The Disappearance of the Unconscious (Sorry, Siggie)


The original concept of the unconscious involved a part of the mind hidden from conscious or verbal awareness but which contained all the primitive, childish drives and wishes.  It was able to influence our behavior without our verbal awareness.  Our irrational and animalistic impulses remained comfortably apart from our image of our own character.  Over time the concept took on even more potency to run our lives.

Nowadays, as we watch television, read the papers and books, and watch movies, we see behavior that seems quite primitive even to us.  To the people of Freud's day, in the first half of the 20th century, it would seem animalistic, shocking and outrageous.  We watch it with some amusement and interest. They would have left the room and had bad dreams.

If we had an 'unconscious', what would we bother to bury in it?  We don't bury those impulses anymore.  We are not shamed by them. Actually, we seem to enjoy them at least vicariously. So what has happened?  The unconscious seems to have largely disappeared.
Yet it still appears in peculiar and unique circumstances.  People with rigid and limited self-images or self-concepts find themselves behaving in ways that surprise them (though not those who know them well).  People who are very naive, uneducated or "innocent" seem also to fall prey to "unconscious" impulses.  People from cultures who have a very narrow and limited range of acceptable behaviors or strong religious prohibitions also seem to have problems with their unconscious.

It seems that the "unconscious" is not so much universal as it is a function of denial and repression in certain personality types.   Those behaviors and impulses that are "forbidden" or have been shamed strongly are relegated to the non-verbal sections of the brain.  I imagine this process as being like that of a child shamed by a parent for displaying aggressive or sexual impulses, whose shame strikes at his very self-concept and sense of self-worth.  The child does not want to verbally acknowledge those impulses or admit to them in any way.  However, this does not mean that the impulses will not be acted upon.  It means that the child can express the primitive and instinctual behavior without having to acknowledge that they are a part of his actual self.

So we develop an "unconscious" in situations or circumstances in which an important and emotionally strong impulse is shamed and denied.  Since less and less seems to fall in this category, the unconscious seems to be relegated to those limited circumstance described previously.  No shame or denial equals no unconscious.  We may choose, however, to limit our awareness in order to preserve our "proper" sense of self.