How can we start to understand the mass investment in an economic ideology that exploits and brutalizes the vast majority of its participants? Why does racism persist despite all effort to educate or legislate it away? Why the hysterical response to President Trump specifically despite the majority of former presidents being involved in similar if not worse political, economic, and international atrocities? What may be the reason that rates of depression and anxiety continue to rise even though mental health discourse and people attending therapy are at an all time high?
“Psychoanalysis is the study of how we maintain not knowing what we know.”
- Matthew Steinfeld professor at Yale School of Medicine.
Looking at the world around us and trying to make some sense out of the disorientation many of us feel, psychoanalytic theory has a lot to offer that I believe is currently missed when we fail to acknowledge the reality of the unconscious. So much of today’s dominant ideologies rely on both the repression and / or disavowal of reality, or, of what we know. We cannot ignore looking at the unconscious if we want to begin understanding this human phenomena of maintaining not knowing what we know.
The existence of an unconscious is a crucial concept for the psychoanalytic project, but because of other popularized notions of psychoanalysis and psychology, I want to clarify the concept.
The first notion we should be critical of is that the unconscious is synonymous with the idea of a subconscious. A common metaphor used to illustrate the idea of a human subconscious is the image of an iceberg - where the tip of the iceberg emerging from the ocean’s surface represents our conscious life and thought, and the monstrosity of the iceberg beneath the surface represent our subconscious life and thought. You might also hear imagery along the lines of excavation or exploration - digging down into yourself to explore the subconscious depths of your psyche - or your “true self” that exists subconsciously somewhere at your inner core. This concept is found in Jungian Depth Psychology, which is distinct from the Freudian psychoanalytic project.
This mistakenly treats the unconscious as a thing (or a state or a place) that exists as distinct and opposed to consciousness as a thing (or a state or a place) that exists within the psyche. A better way to understand the unconscious is as a negativity, or a lack, or a “nothing” that operates as a distortion of our consciousness. The unconscious in actuality lives inconspicuously on the surface, hiding in plain sight, in a manner that renders its influence on us visible not through deep excavation, but in our everyday speech, thought, and actions.
While a subconscious implies a hierarchy of consciousness, an unconscious, to quote Freud, tells us that “the ego is not the master in its own house.”
When it comes to the human psyche, psychoanalysis’ popularity has been eclipsed in the United States by Jungian depth psychology along with the rise of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (and other therapeutic mechanisms aimed at helping subjects adjust back into acceptable capitalist society). In light of this eclipse, the unconscious isn’t often at the forefront of “the discourse.” The idea that we don’t have complete and conscious control over our psychical life has remained controversial and disorienting. However, if you’ve experienced a Freudian slip, have inexplicably self sabotaged a relationship or opportunity, or you acknowledge that the reason we think we do things may not always be the real reason we do them, then congratulations, you actually already believe in an unconscious.
Here we see a sublime example of the unconscious presenting itself in plain sight - where what was consciously intended to be spoken is completely overridden by a truer repressed reality.
So, how can this subjective aspect of our individual lives help inform us socially, politically, and culturally? While the unconscious operates in the psyche of the individual, its formation is intrinsically tied to our communal existence as subjects in a society.
For French psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan, the unconscious originates in us primarily because we are beings of language. When we learn to speak, we’re constantly being confronted with the miscommunication inherent to language. There is a fundamental gap - an impossibility - in language and its ability to completely and fully communicate reality. Especially the reality of our experiences as subjects. We’ve all known the feeling that comes with trying to intimately explain an experience or idea that you have, and knowing that your articulation of it falls short of conveying its true essence.
We experience this impossibility (or lack) explicitly when we try to speak to (or hear from) “the other” - meaning another human. Encountering our explicit separateness and alienation from this other is traumatic, and cannot be incorporated into our conscious life. The first instance of this may be a child recognizing its parent as other, separate and unknowable to itself. Our desire for recognition from the other, as well as our desire to know the other, becomes a primary force that motivates us, albeit unconsciously. In a dialectical relationship, our experience as an individual subject is where the unconscious operates, but its manifestation is completely dependent on our encounter with the other.
If I was the only person who existed, there would be no need for language to exist. Without language, there is no encounter with the gap in how we attempt to communicate reality, therefor there is no unconscious. The existence of the unconscious is only possible with existence of the other and our relation to them. It is in this sense that the unconscious is social.
This formulation brings the unconscious beyond the bounds of individual psychical life and shows us how it is inherently connected to society. It isn’t communal in the sense that there is a “collective unconscious,” shared on some cosmic mass level, but rather because the unconscious is a human phenomena, and humans are communal creatures. Because of this, we shouldn’t be surprised when we see symptoms develop in social, cultural, political, and economic contexts just like an analyst would see with an individual undergoing psychoanalysis.
Without the acknowledgement of an unconscious from which these symptoms arrive, we’ll always be stuck observing these symptoms as things to address in and of themselves. In a culture where we love to treat symptoms in perpetuity and hand out diagnoses like candy, it makes sense that a more radical way to analyze and intervene hasn’t become the dominant methodology.
Often times, a diagnosis of a problem based solely on a presenting symptom, can actually act as a means of maintaining not knowing what we know. Symptoms arise in order to re-enforce the repression of knowledge that lives in the unconscious, and getting to the root of a symptom often means facing a reality that is even more traumatic than the symptom itself.
It seems as though we’re living through a time where not knowing what we know is becoming increasingly difficult. As capitalisms contradictions continue to reveal themselves, as children continue to be sacrificed for the sake of political gain and ideological purity, and as the tyranny of happiness and self improvement continue to render us anxiety ridden and discontent, Freud put it best himself when he said:
Unexpressed emotions never die. They’re buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.
and now the tok of the week
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