A lot of what we do happens unconsciously, completely outside our conscious awareness, yet it is still happening within us. We constantly process information without telling ourselves to do it. You can notice this when talking to someone: while you are listening and responding, your mind is already processing their tone, facial expressions, body language, and emotional signals without your intervention.
Carl Jung placed great importance on this hidden layer of the mind. He argued that consciousness is only a small part of our psychological life, while the unconscious contains memories, instincts, and patterns that can influence how we perceive the world and behave without our awareness.
From a Jungian perspective, this can be understood as the unconscious integrating information that consciousness has not yet explicitly recognized.
I think most of what our brains do, in terms of taking in information from our senses, organizing it, filtering it and presenting it (or not) to our consciousness occurs at a level below conscious awareness or deliberation. Likewise for monitoring bodily functions respiration, heart, GI etc. That dialogue we carry on with the little voice in our heads (which we think is so important) in fact plays a relatively minor role in our mental processes or overall functioning. There is some evidence that most decisions are made by the organism as whole not by internal dialogue or conscious deliberation but at a deeper level. We are great at rationalizing what we do but not so good at acknowledging why we really do it on a more primitive level. Think about the mental work of merely walking, muscle coordination, balance, etc. Think of all the times to tried to remember something, couldn’t, and then later the answer randomly pops into your head after you have given up trying to remember. Or the problems that suddenly had a solution in the morning after trying to solve them the day before and failing. Unconscious experience (that below internal dialogue) in fact may be the most common kine of experience in nature and certainly many other creatures have such experience (different due to different sensory capabilities, environmental demands, and biological structure) but experience and one might assert forms of mind non the less. I think Freud bet Jungj to the concept on this one.
I guess Jung took this from Freud. The key refinement Jung made was expanding the notion of the unconscious into more mystical territory, including the collective unconscious and his theory of archetypes. These are not generally recognised today as empirically established psychological concepts, but they have had a huge influence on artists and writers, as Freud did in his own way.
As an artist you must learn to balance the conscious with the unconscious if you want to work for decades.
I found Plato Forums, Carl Jung’s Red Book, fascinating but have found comfort in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus but mostly in his Philosophical Investigations.
On this day I think language is art and art is language because they are epistemically subjective as they intersect through syntax.
I did come across this idea. I believe the unconscious and the conscious talk to each other. Freud and Jung are out of vogue. Their methods are like homeopathy but there are a few centers that offer services along Freudian and Jungian psychology. They don’t post statistics. Intriguing that!
These are vague theories of mind and last I checked are a collection of incoherent ramblings of a deeply spiritual Jung and for Freud it was all about coitus; he must’ve read Darwin from cover to cover.
Nevertheless, the unconscious is worth further probing. It’s a mysterious part of the mind where hidden treasures lie waiting to be found.
Lots of different things unconsciously regulate signals or information that consciousness has not yet explicitly recognized. But what would you expect? Conscious regulation of all?
Interests, habits, contexts, abilities, sense organs, reticular activating system, or simply the way the world is are unconsciously fixing the things and meanings of which you can partly become conscious.
Jung, however, seems to assume the existence of an underlying reality, an unus mundus, that fits his psychological findings?
Doesn’t this rather diminish the nature of our unconscious minds? It seems that this final sentiment, having already recognised the existence of our ‘unconscious’ minds in the rest of your text, seeks to place it once more under the boot-heel of consciousness and the ‘conscious’ mind? I think that is a shame, if my observation is correct.
No, I would not give it up. However, I realize the many things our minds do everyday which do not require our conscious attention or dialogue and I distinguish between thinking and talking. I also acknowledge the many creatures who negotiate the many difficulties of life and survival entirely without inner language dialogue. I have a notion that much of human creativity arises from unconscious mental processing and that many of our decisions are made and actions originate there. So, I merely wish to point our that conscious awareness and deliberation may be overrated and that we look down our our fellow creatures who have quite similar brains and thus probably minds with somewhat unwarranted disdain.
Yes, this “processing” is unconscious; specifically, it is PRE-conscious. And it only applies to those of us who are not autistic, for example. Autists think differently in this regard.
But, in fairness, only a few percent of us are autists, so maybe this doesn’t matter here? I leave this comment in place out of interest; a sideline comment.
I expected consciousness to be more powerful, but it seems that the unconscious mind is powerful in its own way. It operates beneath the surface, quietly influencing our thoughts, emotions, decisions, and behavior a hidden force that moves things without us always realizing it.
The use of the them “us” is interesting. I would assert “us” is the entire organism, mind (conscious and not), body and soul. It is the organism that acts. The little voice in our head that we sometimes think is “us or I” is just a small part of the organism and often just a distraction from the business or survival and procreation. The organism as a whole “wills” and “decides”.
Absolutely agree, and it was exactly CG Jung who first realised that- S. Freud and other psychoanalysts at the time were considering subconscious part of psyche as sort of a dumping ground.
Over the years CG Jung built very complex and extensive theory that is not easy to grasp, and includes collective subconscious and archetypes and synchronicity (which I as fairly as I understand is manifestation of archetypal dynamics).
CG Jungs ideas are easier to accept and understand from Idealists
standpoint.
But just understanding concepts like persona, shadow, integration, projection can have quite an impact on someone’s life.
There was research done on how people think- people had to wear some device that randomly beeps and immediately write down their thoughts and how they think and if it was internal narrative- to write down their words and results showed that majority people think that they think through internal narrative bit in reality don’t use internal narrative as their primary way of thinking, just sometimes.
And yes there is a difference between thinking and ruminating.
I don’t go along with the Freudian model of the unconsciousIt is too much like a Homunculus, a ‘little man’ behind the curtain, calling the shots and coming into conflict with conscious awareness. I prefer the idea of explicit vs implicit consciousness. We may not be directly attending to what is implicitly conscious, or be able to verbally articulate what it means, but it is a part of our awareness. This is why subliminal advertising never worked. If a message flashes before our eyes too quickly for us to have meaningful awareness of it, it cannot have any significant effect on our behavior.
Yes, this, and more. There are lots of experiments we’ve done that indicate that many, even most, decisions we take are actually taken prior to any conscious action.
But also, what @prothero said in the following post:
Our conscious minds are just one small (?) part of a bodymind whole, I think.
It’s true that it’s not necessary for life and survival. Or, for that matter, for stars to shine, and a gajillion other things.
But I feel comfortable saying it’s the most important thing there is to humans. If anybody had to give up an arm or this, I would bet they’d give up the arm. It’s our very self, or at least a big chunk of it.
But it’s certainly not a good reason to look down on any other species with disdain.
The classic popular claim was that messages presented below the threshold of conscious awareness could secretly persuade people to buy products, vote a certain way, or otherwise alter behavior in substantial ways. Decades of research have found little evidence for such large, real-world effects.
However, researchers have also found that stimuli presented so briefly that people cannot consciously report them can sometimes have small, short-lived effects on perception, attention, judgments, and behavior. For example, a subliminal word may make a related word slightly easier to recognize a moment later, or a subliminal prime may nudge a response in a laboratory task. These effects are generally small,highly dependent on context, short-lived, and far weaker than ordinary conscious persuasion.
This finding cuts against a certain popular image of the unconscious as a hidden agent directing behavior from behind the scenes. Many cognitive scientists argue that durable behavioral change usually requires the stimulus to be integrated into broader networks of meaning, goals, memory, and attention. A fleeting subliminal cue may activate associations, but it generally does not reorganize a person’s interpretive framework.
There are many studies showing the minimal effects of subliminal
cues, such as this one:
A meta-analysis of consumer choice and subliminal advertising.
Charles Trappey
1996, Psychology and Marketing
Abstract
A meta-analysis is used to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of subliminal advertising to influence the consumer’s decision between alternatives. A review of narrative reviews is provided to illustrate that sample size and effect size is seldom used as the basis for evaluating whether subliminal marketing stimuli are an effective means for influencing consumer choice behavior. The results of the meta-analysis indicate that there is very little effect. The resulting coefficient had a value r = 0.0585, which places the effectiveness of subliminal advertising on choice between the impact of aspirin on heart attacks and the relationship between alcohol abuse and a tour of duty in Vietnam (Rosenthal, 1990).
