So What Are We Still Pushing Out Of Our Consciousness?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Sigmund Freud at the turn of the twentieth century turned the ideas of his contemporaries about how our minds work. He showed that not all our actions, thoughts and deeds are controlled by the mind, and besides, not everything that happens in our soul is reflected in consciousness.

People began to discuss their insidious thoughts and obscene inclinations, a theoretical basis for the "sexual revolution" and rebellion against sanctimonious traditional values was laid. It would seem that the mechanics of the work of our psyche has become quite understandable, but only beyond the brink of understanding remained what makes us not completely free from our wayward and not always predictable psyche.

Subjection to unconscious impulses and dependence on unconscious life attitudes is noted in all people - even among the extremely rational, erudite, cynical and not subject to any emotions and sentiments.

Sexual energy never conquered

Despite the permanent and already centuries-old sexual revolution, we are still ashamed of talking about sex, we are afraid of sex, and many fall into sexual and love addiction. It is unlikely that in the relationship between the sexes, something significant remained beyond our understanding. The fact is that sex is not just a direct response to our drives, but a social game and a special form of communication, which leads to the inevitable rupture of our subjectivity even in the most narcissistic and egocentric individuals.

Some sociologists and philosophers note a gradual decrease in the percentage of genius people during the twentieth century. And this phenomenon is explained by the fact that the sexual revolution did not liberate the erotic sphere of man, but it did significant damage to the process of sublimation, and we lost the opportunity to feed our intellectual activity and spiritual aspirations with transformed erotic energy.

The will to power, retouched for ambitious aspirations

Some of Freud's followers - for example, Alfred Adler - suggested that we displace from our consciousness not only sexual impulses and lust for possession, but also our desire to participate in wider social games. In particular, we suppress the desire for power and social domination, first within our family, and then we expand our appetite to the desire to dominate as far as our imagination can.

The concept of an "inferiority complex" introduced by Adler, which is formed on the basis of megalomania, has significantly expanded the idea of what impulses and what energies we are displacing from the field of our consciousness.

According to him, many people around us, who are in a state of social apathy, lack of will and lack of energy to implement their plans, found themselves in such a state precisely because they could not cope with their desire for superiority even in childhood. Therefore, those helpless young men or women who cry out to you in a silent prayer for help and support, in fact, look at you with a feeling of ultimate superiority over you, hidden from themselves.

It turned out that it is easier for people to admit to themselves the most obscene sexual desires than in the desire to dominate the people around them. True, in recent decades, large-scale "social psychotherapy" has been carried out, and masses of people striving for superiority have been able to realize themselves in the context of the values of radical liberalism, with its encouragement of ambitious aspirations and moral justification of social inequality.

So what's left on the other side of pleasure?

Freud and his followers were too much involved in the idea of attraction and the principle of reducing the level of mental stress. Following this logic, it was not difficult to assume that the most relaxed state of the psyche is the death of a person. And thus Freud came to the idea that the desire for death in the human soul is primary in comparison with the desire for pleasure. This is a kind of Buddhist path to nirvana.

Freud also identifies a special mechanism - "the principle of obsessive repetition", which occupies a dominant position in the human psyche. But even passing to the other side of the pleasure principle, into another reality, in which other laws seem to function, Freud again speaks of the desire to reduce the level of energy tension in the psyche.

It seems to me that logical problems in Freud's concepts arose because he himself was in the captivity of psychological subjectivism. His professional experience and observation allowed him to notice the obsessive desire of people to reproduce the same basic forms of mental, intellectual and behavioral self-organization. And within the framework of his concept, it would be more logical to talk about the desire for the reproduction of some traditional basic forms of human existence, rather than the desire for death.

Perhaps death is a phenomenon that, in principle, does not fit into the framework of human rationalism, and the human mind is simply unable to comprehend it. For this reason, in our culture, there is a collective desire to oust the topic of death from public consciousness. In cultures that have had and still have the concept of “continuing life after death,” death sometimes becomes a central theme of everyday life.

We can say that modern culture and the traditional forms of life organization reproduced in it are very closely tied to the mechanism of displacement from the public consciousness in general and the consciousness of individual people in particular the theme of death. Naturally, this topic is constantly trying to break through into our agenda, but we are effectively pushing it out of it or simply drowning it out with other, more subject to our minds.

Social trances as a key way of reproducing our culture and organizing life together

Trance is an altered state of consciousness, but it is only usually assumed that it takes us away from an adequate perception of reality, but this is not entirely true. Very often, trance is just the mechanism that allows us to see some kind of slice of our reality in the most vivid, contrasting and saturated with energy and meaningfulness form.

The category of such reality-affirming trances includes, for example, the state of being in love. We can say that a person loses his head at the same time, but, on the other hand, it is in this state that his life is filled with the utmost clarity and meaningfulness, and it is in this state that he most acutely feels that he is living.

Many people are familiar with the agony and heady joy of creativity. It is in the state of spiritual or intellectual inspiration that something new is revealed with the greatest clarity and evidence to a person, and it is in this altered state of consciousness that he can most clearly see "how everything is arranged in this world."

In addition to the above examples of individual trances, there are also collective, social trances. The most noticeable for us are various social fashions or HYIPs that can captivate large groups of people so much that they change their habits and even their way of life. It is for the induction of social trances that such systems as state, party or class ideologies, or marketing technologies to shape lifestyles and consumption patterns, work.

A special resource-intensive and intellectually rich way of inducing social trances is the state education system, as well as various types of elite education. In this case, trances are induced by setting a certain picture of the world and drawing prestigious life scenarios in it.

In principle, social trances, just like individual trances, allow a person to concentrate their attention, energy and other resources on the implementation of some program given from the outside. This allows him not to dissipate and not waste time on painful and energy-consuming reflection or awareness of the foundations of his life and building his own life plans.

We can say that trance is either an alternative to the principle of repressing everything superfluous from consciousness, or one of its varieties. Trance is a specific state of consciousness that allows you to see only what is necessary to maintain a certain lifestyle.

Perhaps we can also talk about some kind of "transitional trances" or mobilization trances. For example, falling in love mobilizes us to start a family. And the ideological sublimation received by a person in the process of training or communication with people already “dedicated to the topic” allows him to change his job, environment, lifestyle.

Psychotherapy is the withdrawal of a person from negative trances

Like many Soviet and Russian psychologists, at the end of the Soviet period and in the first years of the perestroika excitement, which allowed us to join the world experience, I spent a lot of time and effort on mastering what is behind the practice of NLP and Ericksonian hypnosis. I even had a personal experience with Milton Erickson's daughter Betty. She stayed with me several times, coming to Russia with her trainings.

But at some point, it became obvious to me and many of my colleagues that the main task of a psychologist is not hypnosis and not an introduction into a state of trance, but, rather, on the contrary - getting a person out of those persistent negative trances, in which he, for some reason, located.

With this approach, the question naturally arises of what is the reason for a person's immersion in trances that are destructive for him. And what happens to him when he gets rid of these altered states of consciousness. Indeed, very often negative trances become so familiar to a person that outside of them he no longer thinks of any life for himself.

Very often, turning to a psychologist, a person draws both for him and for himself such a picture of the world in which there simply are no other forms of existence for him, except for those in which he is now. This psychological mechanism, following Freud, could be called the “principle of obsessive repetition,” in the semantic framework we have set, it works as a principle of keeping in a state of habitual trance.

But what happens when a person comes out of trance?

Figuratively and somewhat ironically speaking, we note that he falls into a state of "psychological hangover" or a kind of drug withdrawal. But seriously speaking, we can say that he finds himself in the face of emptiness. It is this emptiness that scares our mind, it is it that is displaced from our consciousness. It is better to have something painful, but "something" than nothing.

Heidegger wrote that the main question of philosophy or being can be formulated something like this: "Why is there, and not vice versa - nothing?" The human mind grasps at any entity, as it is very afraid to face this very "nothing".

The same Heidegger liked to quote the famous German poet Hölderlin, who wrote: "It is worthy, but still poetically, a Man lives on this earth."

To a certain extent, we ourselves create for ourselves the reality in which we live.

• It is not so difficult to identify the negative family scenario that your parents imposed on you,
• it is not very difficult to abandon social scenarios borrowed at the unconscious level.

But it is not very easy to create your own picture of the world, in which you have a worthy place and in which you can write your own life scenario.