A lot of words on psychoanalysis

Unconscious


Written and illustrated by Matthew Haydock




“insanity- - a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world” R.D Laing


The mind, or psyche, is essentially comprised of two distinct fields. Although theories and ideas differ, when regarding their correlation, almost all branches of science, religion and philosophy, believe we, as humans, possess both a conscious and unconscious mind.
Which however is our true self? Does one outweigh or dictate the other? And is it our conscious or unconscious that is responsible for our creativity? When we produce art, music and literature, which is the higher influencing power? As a society, we are fascinated with the psychological habits which are difficult to comprehend. If madness is manifested within the subconscious mind, then it, like dreams, must have had an affect on our creative process. Can forcing a state of mind, by encouraging madness or using hallucinogens, enhance the quality of our creativity? And how much control do artists and creators have over their own legacy of genius?


The conscious mind is also referred to as the ego, taken from the Latin meaning ‘I’. Though it is the ego, or conscious mind º, which represents our aptitude for awareness, self-reflection and thought, our unconscious, is the facility responsible for instinctive wisdom and behavioural patterns. The most general meaning of unconscious is ‘unaware of’, ‘lacking awareness (consciousness) of. Surely then, when studying the unconscious in its purest form, one will inevitably find the true, unrepressed translation the self. The genuine ‘I’.
Neither, of course, could ever be considered as being the more superior function. Like ying and yang, the two rely on each other to stay balanced. Without our conscious, we would be operating on the same level as a wild animal. And without our unconscious, it is hard to imagine exactly what state we would feasibly manage to exist.
It has been realised, that our perception of the ego is a fairly recent addition to the psyche. Before the conception of society and even communication, we like infants, were without the simplest form of thought, now manifested in the framework of an ego. “Just as light was born of the darkness, the ego has formed out of the matrix of the unconcious’’¹.
The limits to the evolution of conscious are endless. It is fuelled by our interaction with our fellow men. So as culture, technology and history diversify, so too will our conscious. Subsequently broadening our ability to maintain individuality. However as this facility educes, so too will our unconscious. This means in theory there is no limit to the potential of what our minds could be capable of. So long as our consciousness continues to expand (though it doesn’t seem to be), our minds could have the potential to achieve some of the things that pseudoscientific theories have speculated in the past.

“The ego cannot escape its destined encounter with the unconscious” Jung ²

To observe the unconscious in its purest form, we must study three of the most accessible states of the unconscious mindset. The first being dreams, an experience which is shared by most intelligent life forms. Inevitably, the dream will always be infected by the conscious. It is a time and place where though the conscious is repressed in a state of slumber, it is constantly present. During the dream period the conscious is used as food for the parasitic unconscious. The conscious element of the dream lies in its remembrance, whereas the unconscious is riddled with mysterious instinct, often expressing itself in the form of metaphor. “It may be a truism that the metaphorical depends on the literal, but this cannot mean that the extension of a term interpreted metaphorically simply depends on its extension interpreted literally.”³


Our dreams could be considered as being an impending force on our current awareness. This is why they are often confused with being prophecy, or in some religious circles, the word of God. Most cultures believe that the dream is advice or instruction sent from a Great Spirit. In the Old Testament, Jacob interprets the pharaoh’s dream to be the word of God warning him of the seven years of prosperity and seven years of famineⁿ. And in Homer’s Iliad, Agamemnon receives instruction from Zeus through a dream. It is, I suppose, easy to see how this preconception is drawn. If during our sleep, our unconscious is extracting information from our logic and processing it in the form a surreal riddle, then it is likely to be within the next few days that the dream becomes relevant and accurate. This would also be the rational explanation for déjà vu³³. A likelihood which has been realised by the conscious and eventually occurs in everyday life. By studying the dream through psychoanalysis, we can discover how we feel about personal issues, and when looking in depth, how we are likely to feel in due course.
Interpreting dreams is like discovering the scriptures of an ancient civilization, and having to decipher the readings on the power of time, location, age and the hundreds of other factors one needs to take into account when understanding something, which was never originally designed to be understood by anyone except the organisation involved in its creation.
It is of course vital that we can analyse dreams when investigating the unconscious. And obviously this process would be made infinitely more straightforward if our dreams were less cryptic, if they could only spell out exactly what message they intended to deliver. But as they only become so animated whilst the conscious remains dormant, this can never be the case.


Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung are obviously seminal characters when studying the importance of understanding one’s dreamsª. Freud stated that…

“dreams are the means of remaining, by hallucinatory satisfaction, mental stimuli that disturb sleep”.

Whilst Jung stated (after his and Freud’s professional separation), with a more spiritual emanation, that “dreams act as a mirror for the ego - revealing that which was missing within the consciousness of the dreamer”. For Jung the dream acted as a guide on the road to wholeness. It is however the work of both Jung and Freud that established the dream as the informant of healing and wisdom. But whereas Freud’s work has been scrutinised for its narrow, reductionistic and rigid view of libido, which not only isolated him from the professional world, but seemed to become an obsession, Jung’s research continued to grow and massively expand upon the nature of symbolism and the effects of living one’s life in ignorance of ones deeper symbolic natures. For instance, to the sex obsessed Freud, a ladder represents “the act of mounting…symbolic of sexual intercourse”. Whereas Jung, the protagonist for most of the new age credence, would suggest that “the ladder denotes our ability to break through to a new level of awareness, moving from the physical to the spiritual, but also being able to move downwards again”.


Withdrawing meanings from dreams does not necessarily follow a gospel rulebook; there is not a step by step guide which can be applied to all dreams. It is important to abolish all preconceptions and likelihoods. Aristotle argued that “the best interpreter of dreams is he who can best grasp similarities. For dream-pictures, like pictures in water, are disfigured by the motion (of the water), so that he hits the target best who is able to recognize the true picture in the distorted one”*. One needs to spend time analysing a dream for some time, crossing off all the possible explanations for what it could signify, until being left with one very probable and reasonable answer. Once every possible component and circumstance within the dream has been juxtaposed with relevant material from one’s consciousness, then the meaning will seamlessly unfold. The enigma suddenly becomes so clear, that the new mystery is “how did I not see that all along?”
If we ignore the questions that our minds are hoping we read into, or only skim over the surface of analysis, then the unconscious will, if necessary, send a second dream. And if this is ignored then the dreamer will be sent a third, and so on until the dreamer’s issue in question has been resolved. This is the phenomenon of repetitive dreaming. Both Freud and Jung found when working with severely neurotic and psychopathic patients, that the recurring dream was far more prominent due to the fact that the recurrence was unlikely to end until the sufferer was cured. Incidentally, on a personal note, whilst writing this study, I thought I would inquire into a recurring dream of my own. I have been a victim of this dream roughly five or six times a year for the past three years. (Though not in the past six months I am pleased to add.) It is always a very short dream, seeming to last for no more than thirty seconds to a minute at a time. Also, as far as I am aware, there is only one component involved in its structure. There appears to be no emphasis on where I am, who I am with or what I am doing. Every time, I simply feel the inside of my teeth with my tongue, my front incisors very vividly move slightly, then, in the same way that milk teeth gradually become more and more loose, I begin to just spit them out with a sense of dread that I will never regain them. I always appear to wake up at the same point in the dream, much to my delight. Freud with his usual sexual connotations would have me believe that “a remarkable dream-symbol is the falling out or extraction of teeth” and that “the primary significance of this is certainly castration as a punishment for onanism”¹¹. Now, I can assure whoever is reading this, that that is not the case. I’ve spoken about this dream to quite a few people around me, and it seems to be a rather common example of a recurring dream, and though it does appear to be a prominently male dream, the Jungian style explanation seems unquestionably more accurate. “Teeth falling or coming out easily indicates we are aware of going through some form of transition, similar to that of going from childhood to maturity, or from maturity to old age and helplessness. If one is anxious about teeth dropping out it suggests there is a fear of getting old and undesirable.”
I do not wish for this essay to become a ‘Freud vs. Jung’ showdown, or indeed a spotlight on Freud’s less widely accepted views. To me, he will always remain the Genius behind this area of psychology and much of his symbolism theories are still recognised today, even much of the sexual denotation which lost him friends and colleagues. For example, the image of the gun still commonly symbolises the male genitalia, and “from the animal world, snails and mussels…must be cited as unmistakable female symbols”.²²

I think we have established that dreams are a hugely important entity to us all, on a personal level. They are an element of both the conscious and the unconscious, which seems to be designed to obtain mental stability. And though results in the field of symbolism are still, and always will be multifarious, it is still one of the most exciting and mysterious branches of psychology. But how does this affect us all socially and culturally? Obviously without dreams we would be without the paintings of Dali and Magritte, religions would have even fewer feet to stand on and of course ‘The Beatles’ would have had a completely different name. On a far larger scale than all these things put together, we once again hark back to the mind of Carl Jung. This time however with a far less convincing theory on the topic of the unconscious. Jung obviously had a great mind, and one which was more than capable of thinking both laterally and outside the box, but he, like his mentor Freud, insisted on pushing ideas which came across more like mental illness than genius. As well as believing in such occult notions as astrology, spiritualism, telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance and ESP, he gave his two pence worth to the world of pseudoscientific beliefs by introducing the theories of synchronicity and the collective unconscious.
It was said that Jung did in fact go through a period of mental illness between 1913 and 1917 himself; during which time he believe he was a prophet. He described this time as a voluntary confrontation with the unconscious. Encouraging his mental state to deteriorate, in order to learn more about certain areas and aspects of his science. It was around this time that Jung espoused his theory of synchronicity. Jung’s theory of synchronicity attempts to explain coincidences by stating that they are in fact meaningful. Jung claimed that there is a phenomenal link between the mind, perception and the surrounding world. Realistically however, this is a perfect example of how the human mind can and will find significance in pretty much anything. If I were to decide that the number 111 possessed some kind of influencing power over my life, then I would begin to find it wherever I looked, ignoring the hundreds of thousands of places in which it does not appear. 111 E-mails in my inbox, 111 steps to the bus stop, 111 miles to my destination etc. It is on the whole a ludicrous theory which claims that various, mutual elements of the mind can come together spontaneously and expand the potential of the conscious mind. Though standing by these beliefs, even Jung had to admit that the findings are based on practical experience as opposed to scientific proof. One example was an incident involving a patient who described a dream which featured a scarab. During the description, a beetle flew in through a window. Jung read this incident as an additional symbol, sent from a higher force to aid the interpretation of the patient’s unconscious.



It would seem that the unconscious is in fact the catalyst for our most powerful and creative thoughts. Another example of the unrestrained unconscious would have to be madness, or mental illness. Insanity is a more permanent mental state, not dissimilar to the fleeting dream. The conscious is repressed, allowing the unconscious to express itself freely and without judgement. Dreams may often be attributed to the process of creativity, but madness quite possibly more so. So why is it then, that the product of a warped or dysfunctional mindset generates so much more attention? When the unconscious is infected with madness, why do we sit up and pay attention? Throughout the history of the western world, (as well as being tortured and condemned) such people have been credited as being divinely inspired. From our psychologists like Freud and Jung to our artists and heroes in fictional, and non fictional literature, there has always been a link between insanity and creativity. Everybody has an idea that creativity does not come from the artists, but from an undetermined and elusive, elsewhere, be it from the gods or the unconscious. Even inspiration is considered as being the elsewhere inside us. People become intrigued with the product of madness because, like dreams it is a perfect example of an un-policed imagination. When Freud asked people to say the first thing that came into their heads, it would often be one of the few occasions that the true, unrepressed unconscious would be made vocal as opposed to the social and conscious filter which is utilised in everyday life. With many forms of mental illness however, this property is incapacitated, resulting in an uncensored window directly into the unconscious. The truth is, if we were suddenly allowed to speak freely by voluntarily suppressing our conscious, then I think we would be surprised just how mad we all were. The conscious is almost like a defensive mechanism, put in place to protect us from the realities of life, the reality of growing up and interacting with each other on a daily basis. It is the evolutionary order which has created order from chaos.
If madness truly is a necessary ingredient of the art that we value, then Broadmoor prison should by all rights, be as creatively rich as the Bauhaus. Dr Gwen Adshead is a consultant forensic psychotherapist at Broadmoor, and she believes that the link made between madness and creativity is often exaggerated. She states that…

“sanity, or a healthy mental life is really about having as many creative options as possible, being able to be as creative and flexible as possible. People who’s sanity is challenged have less flexibility in how they respond, less capacity to use their talents, less capacity to regulate their moods and their thoughts…it’s a process of loss.”

Dr Adshead does go on to admit that in some cases the imagination can be liberated by mental illness. “Psychiatric illness does not affect the entirety of a patient’s capacities, so mental illness and creativity can co-exist”. A sane person may have a vast amount of creative options, but may not choose to take advantage of them, whereas those with a psychiatric illness will often find solace in their skill.
Why then, do we as a society, fantasise over the idea that many of our artists are mad? We seem to want to believe that artists need to be mad to be truly creative. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, writer of the book ‘Going Sane’ speculates that deep down, the role of the sane and the insane have been reversed. As the natural state of childhood is slowly broken down, most of us inevitably become “nine tenths ventriloquist dummies” of society. Like in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’, it is the communities and culture of the adult world that appear truly nonsensical and insane. Perhaps then, we wish for our artists to be mad so that we might connect with our true selves. The artist is the prophet who has the gift to express our true feelings. It does not necessarily mean that the images, literature or music created by the mentally unstable, are any more profound and prolific than that of the sane artist, but perhaps it means that the art carries with it more integrity or honesty. Also it is spawned from the abnormal. Very few people are intrigued by what is common and normal. People would go to a freak show to see a man with four arms, but no one is ever overly impressed by the fact that ninety nine point nine percent of people have an almost identical form. The minority’s contribution to the world will always attract more interest due to its infrequency and perhaps, a morbid sense of curiosity. I myself have often longed for the invention of a machine which has the capability to simply video record a dream or a thought in the form of a moving image on a screen. Perhaps for some people, the paintings created by the insane, do a similar thing. An uncensored portrayal of the human mind on canvas.
However, the phenomenon of the mad artist may very well be a destructive one. One only had to be present at my university fine arts party to see otherwise sane people imposing a clichéd act of madness upon themselves so as to establish the roll of the archetypal ‘artist’. This attitude can also act as an alibi for a poor product. I could very easily make a black and white art film featuring a clown playing chess in a derelict Parisian warehouse, accompanied by a sombre piano soundtrack, but instead of proving that I was mad and free thinking, it would merely go to prove that my conscious had absorbed all the stereotypes of popular culture. And would I need to care if anyone thought it was good or bad? Not really because I’m mad, and I can do what I want. People think, according to Phillips, that “if you’re mad it isn’t really you doing it”. Ironic though, because surely if you are mad, then it truly is you ‘doing it’. If you are sane then there are any numbers of conscious and unconscious influences affecting your creative output. This does of course depend entirely on whether you believe that the sane are the sane, or the insane are the sane. R.D Laing (author of ‘The Divided Self’ and ‘Knots’) was a great force in the sixties, and part of the anti-psychiatry movement. He was a cross between a philosopher and an artist. In his opinion most people’s view of sanity was a ‘false sanity’ which was a form of compliance. To follow society and meekly adopt western culture was to him insane. Laing encouraged people to dispel their aspirations of achieving in a ‘’sick society’’ and become mad in order to regain sanity and subsequently, creativity. Laing encouraged his patients to regress in order to progress which in his words would lead them to “a true sanity”. Laing for some time was considered as being the prophet of this new so-called ‘sanity’, which in itself became a new form of art.
Many would argue that in the western world, there is no such thing as a mad genius. This view has obviously needed to have been voiced for hundreds of years, as we see in this extract from Charles Lamb’s essay, ‘The Sanity of True Genius’.

“So far from the position holding true, that great wit has a necessary alliance with insanity, the greatest wits, on the contrary, will ever be found in the sanest writers. It is impossible for the mind to conceive a mad Shakespeare. The greatness of wit, by which the poetic talent is here chiefly to be understood, manifests itself in the admirable balance of all faculties. Madness is the disproportionate straining or excess of any one of them.
…The ground of the mistake is that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject, but has dominion over it.”

Lamb is basically saying that the true sign of genius is the ability to simulate a loss of consciousness, that to pretend merely sells out to the ideology that madness is in any way glamorous, thus trivialising the integrity of the creative process. And to admire an artist for being mad is no different to admiring an artist for being sane. To be able to use one’s spectrum of creativity to tap into the experience of a dominating state of unconsciousness is truly far more commendable than merely being a prisoner, permanently trapped within the aforementioned state of mind.
This view seems to make sense, and could almost be the line drawn under the entire debate. But perhaps it’s out of date or somewhat missing the point. It could even be entirely incorrect. Dylan Thomas was convinced beyond dispute that it was only by consuming such large quantities of alcohol that he could ever produce a high quality piece of work. Van Gough and many other impressionists were famous for consuming vast amounts of Absinth; although it’s true to say that manic depression was also a contributing factor to the myth of the influences upon his work. Arthur Conan Doyle’s opium addiction was so inspiring that it became Sherlock Holmes’ addiction within the text. There must be something to say for the encouraged and genuine liberation of the unconscious.
Though Paul McCartney said in an interview with Uncut magazine that “it is easy to overestimate the influence of drugs on the Beatles material” it is undeniable that it did contribute an element which, quite probably, escalated the Beatles to the level of genius. Throughout the sixties it was LSD which allowed people to, in Blake’s words, “cleanse the doors of perception”. People described it as the most profound experience they had ever had. The idea of being sane had suddenly become so stale and mundane, that people became quite happy to risk their own health in order to find creativity and in a sense, themselves. It was this movement which is most probably responsible for the term ‘sub culture’. Psychedelic art tried to capture the experience of a drug trip by use of the lights, colours, and sounds which have today become so generic.
So maybe the most obvious resolution to this debate would be to say that there is no hierarchy when it comes to a state of mind. Like most things in life, each case must be judged on its merit. Hallucinogenic drugs did, and still probably do, lead creativity into areas and fields which would otherwise remain unexplored. Most of Dylan Thomas’ work may very well have fuelled by several bottles of whiskey. Salvador Dali had the ability to capture the essence of a dream without having any real form of madness. And Mary Barnes had the questionable gift of being ‘mad’, allowing her to gain recognition as an artist by painting with her own excrement, courtesy of the R.D Laing project. Obviously forcing a state of mind upon one’s self will bring with it some problems. People were damaged by Laing’s insanity programme, and people have been damaged and killed by using drugs irresponsibly. What may work for one person, be it in a creative sense or otherwise, will inevitably not work on another. That is the beauty of the arts. It is an environment in which people can dwell in the spectrum of the conscious and the unconscious, to whatever degree they feel most comfortable. Jumping on the bandwagon will only prove to be destructive both physically and creatively.
So is there any such thing as a genius? Maybe everyone is a genius, or at least has the potential to become a genius; only, not everyone takes advantage of their attributes to use their unconscious facility wisely. Or perhaps it is this quality which establishes what it is to be a genius. The Beatles used drugs whereas Frank Zappa allegedly did not. In my opinion the music is equally awe inspiring with, in my opinion, Frank Zappa’s music managing to convey a loss of consciousness and conformity even more effectively than that from the height of The Beatles’ psychedelic period. So maybe it is best that we have so many different options when it comes to being creative. Sometimes the artist can delve into the inner depths of the unconscious, and sometimes an artist can achieve just as interesting a piece of work by allowing their conscious to lead the way. Genius will continue to remain entirely debateable, and though the unconscious remains the more mysterious and creatively magnetic than the conscious, there is no reason why they have to be mutually exclusive.


“Monica: This is going to turn into a...
Spider: It's going to turn into another Haight-Ashbury. Remember how we
commercialized on that scene?
John: That was a really good move.
Monica: Oh! That was a confession.
Spider: Right man..and all it was was like people sitting in doorways freaking
out tourists going Merry Go Round! Merry Go Round!
Do-Do-Do-Do-Do-Do-Do-Do-Do-Do! and they called that doing their thing.
John: Oh yeah, that’s what doing your thing is!
Spider: The thing is to put a motor in yourself”.
Zappa 95












Footnotes

º. Conscious - a denoting part of the human mind that is aware of a persons self environment and mental activity, and that to a certain extent determines the choice of action - Oxford English Dictionary (1982)

¹. The Psychology of the Unconscious – Carl Jung

². The Psychology of the Unconscious – Carl Jung

³. Joseph Stern
ⁿ. I think it would be fair too assume that from a scientific point of view, much of the Bible can be attributed to the dream, from the voices of angels to the direct word of God. It is also in my opinion that at the time this would have been appreciated, yet because of the metaphorical storytelling of the Bible this could have been taken out of context.
³³. There is however very little psychological evidence or even theory regarding déjà vu. Since Nathaniel Hawthorne first suggested its existence in 1863, it has remained a mystery, too fleeting to study and too lucid to accept. The eerie euphoria associated with it though has captured the imagination of artists, poets and novelists including Dickens and Tolstoy. Psychology has generally filed déjà vu in a draw reading “interesting but insoluble”. However an article in an 1878 psychology journal, suggested that “deja vu happens when the process of sensation and perception, which normally occur simultaneously, somehow move out of sync”.
ª. Carl Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and a colleague of the Austrian founder of Psychoanalysis, Lucian Freud. He then broke away from Freud over the issue of the unconscious mind as a reservoir of repressed sexual trauma which causes all neuroses. Jung founded his own school of analytical psychology.

¹¹. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Symbolism in Dreams) – Sigmund Freud

*.Buchsenschutz, p...65).

²². Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (Symbolism in Dreams) – Sigmund Freud



Bibliography


JUNG, C. The Psychology of the Unconscious (1916)
The Theory of Psychoanalysis (1913)
LAING, R.D. The Divided Self: an Existential studying Sanity and Madness, Penguin (1972)
FREUD, S. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916-17)
The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
The Ego and the Id (1923)
BROWNE, S Book of Dreams, Judy Piatkus Publishers Ltd (2002)
HORGAN, J the Undiscovered Mind, Simon & Schuster Inc (1999)
GREENWALD, A.G. Self Knowledge and Self Deception: an Adaptive Mechanism? NJ (1988)
PHILLIPS, A. Going Sane, Hamish Hamilton (2005)
LAMB, C. The Sanity of True Genius (1826)
HOMER The Iliad, Penguin Classics
ZAPPA, F Civilization: Phaze 3 (1995)