The Role of the Unconscious, 1918
According to the views of this [Freudian] school, man, as a civilised being, is unable to act out a large number of instinctive impulses and wishes, for the simple reason that they are incompatible with law and morality. In so far, therefore, as he wants to adapt himself to society, he is obliged to suppress these wishes. The assumption that man has such wishes is altogether plausible, and the truth of it can be seen at any time by any individual with a little application of honesty.
This process, whereby an inadmissible wish becomes unconscious, is called repression, and distinct from suppression, which presupposes that the wish remained conscious. Altogether repressed and forgotten, the incompatible content – whether it consists of wishes or painful memories – nevertheless exists, and its unperceived presence influences the conscious processes.
The remarkable thing is that they do not confine themselves to purely psychological processes but extend also to physiological ones.
Page 5
…if we reject the exclusively sexual theory of the unconscious and put in its place an energic view of the psyche, we must say that the unconscious contains everything psychic that has not reached the threshold of consciousness, or whose energy charge is not sufficient to maintain it in consciousness, or that will reach consciousness only in the future.
When a thing in forgotten, it does not mean that it is extinguished; it simply means that the memory has become subliminal. Its energy charge has sunk so low that it can no longer appear in consciousness; but, though lost to consciousness, it is not lost to the unconscious.
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Besides things that have been forgotten, subliminal perceptions form part of the contents of the unconscious. These may be sense perceptions occurring below the stimulus-threshold of conscious hearing, or in a peripheral field of vision; or they may be apperceptions, by which are meant perceptions of endo-psychic or external processes.
All this material constitutes the personal unconscious. We call it personal because it consists entirely of acquisitions deriving from personal life. Therefore, when anything falls into the unconscious it is taken up in the network of associations formed by the unconscious material. Associative connections of high intensity may then be produced, which cross over or rise up into consciousness in the form of inspirations, intuitions, “lucky ideas”, and so on.
The concept of a personal unconscious does not, however, enable us fully to grasp the nature of the unconscious. If the unconscious were only personal, it would in theory be possible to trace all the fantasies of an insane person back to individual experiences and impressions. No doubt a large proportion of the fantasy-material could be reduced to his personal history, but there are certain fantasies whose roots in the individuals previous history one would seek for in vain. What sort of fantasies are these? They are, in a word, mythological fantasies. They are elements which do not correspond to any events or experiences of personal life, but only to myths.
Where do these mythological fantasies come from, if they do not spring from the personal unconscious and hence from the experiences of personal life? Indubitably they come from the brain – indeed, precisely from the brain and not from personal memory-traces, but from the inherited brain-structure itself. Such fantasies always have a highly original and “creative” character. They are like new creations; obviously they derive from the creative activity of the brain and not simply from its mnemonic activity. We receive along with our body a highly differentiated brain which brings with it its entire history, and when it becomes creative it creates out of this history, out of the history or mankind. By “history” we usually mean the history which we “make”, and we call this “objective history”. The truly creative fantasy activity of the brain has nothing to do with this kind of history, but solely with that age-old natural history which has been transmitted in living form since the remotest times, namely, the history of the brain structure. And this structure tells its own story, which is the story of mankind: the unending myth of death and rebirth, and of the multitudinous figures who weave in and out of this mystery.
This unconscious, buried in the structure of the brain and disclosing its living presence only through the medium of creative fantasy, is the suprapersonal unconscious. It comes alive in the creative man, it reveals itself in the vision of the artist, in the inspiration of the thinker, in the inner experience of the medium.
The suprapersonal unconscious, being distributed throughout the brain-structure, is like an all-pervading, omnipresent, omniscient spirit. It knows man as he always was, and not as he is at this moment. For this reason, also, the connection with the suprapersonal or collective unconscious means an extension of man beyond himself.
And it is the artist who can tell us most about this sacrifice of the personal man…
Pages 9 – 10
These notes share connection with what David Lewis-Williams says in The Mind in the Cave – How did the same kind of art/vision exist between people who lived thousands of miles apart? Also, V.S. Ramachandran, on ‘Mirror Neurones’, and how these make possible telekinesis. Can also suggest a reason as to why some art by the insane can share similarities. Also, will be good to use as an explanation for where part of the inspiration for the masks come from – may also be linked with ‘Automatic’ forms of writing/drawing (?). Through the masks my artwork tries to reach back through the past to tap into the ‘collective unconscious’, goes backwards to discover consciousness in opposition to into the future, embracing machines as in Posthumanism.
Being a part of the inherited structure of the brain, they are the reason for the identity of symbols and myth-motifs in all parts of the earth.
….to the terror of the primitive man, menacing shadows and nocturnal spectres detach themselves, demanding sacrifices and ceremonies which to out biologically orientated minds seem futile seem futile and meaningless. We laugh at primitive superstitions, thinking ourselves superior, but we completely forget that we are influenced in just as uncanny a fashion as the primitive by this background, which we are wont to scoff at as a museum of stupidities. Primitive man simply has a different theory – the theory of witchcraft and spirits. I find this theory very interesting and very sensible – actually more sensible than the academic views of modern science.
The processes in the unconscious influence us just as much as they do primitives; we are possessed by the demons of sickness no less than they, our psyche is just as much in danger of being struck by some hostile influence, we are just as much the prey of malevolent spirits of the dead, our victims of a magic spell cast by a strange personality.
Page 11
For him, the sensuous immediacy of the object attaches to spiritual phenomena as well. A thought appears to him, he does not think it; it appears to him in the form of a projected sensuous perception, almost like a hallucination, or at least like an extremely vivid dream.
These peculiarities of primitive psychology….are of great importance for an understanding of the collective unconscious. A simple reflection will bear this out. As civilised human beings, we in Western Europe have a history reaching back perhaps 2,500 years. Before that there is a prehistoric period of considerably greater duration, during which man reached the cultural level of, say, the Sioux Indians. Then come the hundreds and thousands of years of Neolithic culture, and before that an unimaginably vast stretch of time during which man evolved from the animal. A mere fifty generations ago many of us in Europe were no better than primitives. The layer of culture, this pleasing patina, must therefore be quite extraordinarily thin in comparison with the powerfully developed layers of the primitive psyche. But it is these layers that form the collective unconscious, together with the vestiges of animality that lose themselves in the nebulous abyss of time.
Page 12
The Soil of every country holds some such mystery. We have an unconscious reflection of this in the psyche: just as there is a relationship of mind to body, so there is a relationship of body to earth…There are people – quite a number of them – who live outside and above their bodies, who float like bodiless shadows above their earth, their earthly component, which is their body.
Page 13
The unconscious is, first and foremost, the world of the past, which id activated by the one-sidedness of the conscious attitude.
At a time when animal magnetism was spreading throughout the Western world as a regular epidemic of table-turning, amounting in the end to a recrudescence of the belief in fetishes (animation of an inanimate object), Robert Mayer elevated the primitive dynamic idea of energy, which rose up from the unconscious and forced itself on him like an inspiration – as he himself describes – to the level of a scientific concept. Meanwhile, the table-turning epidemic burst its bounds altogether and proliferated into spiritualism, which is a modern belief in spirits and a rebirth of a shamanistic form of religion practiced by our remotest forefathers.
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| 'The View form the Back Row' Rene Magritte |
We no more know what the psyche is than we know what life is. They are interpenetrating mysteries, giving us every reason for uncertainty as to how much “I” am the world, and how much “world” is “I”. The unconscious at any rate is real, because it works. I like to visualise the unconscious as a world seen in a mirror: our consciousness presents to us a picture of the outer world, but also of the world within, this being a compensatory mirror-image of the outer world. We could also say that the outer world is a compensatory mirror-image of the inner world. At all events we stand between two worlds, or between two totally different psychological systems of perceptions; between perception of external sensory stimuli and perception of the unconscious. The picture we have of the outer world makes us understand everything as the effect of physical and physiological forces; the picture of the inner world shows everything as the effect of spiritual agencies.
….I am of the opinion that the union of rational and irrational truth is to be found not so much in art as in the symbol per se: for it is the essence of the symbol to contain both the rational and the irrational. It always expresses the one through the other; it comprises both without being either.
Possible explanation for Animism
Closer investigation revealed that the “cause” was an unconscious content of the subject, which, because not recognized by him, apparently transferred itself to the object, and there magnified one of its peculiarities to such proportions that it seemed a sufficient cause for the disturbance.
The fact of projection was first recognized from the disturbances of psychological adaptation. Later, it was recognized also from what promoted adaptation, that is to say from the apparently positive qualities of the object. Here it was the valuable qualities of the subjects’ own personality which he had overlooked that appeared in the object and made it especially desirable.
Page 25
…the world of primitive feeling is not entirely lost on us; it lives on in the unconscious. The further we remove ourselves from it with our enlightenment and rational superiority, the more it fades into the distance, but is all the more potent by everything that falls into it, thrust out by our one-sided rationalism. This lost bit of nature seeks revenge and returns in faked, distorted form, for instance as a tango epidemic, as Futurism, as Dadaism, and all the other crazes and crudities in which our age abounds.
Page 26-27
The question of the relation between conscious and unconscious is not a special question, but one that is bound up in the most informative way with our history, with the present time, and with our view of the world. Very many things are unconscious for us only because our view of the world allows them no room; because with education and training we have never come to grips with them, and, whenever they come into consciousness as occasional fantasies, have instantly suppressed them. The borderline between conscious and unconscious is in large measure determined by our view of the world. That is why we must talk about general problems if we wish to deal adequately with the concept of the unconscious. And if we are to grasp its nature, we must concern ourselves not only with contemporary problems, but also with the history of the human mind.
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