Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Confusion

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The sense of meaninglessness begins to have a marked effect on us. Social life confuses us. We may feel that we don’t fit very well into society. We see ourself as being different from the average person but don’t know why we are different. Everybody else seems to live a reasonably happy life whilst we seem to be perpetually plunging in and out of misery, loneliness and lack of confidence. We find it easy to list a large number of faults and inadequacies in ourself, compared to other people. We long to have the admirable social skills that others have but which we lack.

Such a confused outlook on life doesn’t produce any interest in, or commitment to, a socially-ambitious career. When life seems senseless and meaningless, a high social-status career is of no more value than low status work. We sense that what is important to us is the need to have a strong, assertive character, but we find that this need is of no importance to a capitalist society. Capitalism values only wealth and social status, not character; competitiveness is encouraged, to the detriment of co-operation. Such a system offers only a sense of alienation to us. We turn aside from the social roles and careers expected of us and seek something different that may satisfy our yearning for happiness.

I had no idea what to do during the last years of my school days, so I drifted into college to do physics. In retrospect I should have done civil engineering or architecture and design, but those choices were not on the agenda of the career advisors at school. After attaining a degree at college I drifted into computing, which seemed the glamorous thing to do, but became bored with it. I soon realised that if a person is not brilliant at computing, then it becomes just another job. There is only glamour in a job when a person is brilliant at it. And I was just average at computing. I was fortunate in that the time of my early 20s, the late 1960s, was a time of economic expansion in Britain, so there were no shortage of jobs that I could try. But nothing much appealed to me, so I ended up training as a plumber. I stuck that for a few years, and then moved into hospital work as a porter. Eventually, many years later, I moved into care work: I worked as a care assistant in homes for the elderly and infirm, and I think that that was in some ways the most enjoyable work that I did.

What did I learn from my life? My view, based on my own involvement with psycho-analysis, is that by learning self-awareness to a sufficient degree, we can explore the confusion of human life and begin to make sense of it. I now see the human journey as a journey from disordered and confused states of mind to ordered and harmonious states of mind. In this article I describe some of the issues that the person will encounter as he attempts to resolve his confusion.

The Subconscious Mind

My model of consciousness is a triplet of will/desire, mind, and feeling/emotion. I use the term “will” to mean the same as “will power”. This model means that consciousness is either functioning as will, mind, and feeling, or the slightly different formulation of desire, mind, and emotion. When will and mind work as one, they create desire, whilst when feeling and mind work as one, they create emotion.

There is a region of consciousness that we are not normally aware of. This hidden region is usually described as the unconscious mind or the subconscious mind. Freud used the term “unconscious” and separated the unconscious region into two parts: the unconscious and the preconscious. The preconscious was just the borderline region between full consciousness and unconsciousness. Jung used the term "subconscious" to denote the hidden region of the mind. Initially I followed Freud. In the model of consciousness that I adopted, I had to separate the unconscious region into two parts, because it was evident to me that some aspects of unconsciousness are personal to the individual whilst other aspects are common to everyone. I decided to call the personal aspects of unconsciousness the subconscious mind. My usage of the terms subconscious and unconscious are as follows.

I use the term subconscious mind for what is personal to the individual,
and the term unconscious mind for what is general to humanity.

I also call the unconscious mind the collective mind. My desires and ambitions have roots in the subconscious mind, whereas emotions are common to everyone and so come from the unconscious mind. Also, in history we sometimes see the production of mass movements and social revolutions of various kinds – political movements, cultural movements, sexual movements, etc – and these originate in unconscious influences and so represent the collective mind.

The basic idea of a subconscious mind is that it is the storehouse of memories, beliefs and influences that we are not aware of. Either we have never been aware of them, or once we did know them but have long forgotten them, or we are aware of them but cannot identify them. For example, we are aware that some influences (such as compulsions) in the mind make us act in certain ways but usually we cannot identify them.

First consider when a subconscious mind exerts a positive influence on us. Normally we would not recognise this since it would not cause us any distress. Hence we would assume that it is only our conscious mind that is motivating us. 

Now consider what happens when the subconscious mind exerts a negative influence. Obviously its effect will vary according to the intensity of the influence. Since the influence is negative then it will cause us some distress. When the intensity is fairly low we can pass off the effect as being due to something else. For example, when we get drunk and end up with a hangover the next day, we pass off the hangover as being caused only by the alcohol. Actually the real reason for the hangover is that it is caused by the combination of the alcohol and a negative mood of resentment. The resentment may motivate us to become violent to anyone we dislike. If we are not normally violent then we say that for some unaccountable reason we acted out of character. So people realise that sometimes they do things which they normally would not do and which they regret doing. They rarely attempt to understand why this happened. 

The issue of most importance is what happens when the subconscious mind’s negative influence is intense. Then the person becomes psychologically confused to a varying extent. At the milder end of the range of effects, we see obsessions and compulsions. At the extreme end we see forms of madness happening to the person.

When considering sane, rational adults then we can provide alternative explanations of what really motivates us. It can then be difficult to decide, whether by introspection or by observational studies, which explanations are likely to be true. This is because the basic assumption that underlies the idea of sane and rational adults is that they are not under prolonged and intense stress, so that therefore they can put to one side any emotional issues when they have to make decisions or reflect on what to do. In other words, they can lead a balanced life. This implies that the person’s conscious mind can neutralise the influences of the subconscious mind, so that it is very difficult to detect any negative subconscious influences.

The way to separate fact from phantasy in explanations of how the mind works is to analyse, or try to analyse, the mental and behavioural activity of a person when that person is under prolonged intense stress. When I was studying academic psychology theories prior to formulating my own theories, I found that academic explanations that worked in low-stress situations nearly always failed to work in high-stress situations. 

When considering the scientific method, we need to take into account the history of it as it applies to psychological studies. In the late 19th century, the exploration of the mind was done by introspection. The problem here is that the issue of self-awareness was not understood. The results of much laboratory work with introspectionists was that most of them gave differing accounts of what they felt and identified. Hence little of any lasting value came out of these experiments. Therefore by the beginning of the 20th century the focus switched to observation of behaviour, since behaviour can easily be identified and labelled. However, observation of behaviour rarely enables the observer to understand how the mind works. The most effective approach is to develop our level of self-awareness by suitable training. Then once our self-awareness is very good, we can switch back to introspection as the best means of analysing the mind.

Daydreaming and Imagination

Often the child who feels different is dissimilar from the average child in a significant way. The confused child has an active imagination and phantasy life. He daydreams much more than the average child does, and this mental activity continues into adulthood. It enables him to be much more creative than the ordinary person, but it brings with it its own problem. This problem is that of being excessively sensitive. The more sensitive a child is, the more creative he can be. This combination of sensitivity and creativity pushes the child in the direction of becoming an individual rather than being socially centred. A disadvantage of excessive sensitivity is that the child does not respond well to continuous social pressures and the expectations of other people.

The child needs to daydream. From phantasy will arise the child’s creativity and individuality. If phantasy and daydreaming are discouraged and prevented because they are considered to be “escapist” then the child’s emotional growth will be stunted.

Another problem that can easily stunt the development of a well-balanced sense of individuality is that of the desire of a parent to submit a child to high-pressure education at the infant and primary school stages. All early education should be relaxing and low-pressure. The child needs to create its own world of phantasy, and high-pressure education will have a detrimental effect on it. An example that demonstrates this view is the life of John S. Mill, a brilliant intellectual in the Britain of the nineteenth century. His childhood intellectual growth was stimulated by high-pressure coaching from his father, resulting in Mill’s emotional growth being crippled in the process.

For a person of less ethical restraint than Mill, high-pressure demands on the child are likely to stimulate the production of confusion and internal violence in that child. Phantasy will now become destructive. The child may develop hateful thoughts about the external world, or develop hateful thoughts about himself.

In some ways I was fortunate in the parents that I had. They allowed me to spend much of my childhood in my own dream world. Even as an adult, I still need to give as much time to my dream world as to the world of social reality.

The external world is objective. But objectivity does not necessarily convey reality. Nor does objectivity alone create reality. The subjective world of phantasy is just as necessary to the evolution of consciousness as is the objective world of social relations. High-pressure education can be left till adolescence, when the energy of puberty allows the young adult to cope with it.

Fear

In the sensitive child, phantasy and creativity can work together as he explores the external world. Materialism can seem a wonderland of fascinating delights. However, as sensitivity begins to develop rapidly in intensity during adolescence so materialism may begin to lose its grip on the young ego. Now sensitivity can move phantasy and creativity into new directions. Phantasy can become the creative exploration of oneself.

The emotion that usually underlies sensitivity is fear, with self-pity as a secondary factor. Fear de-stabilises the young adult, the stranglehold of materialism slips, and creative insights into oneself and the world arise in the “gap” of uncertainty that opens up. If a person is too sensitive for his time, if he is too vulnerable to fear of the social pressures, then he may romanticise the simple life of “noble” peasants who have little sense of guilt or fear (but who also have a much lesser degree of personal development).

Sensitivity initiates the development of individuality – the person begins to understand that he has responsibility for himself. He becomes aware that he does not have to act simply from social compulsion. Now peripheral awareness of fear comes into consciousness. This fear may take many disguises, such as fear of authority, fear of society, fear of relationships, fear of the unknown. These disguises add colour to the drama of personal life, but they are not the primary source of fear. 

Sensitivity is rooted in the subconscious feeling of being trapped, of being trapped by something that is indefinable and inexplicable, a nameless fear. When introspective thought is deep enough, this fear is felt to be the fear of the body.

When a sensitive person is socially-orientated, then his jealousy camouflages the fear. But when jealousy is restrained then subconscious fear produces timidity, which becomes the emotional basis of the switch of consciousness away from prosaic realism into creative imagination and phantasy. The timid person becomes self-absorbed in his own world of the mind.[¹]

Trauma in Childhood

The major hurdle that everyone has to face is that of childhood. When things go wrong in childhood it may have an effect on us that can last a lifetime. The most crucial period of childhood when things can, and do, go wrong is the first three years after birth. I give the name infancy trauma to any significant psychological distress that happens to the young child during this time; the name is meant to imply that the trauma happened at an early period of childhood, rather than late childhood or early adolescence.

In my view, psychological trauma happens to most children all over the world. What varies is the intensity of it, from minor to major. Most children are “thick-skinned” (or insensitive) and they learn to accommodate to childhood distress and can manage to lead a moderately-good adult life. However, if the child is very artistic or very intelligent, then he is also very sensitive. Sensitivity magnifies the effects of trauma. So what would be a minor distress to an average insensitive child can become a major distress to a very intelligent child.

Trauma is of three kinds: physical, emotional, and sexual. Physical trauma occurs from excessively-severe physical punishment. Emotional trauma occurs from the emotional denigration and ridicule of the child, or from the opposite, which is the lack of enough emotional support for the child, indicated by the lack of touching and cuddling of that child. In effect, emotional trauma comes from the absence of warm emotional intimacy from the parent to the child.  I do not analyse sexual trauma because I have never experienced it.

The most common cause of trauma comes from a parent’s relationship to the child. But other significant adults can cause trauma, such as uncles, aunts, older siblings, and close neighbours. Most trauma is caused unintentionally because the parents do not understand the difficulties of bringing up a child. Hence although most trauma is caused by parents, it is not fair to blame them for this. In fact, usually the parent treats the child in the same way that the parent (when he was a child) was treated by his parent (which is the grandparent). So faulty ways of bringing up children get handed down the family line, from great-grandparent to grandparent, from grandparent to parent, from parent to child. This is not genetics; it is psychology (or the aspect of psychological bonding called transference).

For example, if a child was not given enough emotional support from his parents, then when he grows up he will be inhibited about expressing warm emotions to other people. He will then find that when he marries and has a family, he will not be able to give enough emotional support to his children. 

When considering whether a person experienced childhood trauma from a parent, what matters is not what the parents are like now, many years later, but what they were like when the person was very young. In Britain, and perhaps in all countries around the world, it is not considered important for newly-married couples to learn how to bring up baby in an emotionally-harmonious way. The new parent just takes guidelines from his parents, so in effect he makes the same mistakes with his child that his parents made with him in his childhood.

I suffered severe trauma as a child from both my parents (physical trauma from my father, and emotional trauma from my mother). They were nice people, but they did not know how to bring up a sensitive child. I don’t blame them; they just did what was socially acceptable for their time.

The main legacy of severe trauma is that the young adult fails to learn adequate social skills. So he finds emotional relationships difficult. One major effect of such difficulty is that it increases the person’s awareness of the depth of the mind and the problems that underlie relationships. This has led to certain kinds of literature that explore these hidden aspects of life. The overall theme of this kind of exploration is that of existentialism.

Two Forms of Identity

As it grows up, the child creates its sense of identity. It does this by forming various patterns of strongly-held beliefs. Its various beliefs on society, relationships, politics, religion, etc, give it a unique view on life, and this uniqueness becomes its identity. The quality of its beliefs determines the quality of its eventual identity. Negative and discordant beliefs give rise to a discordant sense of identity, whilst positive and harmonious beliefs give rise to an harmonious sense of identity. However, an identity is not necessarily homogenous, by which I mean that it is not always all of the same quality. Some aspects of consciousness may hold negative beliefs whilst other aspects may hold positive beliefs. For example, the person may be left-wing or liberal in his views on morality, yet right-wing in his views on politics. The resulting contrary mix eventually becomes the adult’s identity.

There is another feature to identity. Everybody possesses two identities. When a person emphasises the uniqueness and individuality of himself, I call this focus the individual identity of the person. When he centres himself on his social groups and networks, I call this focus his social identity. The individual identity centres on personal creativity and a preference for being oneself and choosing one’s own lifestyle (being different from everyone else). The social identity centres on his social conditioning as a child and his preference for being one of a group and adhering to the group’s lifestyle (being the same as everyone else). Individuality produces choice, whilst social-centredness produces consensus. Hence the two identities often conflict with each other. Normally a person fluctuates from one identity to the other, though usually one is emphasised more than the other, and so becomes more important to the person in the long-term.

The socially-centred person is unlikely to think of himself as having two identities. However, for the sensitive individual, it is quite obvious that there are two strong influences acting on him: he loves his individuality, yet occasionally longs to be like other people too.

The conflict between the two identities is not usually obvious because when one identity is currently being emphasised, the other one is being suppressed. This means that when the person is centred on his groups, his social identity is conscious whilst his individual identity is subconscious. However, when he is focused on his individuality, his individual identity becomes conscious and his social identity is now subconscious.

The Two Identities and Motivation

At an early stage of my self-analysis I came up against the issue of what does subconsciousness mean. I was often frustrated by my own subconscious reality. I was sometimes motivated to act in certain ways by some strong impulses that I was not aware of – this is the arena of subconscious motivation. I could not explain it and found it disturbing.

What does subconsciousness mean?  For a long time I could not decide what it is that is subconscious – is it the will or is it the mind?  Was Schopenhauer correct in his view that the will is blind and unconscious (in the sense of being non-personal)? Or is it rather that the subconscious is a subconscious, deluded mind, a view that is compatible with the teachings of Mahayana Buddhism?

Is subconscious motivation the way of consciously using the mind in response to subconscious will, or the way of consciously using the will in response to subconscious mind?  What would be the difference?

a). If subconscious motivation is defined in terms of delusion (a deluded mind), then insight can remove it.

b). If subconscious motivation is defined in terms of an unconscious will, then insight cannot remove it. An unconscious will is a collective, impersonal will operating through each individual (another way of looking at this is that it is the will of the impersonal God that underlies all creation).

My analysis of the sorrows of childhood eventually gave me an answer to the riddle of subconsciousness. The answer relates to the issue of identity. The person has two identities. Because he can alternate between them, they must be comparable in structure. So whether the social identity is subconscious or whether it is the individual identity that is so, the person’s subconsciousness is structured in exactly the same way as the normal consciousness is. This means that the subconscious is structured into will, mind, and emotion. 

The subconscious contains both a subconscious mind and a subconscious will.

The two identities often closely parallel each other in the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. In general, when one of the four main compound emotions (narcissism, jealousy, guilt and pride) is conscious then its binary is likely to be subconscious, with the binary modes matching as well. So if the love mode of narcissism is dominant in the conscious mind then the love mode of jealousy is likely to be dominant in the subconscious mind. If the vanity mode of narcissism is uppermost in the conscious mind then jealousy in self-pity mode is probably foremost in the subconscious mind. Similar polarities work for guilt and pride.

These ideas on identity can be put another way. Take the extremes of personality, the introvert and the extrovert. For the introvert the normal consciousness is their individual identity and the subconsciousness is their social identity; vice versa for an extrovert. The subconscious mind of the introvert tries to move him or her in the direction of social responsibility, whereas the subconscious mind of the extrovert moves him or her in the direction of being more of an individual. These complementary stimuli create a distinctive effect.

The introvert’s normal consciousness mirrors the extrovert’s subconsciousness.

The introvert’s subconsciousness mirrors the extrovert’s normal consciousness.

This pattern of relationships is the reason that an introvert can form an harmonious partnership with an extrovert.

The number in brackets at the end of each reference takes you back to the paragraph that featured it. 

[¹]. I have three articles on Emotions on the Home page. [1]

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