I was up late the other night questioning the validity of the term “unconscious mind.”
When I was very young, the material I read about the unconscious (or the subconscious as it is sometimes called) led me to believe that it was a mysterious and intelligent entity that connived and planned with foresight and its own set of goals. After reading the psychological literature about unconscious processes more recently, I have come to see them as inadvertent reflexes, misunderstood impulses, and generally just a side effect of the way memory interacts with consciousness. The unconscious is more a series of discrete, unrelated processes than anything that has the cohesion and sophistication to be comparable to consciousness. To me, this illusion of an unconscious entity dissipated to become no longer a mind, no longer another entity that shares my head. The unconscious is not a mind, is not an entity and anthropomorphizing it using human adjectives may be fun but is misleading. Or is it?
Is it equally as anthropomorphic to attribute beliefs and other high-order cognitive states to our conscious mind? Another major theme that has emerged in this discourse is the piecemail, fragmentary, irrational, unsystematic, unreliable nature of conscious processes. Many studies have shown that we are just a bundle of instincts and impulses and that there is often very little true continuity even in our conscious lives. These findings along with things like the cohesiveness and meaningfulness of my dreams, my Freudian slips and my intuition has urged me to reconsider. Perhaps if I am going to consider my consciousness to constitute a mind despite the fact that it is insubstantial in many ways, then it is only fair to permit unconsciousness the same nominal privilege. Withholding this distinction from unconsciousness could be considered existential hypocrisy.
When I was very young, the material I read about the unconscious (or the subconscious as it is sometimes called) led me to believe that it was a mysterious and intelligent entity that connived and planned with foresight and its own set of goals. After reading the psychological literature about unconscious processes more recently, I have come to see them as inadvertent reflexes, misunderstood impulses, and generally just a side effect of the way memory interacts with consciousness. The unconscious is more a series of discrete, unrelated processes than anything that has the cohesion and sophistication to be comparable to consciousness. To me, this illusion of an unconscious entity dissipated to become no longer a mind, no longer another entity that shares my head. The unconscious is not a mind, is not an entity and anthropomorphizing it using human adjectives may be fun but is misleading. Or is it?
Is it equally as anthropomorphic to attribute beliefs and other high-order cognitive states to our conscious mind? Another major theme that has emerged in this discourse is the piecemail, fragmentary, irrational, unsystematic, unreliable nature of conscious processes. Many studies have shown that we are just a bundle of instincts and impulses and that there is often very little true continuity even in our conscious lives. These findings along with things like the cohesiveness and meaningfulness of my dreams, my Freudian slips and my intuition has urged me to reconsider. Perhaps if I am going to consider my consciousness to constitute a mind despite the fact that it is insubstantial in many ways, then it is only fair to permit unconsciousness the same nominal privilege. Withholding this distinction from unconsciousness could be considered existential hypocrisy.
