Oh, so you did mean what I described. I assumed this was given, here in this topic.
The term that history has bequeathed us, “unconscious mind”, is horribly misleading. It makes it sound like we have two minds, not one, called “conscious” and “unconscious”.
Modern understanding seems to say, instead, that we have one mind, and that the conscious mind is one part of it. That which we call the “unconscious” mind is the term we use to describe what’s left after the conscious mind is accounted for.
Human minds are multifaceted, and clearly not dominated by the conscious bit. I am a whole bodymind, not just a mind-fragment whose workings I can inspect…
The unconscious mind operates below conscious awareness. It influences things that happen within you without you fully knowing why they happen. For example, you might be attracted to a girl without being able to explain why. You simply know that you like her, but only after talking to her and getting to know her might you begin to understand the deeper reasons behind that attraction.
It feels like our consciousness only makes wishes, and something invisible does the rest.
Even this… What we wish for is clearly desided by this invisible thing, and it doesn’t even show us the method it uses to decide. So, our consciousness decides nothing at all?
So, even with our ability to discuss our consciousness using our body, it still feels like our consciousness is just one of the many methods the invisible thing can use to change its state, even if it is the most mysterious one.
This reads much more like a caricature of Freud along the lines of popular (mis)conception than a serious criticism. The idea of the unconscious is considerably more nuanced. It’s more like a regulative framework sedimented over a particular personal history that encompasses both how the human mind is structured, how it develops, and the particular path of development each individual takes in context. It’s not a homuncular repitition but more like the background necessary for the individual to be an individual in the moment, to be meaningful to itself, the cost of which is conflict in the form of repression etc.
In fact, to present human interaction as something simply recurring moment by moment without clear diachronic grounding, but some unspecified combination of implicit and explicit processing is at least as open to question as the general contours of Freud’s theory.
I think it’s humourously perverse to read Freud as a Darwinian reductionist. Where’s the reproductive value in fetishizing a pair of shoes, for example? Freud, if anything, seriously complicates desire and sexuality. If you want Darwinian reductionists, look no further than religion: Be fruitful and multiply; no sex except to procreate and so on.
These issues that you raise are for Freudian analysts to sort out. The convergence that prompted my statements is real though. Sex sells like hot cakes and sex results in injecting half the male genome into the waiting half genome of the female, the uniom of which is our fetus.
Religion has its own ideas about sex, some are positive and some negative. Christianity considers lust to be a sin, outlaws polygamy, homosexuality, adultery but is more than ok with marriage between men and women.
Thanks. I would like to bring Jung in where he departs from Freud regarding their views on sex… I will elaborate on this further but at this time i think it’s worth noting their point of departure and difference.
Onanism , like the word. Makes playing with oneself philosophical. You should look up the Hindu view of how life should be lived - in stages, as a celibate student; as a sexually active family man who participates in society; as a retired person dispensing advice to whoever will listen; as a renunciate who devotes what’s left of his life to spiritual fulfillment.
Freud, in my opinion had deeply held misconceptions about sex that Jung disagreed with. For Freud everything from art or perhaps even science was a some form of sexual manifestation and this is the point of departure between him and Jung because for Jung sex was simply an expression of the libido rather than a connotation of repressed expression. So for Jung sex was just one channeling of the libido or anima where’s for Freud it was everything.
I’m sure Freud is more nuanced and complex than I’ve quickly distilled for I traded thoroughness for brevity … but I must quickly add that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar” as Freud aptly concluded
What interests me is how, even in a topic on the subject, we word our posts as though our unconscious minds are something other.
The rest of our minds do not operate “below” conscious awareness, but only outside it. It is your conscious mind that might not understand why you made some decision or other; the rest of your mind, er, understands, if that’s the right word for it.
Yes, this is the same thing. To the conscious part of our minds, the unconscious mind really is “something invisible”. But we still seem to deny in our words, and probably in our thinking too, that our minds are whole, not fragmented, and that even the bits we’re not directly (i.e. consciously) aware of are part of that whole.
It might seem so, sometimes, but the truth is surely that our conscious minds participate in the working of the mind (all of it) just as the other parts do?
One of the other things that we do is to think of the conscious mind as one thing, and the unconscious mind as another. But doesn’t this deny what we seem to understand these days, that the conscious mind is just one part, and the “unconscious” is not one thing, but many?
After all, our perception is pre-conscious (i.e. unconscious); the bit that keeps our hearts beating is another; and the part that composed “Kublai khan” for Coleridge is yet another.
I think our minds are complex things, and our conscious minds represent just one of its (many?) parts.
Totally agree. It feels like there’s some hidden layer of consciousness that has a significant impact on us without us being fully aware of it. That’s actually one of the ideas Carl Jung explored, that there are deeper parts of the mind influencing our thoughts, emotions, and behavior without us consciously realizing it.
He expressed a lot of those ideas in The Red Book. I struggled to find a good english version of it, but I really loved the photos and illustrations in it.
I find this confusing. Our so-called unconscious minds are just parts of our minds that we cannot introspectively examine. I.e. not all of our minds are, er, visible to our conscious mind-fragment.
It’s something to do with mind being “off”, not just invisible.
It’s not the part we can’t reach, for the matter of being unreachable, but we can’t understand it as “on”, because it’s “off”; and because it’s “off”, it’s closer to death.
Ongoing death, shedding of past self, is definitely something to do with the unconscious.
However, it’s not death exactly, there’s still activity there.
The unconscious is near-death, and is curved towards where ongoing death, shedding of past self, is occuring.
I have always found the so-called ‘unconscious’ mind fascinating; the ‘conscious’ mind too. But once I got my head around the whole idea, I was left wondering why we get so confused about it, and seem to want to defer to the accepted wisdom, that the conscious mind is the bit in charge, the only bit that matters. I don’t see it quite that way.
Although our minds are wholes, they have internal structure. For want of a better word, I’ll refer to this structure in the form of “mind-fragments”.
< silly story-analogy >
First, there’s mind-fragment A. That’s the one, over there in the corner, shouting out orders. It thinks it’s in charge. It’s the mind-fragment that we call “the conscious mind”, and it’s upset. Why?
Because mind-fragments B–Z are not accessible for it to inspect or examine.
So what? All kinds of things in the world might be confusing, or not quite as we expected them to be, but we still accept them; we don’t have a lot of choice. So what is the big deal that many areas of our minds are not open to inspection by ONE of the other parts?
< / silly story-analogy >
But the final question stands: why do we get so upset that parts of our minds are not open to conscious inspection?
I find this difficult to grasp. Perhaps you could elaborate or explain how the parts of my mind that are not accessible to inspection or awareness are “off, not just invisible”?
The post above, that I just wrote and posted, ‘appeared’ in my conscious mind after I’d returned from a quick shopping trip. Just like Coleridge, but not as captivating. Where did it come from? How did a part of my mind that is “off” compose that post?
