little before it. Indian hurtles from the bicameral Veda into the ultra subjective Upanishads, neither of which are as authentic to their times. Greek literature, like a series of steppingstones from the Iliad to the Odyssey and across the broken fragments of Sappho and Solon toward Plato, is the next best record, but is still too incomplete. And Egypt is relatively silent. While the Old Testament, even as it is hedged with great historical problems of accuracy, still remains the richest source for our knowledge of what the transition period was like. It is essentially the story of the loss of the bicameral mind, the slow retreat into silence of the remaining elohim, the confusion and tragic violence which ensue, and the search for them again in vain among its prophets until a substitute is found in right action. But the mind is still haunted with its old unconscious ways it broods on lost authorities; and the yearning, the deep and hollow-ing yearning for divine volition and service is with us still. As the stag pants after the waterbrooks, So pants my mind after you, O gods! My mind thirsts for gods! for living gods! When shall I come face to face with gods? — Psalm 42


I wish to be very clear that consciousness is chiefly a cultural introduction, learned on the basis of language and taught to others, rather than any biological necessity. But that it had and still has a survival value suggests that the change to consciousness may have been assisted by a certain amount of natural selection. It is impossible to calculate what percentage of the civilized world died in these terrible centuries toward the end of the second millennium B.C. I suspect it was enormous. And death would come soonest to those who impulsively lived by their unconscious habits or who could not resist the commandments of their gods to smite whatever strangers interfered with them. It is thus possible that individuals most obdurately bicameral, most obedient to their familiar divinities, would perish, leaving the genes of the less impetuous, the less bicameral, to endow the ensuing generations. And again we may appeal to the principle of Baldwinian evolution as we did in our discussion of language. Consciousness must be learned by each new generation, and those biologically most able to learn it would be those most likely to survive. There is even Biblical evidence, as we shall see in a future chapter, that children obdurately bicameral were simply killed.


The Causes of Consciousness AN OLD SUMERIAN PROVERB has been translated as “Act promptly, make your god happy.”1 If we forget for a moment that these rich English words are but a probing approximation of some more unknowable Sumerian thing, we may say that this curious exaction arches over into our subjective mentality as saying, “Don’t think: let there be no time space between hearing your bicameral voice and doing what it tells you.” This was fine in a stable hierarchical organization, where the voices were the always correct and essential parts of that hierarchy, where the divine orders of life were trussed and girdered with unversatile ritual, untouched by major social disturbance. But the second millennium B.C. was not to last that way. Wars, catastrophes, national migrations became its central themes. Chaos darkened the holy brightnesses of the unconscious world. Hierarchies crumpled. And between the act and its divine source came the shadow, the pause that profaned, the dreadful loosening that made the gods unhappy, recriminatory, jealous. Until, finally, the screening off of their tyranny was effected by the invention on the basis of language of an analog space with an analog ‘I’. The careful elaborate structures of the bicameral mind had been shaken into consciousness.


...there are several stages of creative thought: first, a stage of preparation in which the problem is consciously worked over; then a period of incubation without any conscious concentration upon the problem; and then the illumination which is later justified by logic. ...Indeed, it is sometimes almost as if the problem had to be forgotten to be solved.


Members of a psychology class were asked to compliment any girl at the college wearing red. Within a week the cafeteria was a blaze of red (and friendliness), and none of the girls was aware of being influenced. Another class, a week after being told about unconscious learning and training, tried it on the professor. Every time he moved toward the right side of the lecture hall, they paid rapt attention and roared at his jokes. It is reported that they were almost able to train him right out the door, he remaining unaware of anything unusual*.'\n\n *W. Lambert Gardiner, Psychology: A Story of a Search (Belmont, California: Brooks/Cole, 1970), p. 76.


Author: Ernest Becker
Publisher: Free Press (1975)

I think the whole question of what is possible for the inner life of man was nicely summed up by Suzanne Langer in the phrase “the myth of the inner life.”37 She used this term in reference to the experience of music, but it seems to apply to the whole metaphysic of the unconscious, of the emergence of new energies from the heart of nature. But let us quickly add that this use of the term “myth” is not meant to be disparaging or to reflect simple “illusion.” As Langer explained, some myths are vegetative, they generate real conceptual power, real apprehension of a dim truth, some kind of global adumbration of what we miss by sharp, analytic reason. Most of all, as William James and Tillich have argued, beliefs about reality affect people’s real actions: they help introduce the new into the world. Especially is this true for beliefs about man, about human nature, and about what man may yet become. If something influences our efforts to change the world, then to some extent it must change that world.


Rieff’s point is the classical one: that in order to have a truly human existence there must be limits; and what we call culture or the superego sets such limits. Culture is a compromise with life that makes human life possible. He quotes Marx’s defiant revolutionary phrase: “I am nothing and should be everything.” For Rieff this is the undiluted infantile unconscious speaking. Or, as I would prefer to say with Rank, the neurotic consciousness—the “all or nothing” of the person who cannot “partialize” his world. One bursts out in boundless megalomania, transcending all limits, or bogs down into wormhood like a truly worthless sinner. There is no secure ego balance to limit the intake of reality or to fashion the output of one’s own powers.



  • We might interject here that from this point of view, one of the crucial projects of a person’s life, of true maturity, is to resign oneself to the process of aging. It is important for the person gradually to assimilate his true age, to stop protesting his youth, pretending that there is no end to his life. Eliot Jacques, in his truly superb little essay “Death and the Mid-Life Crisis,” in H. M. Ruitenbeek, ed., Death: Interpretations (New York: Delta Books, 1969), Chapter 13, beautifully develops the idea of the need for “self-mourning,” the mourning of one’s own eventual death, and thus the working of it out of one’s unconscious where it blocks one’s emotional maturity. One must, so to speak, work himself out of his own system.


As the highest ambition of the child is to obey the all-powerful parent, to believe in him, and to imitate him, what is more natural than an instant, imaginary return to childhood via the hypnotic trance? The explanation of the ease of hypnosis, said Ferenczi, is that “In our innermost soul we are still children, and we remain so throughout life.”11 And so, in one theoretical sweep Ferenczi could destroy the mystery of hypnosis by showing that the subject carries in himself the predisposition to it: … there is no such thing as a “hypnotising,” a “giving of ideas” in the sense of psychical incorporating of something quite foreign from without, but only procedures that are able to set going unconscious, pre-existing, auto-suggestive mechanisms… . According to this conception, the application of suggestion and hypnosis consists in the deliberate establishment of conditions under which the tendency to blind belief and uncritical obedience present in everyone, but usually kept repressed … may unconsciously be transferred to the person hypnotising or suggesting.12


But while one sort of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort permits itself as it were to be defrauded by “the others.” By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of wordly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in this world, such a man forgets himself … does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd.29 This is a superb characterization of the “culturally normal” man, the one who dares not stand up for his own meanings because this means too much danger, too much exposure. Better not to be oneself, better to live tucked into others, embedded in a safe framework of social and cultural obligations and duties. Again, too, this kind of characterization must be understood as being on a continuum, at the extreme end of which we find depressive psychosis. The depressed person is so afraid of being himself, so fearful of exerting his own individuality, of insisting on what might be his own meanings, his own conditions for living, that he seems literally stupid. He cannot seem to understand the situation he is in, cannot see beyond his own fears, cannot grasp why he has bogged down. Kierkegaard phrases it beautifully: If one will compare the tendency to run wild in possibility with the efforts of a child to enunciate words, the lack of possibility is like being dumb … for without possibility a man cannot, as it were, draw breath.30 This is precisely the condition of depression, that one can hardly breathe or move. One of the unconscious tactics that the depressed person resorts to, to try to make sense out of his situation, is to see himself as immensely worthless and guilty. This is a marvelous “invention” really, because it allows him to move out of his condition of dumbness, and make some kind of conceptualization of his situation, some kind of sense out of it—even if he has to take full blame as the culprit who is causing so much needless misery to others.


We called one’s life style a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one’s whole situation. This revelation is what the Freudian revolution in thought really ends up in and is the basic reason that we still strain against Freud. We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not always obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tillich in our day. They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his “courage to be” from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance. The defenses that form a person’s character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity. But he is also drawn precisely toward those things that make him anxious, as a way of skirting them masterfully, testing himself against them, controlling them by defying them. As Kierkegaard taught us, anxiety lures us on, becomes the spur to much of our energetic activity: we flirt with our own growth, but also dishonestly. This explains much of the friction in our lives. We enter symbiotic relationships in order to get the security we need, in order to get relief from our anxieties, our aloneness and helplessness; but these relationships also bind us, they enslave us even further because they support the lie we have fashioned. So we strain against them in order to be more free. The irony is that we do this straining uncritically, in a struggle within our own armor, as it were; and so we increase our drivenness, the second-hand quality of our struggle for freedom. Even in our flirtations with anxiety we are unconscious of our motives. We seek stress, we push our own limits, but we do it with our screen against despair and not with despair itself. We do it with the stock market, with sports cars, with atomic missiles, with the success ladder in the corporation or the competition in the university. We do it in the prison of a dialogue with our own little family, by marrying against their wishes or choosing a way of life because they frown on it, and so on. Hence the complicated and second-hand quality of our entire drivenness. Even in our passions we are nursery children playing with toys that represent the real world. Even when these toys crash and cost us our lives or our sanity, we are cheated of the consolation that we were in the real world instead of the playpen of our fantasies. We still did not meet our doom on our own manly terms, in contest with objective reality. It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.


Kierkegaard understood that the lie of character is built up because the child needs to adjust to the world, to the parents, and to his own existential dilemmas. It is built up before the child has a chance to learn about himself in an open or free way, and thus character defenses are automatic and unconscious. The problem is that the child becomes dependent on them and comes to be encased in his own character armor, unable to see freely beyond his own prison or into himself, into the defenses he is using, the things that are determining his unfreedom.17


One of Becker’s lasting contributions to social psychology has been to help us understand that corporations and nations may be driven by unconscious motives that have little to do with their stated goals. Making a killing in business or on the battlefield frequently has less to do with economic need or political reality than with the need for assuring ourselves that we have achieved something of lasting worth. Consider, for instance, the recent war in Vietnam in which the United States was driven not by any realistic economic or political interest but by the overwhelming need to defeat “atheistic communism.”


Publisher: Bantam Books (1982)

Consider, for example, the striking discovery by the psycholinguists James Lackner and Merril Garrett of what might be called an unconscious channel of sentence comprehension. In dichotic listening tests, subjects listen through earphones to two different channels and are instructed to attend to just one channel. Typically they can paraphrase or report with accuracy what they have heard through the attended channel but usually they can say little about what was going on concomitantly in the unattended channel. Thus, if the unattended channel carries a spoken sentence, the subjects typically can report they heard a voice, or even a male or female voice. Perhaps they even have a conviction about whether the voice was speaking in their native tongue, but they cannot report what was said. In Lackney and Garrett’s experiments subjects heard ambiguous sentences in the attended channel, such as “He put out the lantern to signal the attack.” Simultaneously, in the unattended channel one group of subjects received a sentence that suggested the interpretation of the sentence in the attended channel (e.g. “He extinguished the lantern), while another group had a neutral or irrelevant sentence as input. The former group could not report what was presented through the unattended channel, but they favoured the suggested reading of the ambiguous sentences significantly more than the control group did.


The new way of thinking was supported by a crutch, one could cling to at least a pale version of the Lockean creed by imagining that these “unconscious” thoughts, desires, and schemes belonged to other selves within the psyche. Just as I can keep my schemes secret from you, my id can keep secrets from my ego. By splitting the subject into many subjects, one could preserve the axiom that every mental state must be someone’s conscious mental state and explain the inaccessibility of some of these states to their putative owners by postulating other interior owners for them. This move was usefully obscured in the mists of jargon so that the weird question of whether it was like anything to be a superego, for instance, could be kept at bay.


We have come to accept without the slightest twinge of incomprehension a host of claims to the effect that sophisticated hypothesis testing, memory searching, inference – in short, information processing – occurs within us though it is entirely inaccessible to introspection . It is not repressed unconscious activity of the sort Freud uncovered, activity driven out of the sight of consciousness, but just mental activity that is somehow beneath or beyond the ken of consciousness altogether. Freud claimed that his theories and clinical observations gave him the authority to overrule the sincere denials of his patients about what was going on in their minds. Similarly the cognitive psychologist marshals experimental evidence, models, and theories to show that people are engaged in surprisingly sophisticated reasoning processes of which they can give no introspective account at all. Not only are minds accessible to outsiders, some mental activities are more accessible to outsiders than to the very “owners” of those minds.


From the inside, our Own consciousness seems obvious and pervasive, we know that much goes on around us and even inside our bodies of which we are entirely unaware or unconscious, but nothing could be more intimately know to us than those things of which we are, individually, conscious. Those things of which I am conscious, and the ways in which I am conscious of them, determine what it is like to be me. I know in a way no other could know what it is like to be me. From the inside, consciousness seems to be an all-or-nothing phenomenon – an inner light that is either on or off. We grant that we are sometimes drowsy or inattentive, or asleep, and on occasion we even enjoy abnormally heightened consciousness, but when we are conscious, that we are conscious is not a fact that admits of degrees. There is a perspective, then, from which consciousness seems to be a feature that sunders the universe into two strikingly different kinds of things, those that have it and those that don’t. Those that have it are subjects, beings to whom things can be one way or another, beings it is like something to be. It is not like anything at all to be a brick or a pocket calculator or an apple. These things have insides, but not the right sort of insides – no inner life, no point of view. It is certainly like something to be me (Something I know “from the inside”) and almost certainly like something to be you (for you have told me, most convincingly, that it is the same with you), and probably like something to be a dog or a dolphin (if only they could tell us!) and maybe even like something to be a spider.


Author: P.D. Ouspensky
Publisher: Vintage (1971)

Energy created in the organism is kept in a certain big accumulator which is connected with two small accumulators placed near each centre. Supposing man begins to think and uses the energy of one of the small accumulators of the intellectual centre. The energy in the accumulator gets lower and lower, and when it is at its lowest he gets tired. Then he makes an effort, or has a short rest, or yawns, and becomes connected with the second small accumulator. It is very interesting that yawning is a special help provided by nature for passing from one accumulator to another. He goes on thinking and drawing energy from the second accumulator, is again tired, yawns, or lights a cigarette, and becomes connected again with the first small accumulator. But that accumulator may be only half filled and is quickly exhausted. He becomes connected once more with the second, which is only a quarter filled, and so it goes on until time may come when both accumulators are empty. If at that moment a man makes a special effort of the right kind he may become connected directly with the big accumulator. This is one explanation of miracles, for he will then have an enormous supply of energy. But this needs a very great effort—not an ordinary effort. If he exhausts the big accumulator he dies, but generally he falls asleep or becomes unconscious long before that, so there is no danger. In ordinary life this connection with the big accumulator sometimes happens in extraordinary circum stances, such as moments of extreme danger. This is why there is this system of small accumulators. If one could be easily connected with the big accumulator one might, for example, never stop being angry for a week, and then one would die. So generally one does not become connected with the big accumulator until one has control over negative emotions. Emotions are stronger than other functions, so if one were to get into a negative emotion and had unlimited energy it would be too dangerous


Q. What is meant by the law of accident? \r\n \r\nA. The life of man-machine, of man who cannot 'do', who has no will or choice, is controlled by accident, for things in ordinary life happen mechanically, accidentally; there is no reason in them. And just as man's external life is controlled by accidental external influences, so is his inner life also controlled by both internal and external influences which are equally accidental. You will understand that, if you realize what it means that man is asleep, that he cannot 'do', cannot remember himself; when you think of the constant unconscious flow of thoughts in man, of day-dreaming, of identifying and considering, of mental conversations that go on in him, of his constant deviation towards the line of least resistance. People think that accidents are rare, but in actual fact most things that happen to them are accidental. What does accident mean? It means a combination of circumstances which is not dependent on the will of the man himself nor the will of another person, nor on fate, as do, for instance, conditions of birth and upbringing, nor on the preceding actions of the man himself. An accident happens when two lines of events cross one another. Suppose a man stands under the roof of a house, sheltering from rain, and a brick falls and hits him on the head. This would be an accident. There are two separate lines of cause and effect. Take the line of the man's movements and the fact that he happened to stop under the roof of that particular house; every small thing in it had a cause, but the brick did not enter into this line of cause and effect. Suppose the brick was negligently set and the rain made it loose and at a certain moment it fell. There is nothing in the life of the man or the life of the brick to connect them. The two lines of cause and effect meet accidentally.


Although a great many of our 'I's are disconnected and do not even know one another, they are divided into certain groups. This does not mean that they are divided consciously; they are divided by circumstances of life. These groups of 'I's manifest themselves as roles that a man plays in his life. Everybody has a certain number of roles: one corresponds to one set of conditions, another to another and so on. Man himself seldom notices these differences. For instance, he has one role for his work, another for his home, yet another among friends, another if he is interested in sport, and so on. These roles are easier to observe in other people than in oneself. People are often so different in different conditions that these roles become quite obvious and well defined; but sometimes they are better hidden or even played only inside without any external manifestations. All people, whether they know it or not, whether they wish it or not, have certain roles which they play. This acting is unconscious. If it could be conscious, it would be quite different, but one never notices how one passes from one role to another. Or if one notices it one persuades oneself that one is doing it on purpose, that it is a conscious action. In reality the change is always controlled by circumstances, it cannot be controlled by man himself, because he himself does not exist yet. Sometimes there are definite contradictions between one and another role. In one role one says one thing, has certain definite views and convictions; then one passes into another role and has absolutely different convictions and says absolutely different things, without noticing it, or else thinking that one does it on purpose. There are very definite causes which prevent man from seeing the difference between one role or mask and another. These causes are certain artificial formations called buffers. Buffer is a very good name for these appliances. Buffers between railway carriages prevent clashing, diminish the shock. It is the same with buffers between different roles and different groups of 'I's or personalities. People can live with different personalities without them clashing, and if these personalities have no external manifestation, they exist internally all the same. It is very useful to try to find what buffers are. Try to find how one lies to oneself with the help of buffers. Suppose one says 'I never argue'. Then, if one really has a good conviction that one never argues, one can argue as much as one likes and never notice it. This is the result of a buffer. If one has a certain number of good buffers, one is quite safe from unpleasant contradictions. Buffers are quite mechanical; a buffer is like a wooden thing, it does not adapt, but it plays its part very well: it prevents one seeing contradictions.


Publisher: Fine Communications (1998)

It is now theoretically possible to link the human nervous system into a radio network so that, micro-miniaturized receivers being implanted in people's brains, the messages coming out of these radios would be indistinguishable to the subjects from the voice of their own thoughts. One central transmitter, located in the nation's capital, could broadcast all day long what the authorities wanted the people to believe. The average man on the receiving end of these broadcasts would not even know he was a robot; he would think it was his own voice he was listening to. The average woman could be treated similarly. It is ironic that people will find such a concept both shocking and frightening. Like Orwell's 1984, this is not a fantasy of the future but a parable of the present. Every citizen in every authoritarian society already has such a 'radio' built into his or her brain. This radio is the little voice that asks, each time a desire is formed, 'Is it safe? Will my wife (my husband/my boss/my church/my community) approve? Will people ridicule and mock me? Will the police come and arrest me?' This little voice the Freudians call 'The Superego,' with Freud himself vividly characterized as 'the ego's harsh master.' With a more functional approach, Peris, Hefferline and Goodman, in Gestalt Therapy, describe this process as 'a set of conditioned verbal habits.' This set, which is fairly uniform throughout any authoritarian society, determines the actions which will, and will not, occur there. Let us consider humanity a biogram {the basic DNA blueprint of the human organism and its potentials) united with a logogram (this set of 'conditioned verbal habits'). The biogram has not changed in several hundred thousand years; the logogram is different in each society. When the logogram reinforces the biogram, we have a libertarian society, such as still can be found among some American Indian tribes. Like Confucianism before it became authoritarian and rigidified, American Indian ethics is based on speaking from the heart and acting from the heart—'that is, from the biogram. No authoritarian society can tolerate this. All authority is based on conditioning men and women to act from the logogram, since the logogram is a set created by those in authority. Every authoritarian logogram divides society, as it divides the individual, into alienated halves. Those at the bottom suffer what I shall call the burden of nescience. The natural sensory activity of the biogram— what the person sees, hears, smells, tastes, feels, and, above all, what the organism as a whole, or as a potential whole, wants —is always irrelevant and immaterial. The authoritarian logogram, not the field of sensed experience, determines what is relevant and material. This is as true of a highly paid Illuminatus! Trilogy Seite 286 von 470 advertising copywriter as it is of an engine lathe operator. The person acts, not on personal experience and the evaluations of the nervous system, but on the orders from above. Thus, personal experience and personal judgment being nonoperational, these functions become also less 'real.' They exist, if at all, only in that fantasy land which Freud called the Unconscious. Since nobody has found a way to prove that the Freudian Unconscious really exists, it can be doubted that personal experience and personal judgment exist; it is an act of faith to assume they do. The organism has become, as Marx said, 'a tool, a machine, a robot.' Those at the top of the authoritarian pyramid, however, suffer an equal and opposite burden of omniscience. All that is forbidden to the servile class— the web of perception, evaluation and participation in the sensed universe— is demanded of the members of the master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and decision-making for the whole society. But a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs. Furthermore, the logogram of any authoritarian society remains fairly inflexible as time passes, but everything else in the universe constantly changes. The result can only be progressive disorientation among the rulers. The end is debacle. The schizophrenia of authoritarianism exists both in the individual and in the whole society. I call this the Snafu Principle.


Author: Eric Berne
Publisher: Grove Press (1972)

The unconscious has become fashionable, and hence grossly overrated.  That is, by far the larger percentage of what is called unconscious nowadays is not unconscious, but preconscious.  The patient, however, will oblige the therapist who is looking for 'unconscious' material by advancing preconscious material with a spurious label.  This is easily verified by asking the patient, 'Was it really unconscious, or was it just vaguely conscious?'  True unconscious material (for example, the original castration fear and the original Oedipal rage) is truly unconscious, and not vaguely conscious.


Author: Erich Fromm
Publisher: Continuum Impacts (2005)

While one is consciously afraid of not being loved, the real, though usually unconscious fear is that of loving.  To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person.  Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.'