The Unconscious’s Search for Consciousness

The two concepts of consciousness and unconsciousness are the most principal concepts in psychoanalysis. Consciousness is easy to define and deal with because it relates to awareness and is the condition of regular mentation. However, the concept of unconsciousness is most puzzling. The prefix ‘un’ when added to consciousness, it opens the door for multiplicity of meanings ranging from ‘not’ conscious to the reverse of consciousness, which is not within the field of psychoanalysis. Freud and analysts after him used the term unconscious in a variety of capacities, which is not unusual in human sciences. But, the absence of a recognized meaning of unconsciousness in keeps psychoanalysis deteriorating because it allows false psychoanalyses to compare with what is supposed to be the right one.

This post is an attempt to address the puzzling question of psychoanalysis: what is unconsciousness? Is it something we assume its existence; thus, we keep searching for it-in psychoanalysis- almost in a sleep walking fashion? Or is it something we feel its presence in us but do not know how it existed in us in the first place! We should remind ourselves that the unconscious (adjective) existed in our life form the beginning of the distinctiveness of homosapien from the rest of the primates. It started to raise eyebrows only when Freud brought it to our attention. He began talking about  the unconscious as noun (something specific) but gradually realised that ‘unconsciousness’ is an adjective of different and varied psychical process. He was even more ardent in giving it a primacy in psychical life, considering it an integral part of anything conscious issue.

A question arises in that context:  How could someone who is fundamentally conscious learn of the existence of unconsciousness, i.e., become conscious of unconsciousness?

Background:

Freud’s discovery of the unconscious was a long trip. He recognised that part of consciousness could be forced out of consciousness in some circumstances creating what he called repressed unconscious. Then he realised that consciousness is not the natural state of affaires because it is selective and the rest the mental activity gets systemically removed from consciousness and become an unconscious system. Later, he realised that the systemic unconscious leaves disguised marks in in consciousness. Those marks, he called none repressed unconscious. In real terms, the none repressed unconscious (conscious but disguised) means that both consciousness and unconsciousness coexist in the same psychical act. They are not qualitatively distinguishable or different, yet one gets a place in attention while the other has to be deduced.

Having that in mind and also being curious to know how could we extricate the unconscious from consciousness since they coexist, made me wonder about myths as a possible model of the hidden unconscious in consciousness. In a late posting I wondered about Jocasta’s part in the Oedipus Myth, or her disguised role in making the myth be about to be about the taboo of the incest. I got into an interesting but short exchange of views with a senior and very experienced analyst regarding psychoanalysis and mythology. The main point in the exchange was whether psychoanalysts could say something about myths, or do myths say something to psychoanalysts. In the first case myth would be treated as historical events (conscious material) thus its characters could be treated as personifation[aF1]  of regular human attributes. In the second case a myth would be an implicit (unconscious!) statement about a human condition disguised in a situation (not an event). We are still creating myths; the Pope is still creating saints, and none religious people create mythical heroes from politicians, artists, and others. Americans’ adoration, if not idolization, of their ‘forefathers’ is modern myth-creation and its unconscious message is not very unconscious. Therefore, the effort to look at myth as a way to understand unconsciousness seemed reasonable. The distinction between a myth and a historical event is in the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious in both. In the myth, the unconscious is hidden within the seemingly quasi conscious events. This is what gives the myth its unconscious messaging quality. The Oedipus myth is not about some characters manipulated by ‘destiny’ to set up a human drama; it is a human drama, created unconsciously by conscious minds to say something unconscious about family intra-dynamics. The Oedipus myth is -unconsciously-about the taboo of incest in family structure (The taboo of incest is the most important achievement of homosapiens in regard to separating themselves from the rest of the high primates). A historical event – on the hand- is empty of any unconsciousness even if it implies that it will unconsciously cause future changes.   

Few days after that exchange with my  colleague I remembered a discussion-of few years earlier among some friends about Greek Tragedies and the birth of Theatre (one of the people present corrected the notion that ‘theatre’ is a Greek invention stating the discovery of a hieroglyphic text of a play in one of the historical digs that went back to the second pharaonic dynasty (of the fourth century BC). Remembering that meeting reminded me of a very interesting and extremely important question that the archeologist in the group raised: Why did we (whoever the we were) created Theatre? A little later it came to my mind that theatre, whether Greek or Egyptian, began in parallel to the early creation of myths: theatre was devoted -then- to performing the popular myths of the age. The enactment of myth was also part of celebrating religious occasions. Theatre was the spoken text of mythology ‘par excellence’.

 As psychoanalysts, we learn that dreams are wish fulfillment. A dream is a scene in which the wish is already performed and fulfilled (the Irma Dream). Therefore, it is safe- at least- to say that acting a myth on theatre makes it come across as a real event or as an actuality. It also becomes a scene of fulfillment and frustration of conflicting wishes. The theatre goer watches a fictional scene as a reality for the duration of the acting, at least, without noticing or being aware (unconscious) of his state of mind that did not make the distinction between reality and fiction. This is exactly what the dreamer does by not waking up whatever the dream is saying. It is also safe to say that the great evolution in theatrical creations worldwide, including movies and other contemporary means of expressing ideas is still functioning as enactment of something dormant and silent within the subject, i.e., unconscious. Watching an enactment paralyzes or abolishes the critical functions of consciousness for a while. Just as examples: in “Gone with the Wind” Gable and Lee acted a dramatic story that could have actually happened during the Civil War in America. However, people watched the movie as a story but in the back of their minds it was also the story of the North (Gable) and the South (Lee), and the tragedy that at the end finally made Gable (the North) “walk out of his marriage without giving a damn”.  Myths are made of the fabric of dreams, as theatre is made of the fabric of dreaming.  

I reached a comfortable position in regard to the possible relation between consciousness and unconsciousness from comparing myth to history. Put a little better, a myth is unconsciousness disguised in what looks like conscious, while history is consciousness disguising as unconsciousness intention.

The puzzle got a little clearer but the problem remained unsolved clinically. Where is the conscious and the unconscious in the work of psychoanalysing?

A Surprize in a Gift:

A few weeks ago, a friend gave me a book as gift, entitled “Hermopolis” (Author: Mervat Nasser). Hermopolis is the name of an old city that existed in Pharaonic Egypt (there is still a city near its original place). The book deals with an ancient book of wisdom entitled Hermetica. Hermetica is initially a text that combined the wisdom and philosophy of the Pharaonic God Thoth or Tehuti, and Hermes the Greek God. It originated in the old Egyptian city of Hermopolis, then moved to Alexandria to get assimilated in the Greek text, and was known since as The Hermetica.  Tehuti, the Egyptian God was ‘lord of the divine words who invented the hieroglyphs. He also put thoughts and speech into form [thus] encapsulating the ‘information’ of the world into the words (logos)” (Nasser, p.16.).

This piece of information about Tehuti surprized me, if not shocked me. Egyptians, created their spoken language and realized the core of its nature but did not consciously own their discovery. The detail of Tehuti putting thoughts and speech together into form [thus]encapsulating the ‘information’ of the world in words (logos) is evidence that the Egyptians were conscious of the intricacies their language, but just retroactively (knowledge that came back to them from the God they themselves created).  They spoke and exchanged ideas, feelings, and many other psychical issues correctly, and did that without any conscious effort. Yet, they had to created a God whom they considered the initiator of that magical world of speech and meaning to explain the marvel of language. They also invented a way to write that speech so people could know about things beyond the time of speaking but ascribed that too to Tehuti. What surprised me was the process of unconsciously creating language and also creating the God who made what is done unconsciously become conscious. This could well mean that consciousness is an after-effect, a re-cognition, or a reaction to unconsciousness (I published in 2014 a book suggesting that we should call the psychoanalytic unconscious ‘a-conscious’, to bypass the notion of the primacy of consciousness). The evolution of human mind allowed humans to gradually  reclaimed most of what was previously attributed to the God(s).  We could assume that basically myths are product of something similar to the creation of the Gods, i.e., they represent affairs and concerns that preoccupied humans at the dawn of civilization, but unconsciously.  

The Primacy of the Unconscious:

 The combination of the book of Tehuti and the myth of the God Hermes in early Greek thought created the book of Hermetica (the first-second centuries AD). Hermetica became a main basis to build upon future thought, knowledge, and culture. Better, the principles of learning about things stayed in the roots of Hermetica. The authors of the book about Hermetica tackled this fact almost unconsciously. In 1460 the manuscripts of the book were translated by Cosimo De’Medichi and given to the Platonic University of Florence. Mervat Nasser, the  author of the book I got as gift, is an Egyptian psychiatrist (British educated and trained) gave a brief but elegant journey from the date of the translation of the Hermetica to modernity, revealing the direct and indirect impact of the Hermetica on the evolving European thought from its origins to William James and Carl Yung. She did move from the old to the recent, showing in a very palpable way how the book Hermetica continued to influence human thought-indirectly- till now. The way the whole matter of the Gods who knew the what and the how, and the continuation of unfolding knowledge to actualize more revelations over the years, forced on me the idea that knowledge is discovering the unconscious unconsciously. What I mean is that moving from the belief that Tehuti created language to De Saussure structuralism, in the early thirties, is a continuous unconscious process of searching for consciousness and turning it into knowledge. I would say that ‘knowledge’ is a human product that starts and grows unconsciously, and gets more sophisticated but remains disguised so the subjective achievement remains unclaimed until it acquires the quality of consciousness. Similarly, Feud’s concept of the none repressed unconscious is the final upshot of the concept of the unconscious as repressed consciousness. Lacan’s reference of the unconscious as “the other” (the not me) is consciousness of the unconscious. Moreover, when we go back the split of ‘unconsciousness’ of consciousness we could trace back to Descartes’s Cogito. 

The Clinical Dealing With Unconsciousness.

The pharaonic Egyptians first created Tehuti out of the fabric of unconscious imagination, then let him bring to their domain of consciousness what they have already unconsciously knew. This process kept going, as Nasser condensed well, until it reached Freud who gave us the conscious knowledge of the unconscious.  A young bright candidate was ‘keen’ to know how the analyst reaches the unsaid in what is said. During that particular part of her analysis she mentioned the movie of the Wizard of OZ frequently, and she pondered the symbolic meaning of the Wizard’s deeds in the movie. From the way she talked about the Wizard I likened him to her as the analyst. The wizard realized the unobvious that remained unconscious to the three disgruntled characters.  He gave each the equivalent of what they unconsciously wanted: courage, mind, and compassion represented in something obvious that is equivalent to tuning the unconscious into consciousness. Although my intervention did not seem to engender the desired insight about the unconscious transferiantial nature of the character of the wizard the analysand made major and foundational progress after that intervention.

The issue is how could we notice and interpret the unconscious in the conscious material he conveys to us. We all ask the patient to ‘free associate’ and tell us what comes to his mind without censorship. Free association- as a way of talking- is not possible, because of the transcendence of consciousness over that lower level of consciousness. A Lacanian supervised brought to my attention what I should convey to the patient about the process of analysis: talk freely in order to know, not about what you already know. The patients who are capable of doing that, or whenever they are capable of doing it show something particular about their analyses. They talk, know, then become conscious of what they have said. They invariably realise that they said something they dis not notice till the analyst showed them. A better way to say it: the patient talks to find out-sometimes- by the help of the analyst that they unexpectedly understand something that was implicit in what they said. A patient commented on the analyst’s silence and limited participation in process by saying ‘like my father who was a man of little words’. He continued to say that he became worse after my mother’s death and his condition worsened. I heard him ‘not saying that his father’s depression got worse’.  As I made that unconscious notion come to focus the patient came up with a rich description of his family history and his father’s depression and passivity. A great deal of reconstruction was thus possible. The patient’s new understanding is new consciousness. The unconscious turns into consciousness only if it becomes knowledge. Consciousness emanating from knowledge is the material for a better awareness of the identity.

Back to our Main Question:

Like the Egyptians who sought after something to display their knowledge of their language by creating the God Tehuti, the patients display their knowledge of heir unconscious wishes in symptoms and several other features psychological life that are in the fall in sphere of consciousness. The idea that the unconscious is separate from consciousness and has to be retrieved from other location in the psychical structure is the error that analyst easily do, and that needs arguing. What we suggest to the patient to do is to free associate and tell us anything that come to his mind. If the patient does that (thanks to its difficulty if not impossibility he does not do it) the analyst would not have material to work with; only quasi psychotic gibberish. A Lacanian supervisor’s gesture clarified to me three core ideas about psychoanalysing:

A.      Whatever the patient says carries a corresponding unconscious meaning within it. Extracting the unconscious from the related conscious material is the work of psychoanalysis, and what distinguishes a good psychoanalyst from a not so good one. 

B.      The way the analyst reaches and underline the unconscious to the patient requires from him to be carful in his choice of words. The same material will come back in a different context and should have the chance to be reinterpreted, and get an interpretation that is similar or complimentary to the previous one.

C.      Handling the elicited unconscious requires from the analyst to make it come from the conscious material that it came in its context. Otherwise the interpretation would more of information than the conscious equivalent of the unconscious revealed. The patient has to notice the existence of something unconscious in what he imparted for the unconscious turns into consciousness.

Conclusion:

The unconscious is disavowed consciousness. It is conscious material which the subject does not acknowledge owning at a previous time. Disavowal is not denial or negation of a link with the conscious material, it is total absence of recognition of the material. Thus, the patient I mentioned above did not at any previous point in his relationship with his father realised that his father was depressed; he was just a man of few words. Literally speaking he was unconscious of depression until depression hit him as an undeniable description of his father condition, which worsened with the depression for loosing his wife.

Unconsciousness is disavowal of consciousness.  

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