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It is almost certainly true to say that, in the world of psychology,
nothing has caused more controversy, division, and bitter dispute than Freud’s
theory of the unconscious: a hypothetical entity which, in his own words, had
“its own wishful impulses, its own mode of expression, and its peculiar mental
mechanisms which are not in force elsewhere.” It would seem almost as if we had
imbibed this notion with our mother’s milk, so commonly is it accepted. Yet if
we are to accept the existence of such an entity, then I think the question
needs to be asked, “Is the Unconscious unconscious of itself?” If so, we are
dealing with some kind of drive which – like sexuality – has no knowledge of us
as human beings, and does not reckon consequences. I would have no quibble with
this about the unconscious if I could understand its (unconscious) raison d'être. But I cannot. If it suppresses
those experiences we have had which are too painful for us to acknowledge, then
precisely by what means does it succeed in doing this? We are only too aware of
the traumas, missed opportunities, and sadnesses of our past lives. And the
problem – insofar as there may be one – is to acknowledge these experiences as
ineradicable ‘tree–rings’ (and incorporate them as best we can into that
‘irreducible mystery’ that, finally, we all are).
I might say too, about ‘Freudian slips’ – where the truth of what we
really feel about some person or issue slips off our tongue before we realise
it – that these are not expressions of things of which we are unaware. They are
in fact expressions – albeit involuntarily expressed – of emotions of which we
are only too well aware.
However,
is it not the case that Freud’s hypothetical Unconscious would need to be conscious of its activities
if it were to decide which memories were to be suppressed from consciousness
and which released into consciousness – and the optimal times at which these
psychic mechanisms were to be operated? To solve this problem, psychoanalysis
proposes the notion of a ‘censor’ – a ‘director of operations’, if you like. Here
is Sartre on the subject in Being and
Nothingness:
. . . it
is not sufficient that it [the censor] discern the condemned drives; it must
also apprehend them as to be repressed,
which implies in it at the very least an awareness of its activity. In a word,
how could the censor discern the impulses needing to be repressed without being
conscious of discerning them? How can we conceive of a knowledge which is ignorant
of itself? To know is to know that one knows . . . (Being and Nothingness, pp52–3. Italics in original. Hazel Barnes
translation. Routledge. 1958)
. . . the
hypothesis of a censor, [is] conceived as a line of demarcation with customs,
passport division, currency control, etc., to re-establish the duality of the
deceiver and the deceived. (Ibid, p50)
According
to Sartre, then, it is not the unconscious that requires consciousness, but the
censor – which psychoanalysts place as
mediator between the unconscious
and the conscious mind: that is, a second consciousness which operates
according to unknown rules and remains concealed from our primary
consciousness. It need hardly be stated that such a notion is absurd, and on a
par with the invocation of ghosts, demons, and angels as silent operators. A standard description of Freud’s idea of the
mechanism whereby unwanted thoughts are kept out of consciousness is given in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica:
[Such
thoughts] are censored and kept from
consciousness unless altered into dream symbols, slips of the tongue, jests or
some other acceptable guise. [My emphasis]
Again,
how can a censor do its job unless it is aware – conscious – of what it is
doing? If I were a film censor I would have to know exactly what I was doing.
It
is a relief to turn to Adler, whose writing is clear and whose concept of the
unconscious requires no dubious entities, and has no flavour of dogma or
religion about it:
The
unconscious is nothing other than that which we have been unable to formulate
in clear concepts. It is not a matter of concepts hiding away in some
unconscious or subconscious recesses of our minds, but of parts of our
consciousness, the significance of which we have not fully understood.
We
cannot oppose “consciousness” to unconsciousness” as if they were two halves of
an individual’s existence. The conscious life becomes unconscious as soon as we
fail to understand it, and as soon as we understand an unconscious tendency it
has already become conscious. (The
Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler, pp232–3. Basic Books. 1956)
We might add that it would seem to be a logical impossibility for two
consciousnesses to exist in one brain (mind?): each in a silent tussle with the
other – and on behalf of what or whom exactly? Ourselves obviously, but what an
Alice in Wonderland world do we here find ourselves in. Further, we talk about the
unconscious when we don’t even understand the nature of consciousness.
Looking at the problem in general, I do not see why we should have a
problem with the fact of unconsciousness – or ‘out of –mindedness’ – in the mind
(and or brain?). Necessarily, it has to be the case that large tracts of our
past experiences are for the most part not present to our conscious mind.
Otherwise, if we were conscious simultaneously of all that we have ever
experienced, we would seize up and go mad. So that there must be a universe of
‘stuff’ stored away, ready to be triggered by any chance event. I can give what
I think are two watertight and perfect examples. In 2001 I visited St Leonards
– where I lived until I was fourteen – and walked along a road I had not
revisited in forty–three years. Passing the church in this road, I noticed a
patterning in the brickwork that had held a particular significance for me as a
child. What that significance was, I cannot possibly say: I did not know as a
child and I do not know now. I think that it was related to
aesthetics and the imagination (not that as a child I had any notion of describing aesthetics);
but in any case its subjectivity was such that it would be impossible to
explain. The main point is that I had entirely forgotten it for more than four
decades. My second example – of the extraordinary ‘concealed retention’ of past
experiences – comes from my twenties and thirties. After first visiting
Florence in the 1970s, I had a recurring dream which featured a vaulted room.
On a second visit to Florence – ten years later with my wife – I revisited the
pensione I’d stayed in on my first visit. I took the lift to the top floor, and
as I stepped out, there in front of me was the vaulted space that I had been
dreaming about. There was no question about it: the recognition was
instantaneous. And, as with my St Leonards experience, I think it had to do
aesthetics and imagination. (And I fully acknowledge that without the writings
of Freud, I could not have seen this with such clarity: Freud was a fine
writer, and is perhaps best read as literature. He had uncanny insights into
human nature, which did not require the quasi–scientific theories into which he
tried to incorporate them.)
You may argue that the personal experiences I have related have nothing
to do with the suppression of aspects of myself I was loath to recognise or
acknowledge: I was not in denial or involved with the displacement of an
emotion. This is perfectly true: my examples demonstrate rather the
extraordinary capacity of the mind to store past experiences which would remain
dormant – or in the one case puzzling – unless triggered by a precise
‘re–encounter’. However, I know perfectly well from my own experience and the
observation of others that we can be quite unaware of the reasons for our
actions or reactions – under certain circumstances. For example, a friend tells
me that – when his wife returned from hospital with their second child – their
younger child was up all night throwing up. He knew – yes, at an unconscious
level – that things would never be quite the same again. But we do not need to
invoke an ‘unconscious’ to explain this. Most of us understand these things
perfectly well – as people have done for centuries. Richard Webster, in his Why Freud was Wrong, quotes these lines
from Shakespeare’s King Lear:
Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! / Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back; / Thou
hotly lusts to use her in that kind / For which thou whip’st
her. (IV, vi, 157–60)
Webster
continues:
[A]lthough Freud invoked the idea of
projection, he also impoverished it by pinning it into his own mechanistic
system. Again and again Freud strangled in false science the very ‘poetic’
insights which he had glimpsed in imaginative literature. (Richard Webster, Why Freud was Wrong. Harper–Collins, revised edition 1996, xiii)
So why did I suggest in my first
paragraph that the existence of any kind of entity that might be labeled ‘the
unconscious’ is of little relevance? Because I think that the important thing
to notice and understand is that human beings quite simply are unaware of their
actions, reactions, and motives under certain circumstances – whatever the causes; and that it
would be healthier for us if we could achieve a lively understanding of this. This
being the case, it would seem that the invocation of an unconscious, accompanied
by the arcane theories of psychoanalysis, can only throw an unwanted – and
often deep – confusion over the matter. Sometimes a chair is just a chair. Shakespeare’s
beadle certainly needed to be on a couch, but it was not that of a
psychoanalyst.
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