Unconscious

“ How vast and powerful are those hidden organs of the Unconscious Personality we can only dimly see. It is through them that Divine revelation is vouchsafed to man. The visions of the mystic, the prophecies of the seer, the inspiration of the sibyl, all come through this Unconscious Soul. It is through this dumb and suppressed Ego that we communicate by telepathy,—that thought is transferred without using the five senses. ”

“ The unconscious, representing as it does all the past experiences of life that have been conserved, is not limited to any particular type of experiences; nor are the subconscious and conscious processes to which it gives rise more likely to be determined by any particular antecedents, such as those of childhood, as some would have us believe. Nor are these motivated by any particular class of emotional instincts or strivings of human personality. ”

“ It is obvious that, so long as the setting to a central idea remains organized and conserved in the unconscious, the corresponding perception and meaning are always liable under favoring conditions (such as fatigue, ill health, etc.) to be switched into consciousness and replace the new formed perception. ”

“ THE UNCONSCIOUS Our studies up to this point have led us to the general conclusion that a large measure of the experiences of life are conserved or deposited in what may be called a storehouse of neurographic dispositions or residua. This storehouse is the unconscious. From this storehouse our conscious processes draw for the material of thought. Further, a large amount and variety of evidence, which we have briefly and incompletely reviewed, has shown that conserved experiences may function without arising into consciousness, i.e., as a subconscious process. ”

“ It is entirely unconscious of the meanings, and does not know what to call that which it sees. Something complete appears, it seems to me, not indeed through the being itself, but through a participation. For you enkindle fire from fire, and you receive the whole fire ”

“ When a thought or feeling comes into the mind without antecedents in consciousness so that we suppose it to have come from the unconscious, I shall not speak of the thought as having arisen unconsciously but unwittingly. Similarly, I shall speak of the process of suggestion as taking place unwittingly and not unconsciously, leaving open how far the source of the suggested thought or behaviour is in the "unconscious" as the term will be used in this book. ”

“ So that the powerful subjectivity of the unconscious, where the self is all-in-all unto itself, active in strong desirous psychic assimilation or in direct repudiation of the contiguous universe; this first plane of psychic activity, polarized in the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion of each individual but established in a circuit with the corresponding poles of another individual: this is the first scope of life and being for every human individual, and is beyond question. ”

“ In the first sense the adjective is used, as in the phrase “unconscious process” to define a process of which we are unaware without connotation as to whether it is a psychological process or a brain process; also the noun (The Unconscious) is used to signify something not in awareness regardless of whether that something is psychological or not; on the other hand, as an adjective it is also used, as in the phrase “unconscious ideas,” to specifically signify real ideas of which we are unaware. ”

“ Let us first consider the concept of the unconscious. I have here introduced the unconscious under the conception of a psychological function, namely, the function of the sum of all those psychic contents which do not reach the threshold of consciousness. I have divided the unconscious materials into personal—that is to reminiscences attributable to personal experiences, combinations and tendencies—and into impersonal collective contents, that is, those whose contents cannot be attributed to personal experiences. ”

“ He wishes rather to convey, we imagine, that which recoils from consciousness, that which reacts in the psyche away from mental consciousness. 27His unconscious is, we take it, that part of the human consciousness which, though mental, ideal in its nature, yet is unwilling to expose itself to full recognition, and so recoils back into the affective regions and acts there as a secret agent, unconfessed, unadmitted, potent, and usually destructive. The whole body of our repressions makes up our unconscious. ”

“ The unconscious as a fundamental of personality.—A survey of all the facts and their relations, which I have outlined in the preceding lectures, brings into strong relief the important principle that no matter in what state complexes of ideas are formed, so long as they are conserved, they become a part of our personality. ”

“ The true unconscious is the well-head, the fountain of real motivity. The sex of which Adam and Eve became conscious derived from the very God who bade them be not conscious of it—it was not spawn produced by secondary propagation from the mental consciousness itself. ”

“ HUMAN RELATIONS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS The aim of this little book is merely to establish the smallest foothold in the swamp of vagueness which now goes by the name of the unconscious. At last we form some sort of notion what the unconscious actually is. ”

“ When we speak of a thing as being “unconscious” we must not forget that from the point of view of the functioning of the brain a thing may be unconscious to us in two ways—physiologically or psychologically. I shall only deal with the subject from the latter point of view. So that for our purposes we may define the unconscious as “the sum of all those psychological events which are not apperceived, and so are unconscious.” ”

“ The setting in obsessions.—This question of the functioning of unconscious complexes as subconscious processes is of fundamental importance for psychology, whether normal or abnormal, and if well established gives an entirely new aspect to its problems. ”

“ It is the unconscious, rather than the conscious, which is the important factor in personality and intelligence. The unconscious furnishes the formative material out of which our judgments, our beliefs, our ideals, and our characters are shaped.
In the second place, the unconscious, besides being a static storehouse, has dynamic functions. It is evident that, theoretically, if unconscious complexes are once formed they may, under favoring conditions of the psycho-physical organism, become revived and play an important part in pathological mental life. ”

“ For life is an expression, our unconscious actions the constant betrayal of our innermost thought. ”

“ Theoretically, we may say that everything goes on in the realm of the unconscious just as in consciousness, only without a message to me; that in clear consciousness the work may be followed up step by step, while in unconsciousness it proceeds likewise, but unknown to us. ”

“ The unconscious is the realm of all the experiences, memories, impulses, and inclinations which during the subject’s life have been condemned by the standards of the conscious, have proved incompatible with it and have therefore been outlawed from it. This banishment in no way deprives these excluded mental processes of their energy, and they constantly influence the feelings and behaviour of the subject. ”

“ Indeed, our reactions to the environment, our moral and social conduct, the affective reactions of our sentiments, instincts, feelings, and other conative tendencies, our “habits,” judgments, points of view, and attitudes of mind—all that we term character and personality—are predetermined by the mental experiences of the past by which they are developed, organized, and conserved in the unconscious. Otherwise all would be chaos. We are thus the offspring of our past and the past is the present. ”

“ I speak of the unconscious, though there are objections to the use of the word, which may lead to such a contradiction of terms as 'unconscious knowledge'. It is much more than a storehouse of memories: it is the seat of mental processes which take place unknown to us and are revealed at times in strange and unexpected ways. ”

“ Our unconscious is not quite the same as that of the philosophers and what is more, most philosophers wish to know nothing of the “psychical unconscious.” But if you will put yourselves in our position, you will understand that the interpretation of this unconscious, in patients’ psychic life, into the conscious, must result in a correction of their deviation from the normal, and in an abrogation of the compulsion controlling their psychic life. ”

“ As soon as we recognise that suggestion is essentially a process of the unconscious, and that its different aspects also have this nature, we have to renounce the clearness of definition which is possible in the case of the processes and products of consciousness. We have to be content with a concept which has a certain vagueness when considered from the purely psychological standpoint, while still remaining capable of exact use from the standpoint of biology. ”

“ In the unconscious these remain more or less permanently fixed as limited ideas, sentiments, and systems of complexes. Further, those complexes of experiences which persist not only provide the material for our memories, but tend, consciously or unconsciously, to shape the judgments, beliefs, convictions, habits, and tendencies of our mental lives. Whence they came, how they were born, we have long ceased to remember. We often arrive at conclusions which we imagine in our ignorance we have constructed at the moment unaided out of our inner consciousness. ”

“ As with unconscious processes, any conserved experience of life, under certain conditions and given certain other factors, may thus function coconsciously, particularly if organized with and activated by an innate emotional disposition. So we may have subconscious processes both without and with conscious equivalents. ”

“ The unconscious subjectivity is, in its positive manifestation, a great imbibing, and in its negative, a definite blind rejection. What we call an unconscious rejection. This subjectivity 73embraces alike creative emotion and physical function. It includes alike the sweet and untellable communion of love between the mother and child, the irrational reaction into separation between the two, and also the physical functioning of sucking and urination. Psychic and physical development run parallel, though they are forever distinct. ”

“ All dormant ideas with their feeling tones and conative tendencies belong to our personality, but they may be arranged with varying instincts and innate dispositions into a number of differentiated systems, each synthesized into a corresponding 256personality. In the unconscious may be conserved a vast number of life’s experiences ranging in time almost from the cradle to the grave. The hopes, the wishes, the anxieties of childhood may still be there, lying fallow, but capable of injecting themselves under favoring conditions into our personalities. ”

“ All happens as if subconscious processes had been at work, as if the problem had been going through a subconscious incubation, switching in this and switching in that set of facts, and presenting them to consciousness, the final selection of the deciding point of view being left to the latter. The subconscious garners from the storehouse of past experiences, those which have a bearing on the question and are required for its solution, brings them into consciousness, and then our logical conscious processes form the judgment. ”

“ Through the conception of the subconscious as resolvable, on the one hand, into the unconscious, passive or active physiological dispositions, and, on the other hand, into coactive conscious states, the subconscious becomes simplified and intelligible. It offers a basis on which may be constructed comprehensible theories of memory, suggestibility, post-hypnotic phenomena, dreams, automatic writing and similar phenomena, artificial hallucinations, the protean phenomena of hysteria, and the psycho-neuroses, as well as the mechanism of thought. ”

“ For though the unconscious is the creative element, and though, like the soul, it is beyond all law of cause and effect in its totality, yet in its processes of self-realization it follows the laws of cause and effect. The processes of cause and effect are indeed part of the working 42out of this incomprehensible self-realization of the individual unconscious. The great laws of the universe are no more than the fixed habits of the living unconscious. ”

“ All that we are thus able to discover becomes, ipso facto, of no further moment as a content of the unconscious, and we may then expect to find only those things contained in the unconscious which we have not found in the conscious mind. ”

“ In the case of some college students who merged into neuroses I could convince myself that the unconscious pleasure derived from the nonsense produced by them is just as much responsible for their mistakes as their actual ignorance. ”

“ Reverse this belief, and the results would be perceptibly different.
The unconscious thought, in the corporeal substratum of mortal mind, produces nothing; and that condition of Substratum of the mind. the body which we call sensation, is erroneous; but mortal mind is ignorant of itself, — ignorant of the errors it includes, and of their effects upon the body. ”

“ A sentiment, being an idea about which a system of emotional dispositions has been organized, when repressed by conflict, or when simply out of mind, whether capable of reproduction as memory or not, may, like all ideas, still be conserved, as we have seen, as an unconscious neurogram. As we have also seen, so long as it is conserved it is still a part of the personality. Even though repressed it is not necessarily absolutely inhibited but may be simply dissociated and then be able to take on dissociated subconscious activity. ”