Blog Archive

Monday, 18 September 2017



According to one theory there are three main divisions of mind of which the outer two are conscious and the middle one is unconscious. At the lowest and most embodied level there are the primary emotions, the 'animal soul', lust, fear, play, care, etc., and at the highest there are our thoughts and purposeful intentions: deliberation, reflection and imagination and such 'human' emergents. These are the conscious parts of ourselves, but they are quite different and almost incompatible in quality, the one being immediate and imperious in its demands, and the other being abstract, highly mediated and aware of its mediation, the dialectical soul, perhaps. Between these two, and unconscious are the acquired structuring process that parse the primary emotions so that they can appear before the reflective mind in the form of meanings and motivations. In this layer the primary emotions are represented and in the form of representations they can be bound into more or less stable but arational complexes. When the psychoanalysts talk of primary process in the unconscious it is roughly the activity of this middle layer that they are referring to. What seems to distinguish this view from the psychoanalytic one, however, is that the unconscious is seen as sandwiched between two heterogeneous forms of consciousness. The self could be taken as the whole of these parts, but perhaps it is more properly taken to be a virtual centre located in the unconscious, because only here is there the possibility of the entire structure being reflected within itself. The process of the unconscious is thought-like, but is not thought, neither is it primary emotion - in fact thought is unable to grasp it at all.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.