Is the unconsious inborn or received?
It may seem that the unconscious is formed in parallel with the development of the human personality, as the most disturbing and frightening experiences are displaced. This is only partially true. Psychoanalysts specify: it appears at the moment when the child mastery of speech. Freud believed that the unconscious includes not only what is being displaced (forgotten), but also what is initially not allowed into consciousness (i.e. our forbidden fantasies and desires). The core of this part of our psyche is the earliest children's primary (sexual) fantasies and the first displaced desires associated with the Oedipal complex, from which the child should refuse to grow up.
Carl Gustav Jung, a student and then Freud's opponent, claimed that we were born unconscious. And along with the individual unconscious there is, in his opinion, a collective one that connects us with our ancestors. It is common to all people and is reflected in myths, cultural and religious attitudes. In the Jungian view, the apple in a dream refers to the myth of an earthly paradise. And when we dream of a plane in distress, for example, we should remember the Greek myth of Icarus, who died because he did not obey his father's advice and flew too close to the sun. This approach assumes that the symbolism of the unconscious is the same for all people.
An invisible dialogue?
Our unconscious not only affects our words and actions. It leads an active dialogue with the unconscious of others. It happens in all emotionally significant relations. Thus, a good mother often guesses the causes of her child's ailments, although he is not yet able to tell her anything. And many psychoanalysts have described situations in which they and their patients were almost "telepathically" connected. "One of my colleagues had to interrupt meetings with a patient in order to go to the funeral", says Igor Kadyrov. And when he returned, the patient told him about his dream. He saw the analyst in it at the funeral, grieving about the loss of a loved one, although my colleague did not tell the patient about the reasons for the break in the sessions. Obviously, there was an unconscious exchange of this information. Of course, this invisible dialogue plays a special role in love relations. After all, children's sexual desires related to incest are among the first in our unconscious to be replaced. They are not always overcome.
"When we can't get rid of our first love for our parents, we have real difficulties in love", says psychoanalyst Yves Depelsener. For the same reason, we often choose partners who look like their mother or father, without realizing it. It is the interaction of the unconscious two that determines the success or failure of their love relationship.
"The decisive role is played by the echoes generated by our own symptoms, continues Yves Depelsener, our own internal expulsion, which we suddenly find in another person. That "I don't know what" that suddenly resonates with our unconscious".
A game of imagination?
The imaginary is a direct way to the unconscious. From the point of view of psychoanalysis, the imaginary is neither illusory nor false. This word denotes everything that manifests itself in our images: night dreams, daytime dreams in reality, erotic fantasies, and myths. For psychoanalysts, fictions have the value of truth: the stories we tell them, to others and to ourselves, the vague thoughts that accompany us during the day, the scripts that we construct for ourselves, convey our unconscious desires. The methods of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are based on the creative power of the image: hypnosis, conscious dreaming, visualization, free association, projective tests.
Justification of our passivity?
"I do not believe in the existence of the unconscious", says the philosopher Robert Mizrahi. - "We are always aware of ourselves. The unconscious is simply the name we give to our misunderstandings, concordance, passivity and ignorance". From the point of view of many thinkers, in particular Jean-Paul Sartre, the idea of the unconscious is just a pretext to avoid the need to be a responsible person. It's a refuge of dishonesty and cowardice: I didn't know what I was doing, it's not me, it's my unconscious. But Freud called for the fullest possible understanding of what we were trying to hide from ourselves. According to psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, we are responsible for him. But in order to answer, we must understand the desires and fantasies that we cannot confess.
"I think that everyone who defines their attitude to the idea of the unconscious has a simple choice", says Igor Kadyrov, "either to reject the idea as an extra head, or to accept it only nominally, quickly turning it into a set of cliches - and in fact, also rejecting it". Or take it seriously by starting to analyze yourself or seeking the help of a psychoanalyst. This option requires strength and serious internal work.
To be continued in the next part: https://zen.yandex.ru/media/id/5d5ee956d5135c00ad8929e9/the-unconsious-part-of-ourselves-theory-and-reality-part-3-5d92241c5ba2b500adbc582a?via=izenkit&integration=zen_app_ios