THE DYNAMIC UNCONSCIOUS

Freud’s notion of what went on in the mind was thus:

Based on introspection, he started with the conscious mind which he connected to the “ego” or one's general feeling of identity and then proposed a superego, which was one’s “best self,” something like a conscience.  But, held down by repression, there was below consciousness the “un-”conscious where there was a lot of stuff that couldn’t be known and a “pre-conscious” where stuff went in and out through dreams, jokes, drifting on the edge of sleep and so on.  The deepest unconscious is also called the “id.” “In Freudian theory, the part of the psyche associated with instinctual, repressed, or antisocial desires, usually sexual or aggressive. In its efforts to satisfy these desires, the id comes into conflict with the social and practical constraints enforced by the ego and superego.”  (online definition)  This is close to the prevalent notion of what society/culture was like.

Sigmund Freud defined libido as "the energy, regarded as a quantitative magnitude ... of those instincts which have to do with all that may be comprised under the word 'love'.  " It is the instinct energy or force, contained in what Freud called the id, the strictly unconscious structure of the psyche." (wiki)  Its shadow is thanatos, the wish to die.

This is invented.  There is no single brain-blob that can be identified as the ego or even the libido.  Freud was scribbling doodles to keep metaphorical ideas clear.  They were dynamic and theoretical, but they were not real.  Yet we have all talked and speculated so much about this little diagram that it seems real.  Esp. to the psychoanalyst, to whom these concepts are very useful and come to account for things otherwise inexplicable.

Since they are based on introspection, what one can think of consciously is the main category.  Then under that is the unconscious -- we are aware that sometimes we do what we didn’t intend, that we remember and other times forget -- sometimes conveniently.  This is Freud’s strongest concept.  It pulls back into the human mind things that to more “primitive” people might be projected out onto the world, so that “the devil made me do it” seems like a good explanation.  People might feel they are somehow under a spell or not really even know how they feel, deceiving themselves somehow.   "Jesus loves me."

Research now has undermined the idea that there is a "truth," something resistant to fantasy.  Memories are as unreal and fluid as everything else.  It appears that a memory is re-assembled every time it comes to mind and thus can accidentally include mistaken ideas. 

The superego was the attempt to keep the ego sorted.  The id was identified with the raw body and all its indecencies, childishness, craving appetites.  In 19^th century Vienna, the highest value was given to rationality, control, fitting one’s culture, staying clean,  being close and obedient to one’s family.  The result was a lot of suffering and an unending source of jokes, which are an effective way to frame ridiculous contradictions.

There have been many other systems since this “egg” was hatched.  Basically the division between the conscious and the unconscious has persisted, but always the unconscious was seen as an undeveloped source of energy, merely an emotional substrate for the refined mind, messy enough to require the ego and superego to keep a lid on it.  And yet psychoanalysis asks for access to all the steaming, roiling mess in order to straighten out misconceptions.  The old Greek mythology has been authentic and powerful enough to provide “pot handles” by which to grasp strong hot stuff.  At least in the Euro-American setting.  But that's NOT universal.

When working with ritual, Victor Turner’s anthopological concept of the “liminal” has proven very useful.  The idea is that the inner life is more like a room than a pot with a lid --  and that one enters it through a sort of door.  A limen is the name of the threshold one steps over.  In this idea the liminal space is sequestered like the unconscious, but it’s like hypnosis in that it gives access to what is not usually conscious and throws off the superego nagging. It allows change.  No shame.

With this concept and some others, the consciousness is a much “smaller” state than "id/animal/flesh".  One might think of consciousness as the circle of light from a spotlight that can be moved around to reveal the dark stage.  Instead of being some kind of volatile animal to be contained, the unconscious becomes a potential to explore in the way an artist might develop a view or narrative.  What one doesn’t know about oneself becomes a potential discovery instead of some kind of inner monster.

But these are all fantasies, metaphors, poetries about a molecular structure interacting electrochemically, that somehow manages to throw up to "view" a small stage, a fraction of the busy city of transactions that supports it. A puppet show. Only recently have we been able to actually SEE things flowing busily around and to identify the organized, though sometimes very small, cellular structures of the body and brain that connect messages from outside the body, messages from the actual tissues and their orientation in the world (Where's "up", where's "North?") and messages about well-being or dysfunction in the gut, the eye, the lung, the heart.

A metaphorical illustration of a human connectome.

At the same time professors and their students have been resourcefully devising ways to reveal how the mind works, sort of parallel to the way cloud chambers can leave traces that imply what particles of the atom are like and what they do.  At first it was a bit of a shock to realize how much of our "rational" decision-making -- thought to be fact-based analysis -- was in fact being managed before it ever got to consciousness and sometimes that level did a much better job of evaluating choices.  “Zen” archery turns out to be a real thing, another way of tapping the knowing unknown, while “overthinking” complex problems can prevent good decisions.

It now appears that what we “feel” as the limen or threshold may be the instant of the connectome rearranging itself to address a new sort of task.  Say, going from writing a poem or even a shopping list, to playing a game of ping pong.  The information/decision flow will connect different points in the brain -- maybe more or maybe less.  Maybe not even in the brain.  But if the space/time is liminal, it will be protected without being secret.

It’s clear that the brain has evolved “consciousness” as we think of it when we use language, which must have been recently evolved.  But on the whole, brain evolution is not simply cumulative -- rising steadily up from fish to animal to human.  It may be that some new twist appears, but it’s possible and likely that sometimes it may be a dropped-out bit that has opened up possibilities by eliminating some blockage or sidetrack.  Clearly there are long nerve connections that go down into the legs, but also it seems that some of the newest and more powerful abilities are in individual cells, like mirror cells that enable empathy.  It’s likely that human beings will not evolve by growing wheels on their feet or by being patched in to iPods, but by finding new uses and connections for cells that are already there.  What is the autonomic nervous system up to these days?

Heather Berlin

Heather Berlin is a researcher who addresses these matters.  She’s VERY smart and quite beautiful, which means she is (and must be) meticulous in her thinking and carefully watched by others.  I’m going to spend some time today on an article she wrote for “Neuropsychoanalsis" 2011,13(1) called “The Neural Basis of the Dynamic Unconscious".  It’s so “sourced”, linked to previous research, that it’s hard to read, but I’ll see what I can do.  Freud’s unconscious, you notice, is still being used as though it were a unified entity, but “dynamic” is a good word: the unconscious is not just a junk pile -- it’s doing something, flashing along the connectome in electrochemical transmissions, jumping synapses, and -- only an hour or so ago making me dream.  

by Adolfo 1111

Dream.  “I had taken a train to Chanticleer, a medieval town with a stone wall along a river and some buildings that seemed to be small castles once but are now converted to business, so the nearest one had a huge sign advertising beer.  I was attending partly for a conference but was proud of myself for putting on a backpack and wandering the town.  One of the fellow attendees was trying to get my attention and called my name.  He was very fat and crouched behind the railing of an old stone bridge.  Then he threw a rock.  It was a black gritty one with tiny blue sparkling crystals embedded in it.”

Interpretation.  I free-associate to a long ago meeting in Halifax that looks rather like Bruges in my mind.  I had posted a photo of Bruges recently.  Also I ran across a photo from that Halifax meeting, which was chilly.  (My electric mattress pad had turned itself off.)  I suspect that Corky came over to look at my sink drain while I was still asleep -- I wrote between 3AM and 5AM, then went back to sleep) and called my name.  I have another friend who does this sort of work -- he's had surgery in Spokane that reduced his weight by a fourth or a third, but I haven't seen him since then.   (I'm trying to lose weight.)   I had read something about the imposingly big female knight, Briana, in "Game of Thrones" who was saved by the idea that she was from the Island of Sapphires.  The rooster was a little figure I'd torn out of a magazine for my painting morgue that keeps floating around on my desk without getting filed.

NO revelations of the future.  Just scraps.