Human Consciousness: Role of the unconscious (Humans)

by dhw, Wednesday, February 10, 2016, 13:12 (3211 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Freud's 'unconscious' Makes a comeback:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/30/sigmund-freud-unconscious-theories...-QUOTE: " Yet it could be the case that far from being past its sell-by date, the time of the unconscious is yet to come.” -I'm surprised to hear that Freud's unconscious even needed to make a comeback. Perhaps that is simply because we now take it for granted that childhood experiences mark us for the rest of our lives, and that vast numbers of our actions take place without any conscious decision on our part. Freud was also extremely aware that art had its roots in the subconscious. See below. -BBELLA: Freud and Jung's work and others called to me to study from a very young age. I look forward to any new information and understanding of the mysteries of the unconscious mind. It seems that aspect of the human mind is asleep until the conscious aspect falls asleep. Then the unconscious wakes and lives it's own life out in our minds until we awake. But even so, as the article points out, all of our lives are molded by both the conscious and the unconscious, that which we KNOW and remember and that which we don't. Imagine what kind of being we would be if both aspects of ourselves were fully aware and awake at all times. Mind blowing to think about.-Interestingly, the creative processes do combine the conscious and the unconscious, which is why the arts can be so useful in psychotherapy. For a writer especially, the mixing of consciousness levels is quite astonishing. The characters emerge from the subconscious and they take on a life of their own, but you the writer are fully conscious of their presence, thoughts and actions (in dreams we are rarely conscious that we are dreaming) and you may even consciously interfere (which can be dangerous but is sometimes necessary). At one and the same time, the writer is consciously inside and outside his characters and his own consciousness and his subconsciousness. Actors, on the other hand, must lose their self-awareness and “be” someone else. The moment they become self-aware, the performance will lose its seeming “reality”.-DAVID: Firstly, I'm sure your deep interest in this subject greatly helped you as you created personalities in your plays and books. Secondly, as you recognize the depth of consciousness and unconsciousness in humans, how much unconsciousness do you expect is present in apes? Different in kind!-You mistakenly attributed BBella's comments to me, but you are quite right about the arts. As regards apes and other animals, far more of their activity is based on the unconscious than the conscious. It is our levels of awareness and self-awareness that mark us out as special! In terms of character formation, anyone who has lived with animals will know that they are different individually, and there can be no question that exactly like ourselves they are a mixture of nature and nurture. But because they lack our DEGREE of self-awareness, they are not able - as far as we know - to deliberately bring their subconscious minds to the surface as we can. It is this self-awareness that leads us to ask the questions which in turn lead us to expand our horizons so far beyond those of our fellow animals. Different in degree!