There Is No Subconscious

 

Thanks to Freud, the concept of a “subconscious mind” has seeped into our culture. People even hail it as an important scientific discovery, similar to the law of gravity or theory of evolution. But the concept is self-contradictory.

It posits a part of self that is independent of self (“ego”). It posits a part of consciousness of which we are  not conscious. 

These characteristics are definitive of “other.” 

There is no subconscious mind.

The concept is constructed from our experience of memory. Memories emerge into consciousness from some unknown place, where they abide when we are not thinking of them. 

But before Freud muddied the waters, we had Plato’s concept of the ideal forms, the Buddhist concept of a “storehouse consciousness,” Coleridge’s “primary imagination.” Put simply, an objectively existing spiritual world. And this is the only coherent explanation.

The fact that memories continue to exist whether or not we or anyone are thinking of them, identifies them as not subjective, part of ourselves, but independent objects of consciousness. This is simply true by definition. Just as the fact that the corner lamppost seems to exist whether or not we are looking at it, demonstrates that it is not a part of us and our consciousness, but an independent object. 

If the memories we encounter seem by and large to be entirely personal, that does not make them a part of ourselves. Our sense experiences are also personal: we see only what is around us in space. They may be only a small part of a wider world, just as Africa exists, or Alpha Centauri, although we have never seen it.

But Freud actually finds that memories are not personal; in the house of memory, there seems to be wills operating independent of our own. The subconscious makes us think, say, even do things contrary to our will.

We always knew this too: these wills are the independent spiritual entities identified worldwide as angels, demons, fairies, gods. We know they exist on exactly the same evidence that we know other human or animal spirits exist, that the things we see are not all simply objects: because they are clearly not subject to our will, but follow their own wills.

Just to make the matter clearer, or more confusing if you hold to the Freudian formula, Jung has demonstrated that we are capable of remembering things we have never seen nor heard. Dragons, for example, unicorns, phoenixes, vampires, zombies, and so forth. These are not individual memories, and not individual “imaginings” either; for the same creatures and characters recognizably appear in myths, legends, and folk tales all around the world.

The Freudian “subconscious” is just an alibi, a spooky tale told at bedtime to frighten off further questioning, an attempt to explain away the spiritual aspect of existence, because it contradicts the materialistic dogmas of scientism. But the thesis itself violates all the basic tenets of science as well as philosophy. One of which is that one must go with the simplest explanation to account for the facts.

Which, in this case, is the existence of a spiritual dimension that exists independently of the material.

The Freudian Slouch on the Couch

I put a thought experiment to my Freudian friend: suppose someone came to an analyst or psychiatrist, of any school, and said they had been speaking with an angel. As Mohammed did, or Joseph Smith, or Mary, or St. Francis, or Abraham, or Moses, or Joan of Arc. Would they accept that, or declare them mad? For if they could not accept that, they are working antithetically to religion. The two cannot both be true within the same universe.

He replied, “No competent lay therapist would pronounce someone who was visited by an angel as insane. Together they would find meaning in it.”

I am not satisfied. I find meaning in this phrasing, “find meaning in it.” Isn’t the meaning of the incident obvious? It’s an angel. It’s a message from God. Surely this “find meaning” means the analyst rejects this possibility and tries to replace it with a materialist explanation?

And then, if the patient does not buy the materialist explanation, he or she is declared mad.

There are, granted, procedures a religious person should follow as well to, as Paul said, “test the spirits.” But the phrase “find meaning in it” would not be the right one.

The first question would be, “is it an angel or a demon?”

And then there is a place for a certain sort of “analysis,” granted. God speaks in parables. He is oracular, the Greeks would say. The meaning is often not the literal meaning. So you might say “unravel the meaning of it.” Why is God speaking to you now? What is he telling you? What does he want you do to?

My friend ranks Freud with Copernicus and Darwin, as scientific paradigm shifters. I would rank him instead with Marx, as two thinkers who tried to apply the “scientific method,” or rather, a scientistic world view, to areas where it cannot work and does not belong.

Science relies on experiment and observation. You cannot directly observe the human soul: that is the key insight of Buddhism. You certainly cannot directly observe the soul of another.

As Heraclitus said almost three thousand years ago, you can never plumb the depths of soul, so deep is its logos.

Nor is a human soul an object, like an apple falling from a tree. This creates an insurmountable observer paradox: there is no way the observer can claim greater knowledge than the “object” of his study. Both are, unlike a geologist and a rock, in principle equally sentient beings. Worse: the object has knowledge of itself the observer cannot have. To overcome this, it is necessary to declare the observer mad, and so incompetent. Thank you, DSM. This objectifies him.

Ah, you say, but that is just the biomedical boys. They know nothing of the subconscious!

I think Freud created the subconscious to work around this same problem: positing an area of the soul of which the analysand is supposedly unaware. Still does not work, though: it is actually an area the analysand can see and experience, and the analyst cannot. This struck me when I realized that, to accept the theory as presented by Jung, you had to accept that a person is “unconscious” when, for example, reading a novel or watching a movie. So too in your dreams: you are conscious of the dream; only the analyst is not. If you are going to be scientific about it, the analysand is the expert, and is teaching the analyst.

But then, there is no such area of the soul. What Freud called the “subconscious” is simply the spiritual realm: Coleridge’s primary imagination, the spirit world, the kingdom of heaven, the source of Plato’s ideal forms. The place where mathematics comes from, and ethics, and archetypes, and innate knowledge of all sorts.

This is hardly a new discovery. Freud only tried, with his “subconscious,” to give a materialist explanation for it. Beyond the canard that it is all down to synapses in the brain, it was a repository of our repressed desires—for material things. For physical survival and for survival of the species: for food and sex.

Materialism. If the spiritual existed at all, it existed only secondarily; like the heat from a fire.

Yes, the spiritual world is beyond our direct conscious control. Just as is the physical world: we cannot decide what will happen in our dreams, and we cannot simply will it to rain. It is, in other words, something that exists and operates independently of us and our will. It is wrong, therefore, to think it is somehow nevertheless part of ourselves, “our” subconscious, any more than the physical world is. We do not speak of “our” physical universe. Yet this is what Freud asserts—in order to deny the independent existence of spiritual entities.

We are willing things we are not willing, then. A contradiction in terms.

Declaring ownership over the spirit world is a pretty blasphemous thing; and a pretty dangerous thing.

Freud came up with this construction because he had to. He understood that there is no modus vivendi between psychiatry and religion. Psychiatry was intended by Freud as the “scientific” replacement for religion. There is no common ground.

The rough beast is now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. The pagan jinn, the demons, are back. Science has led to progress in the material sphere, where it can operate. It has led only to regress when misapplied to the human world: witness the 20th century. Fascism, in its day, was “scientific.” Communism was and is “scientific.” Eugenics was “scientific.” Hallucinogenics, opioids, and so on, were “better living through chemistry.” And now the tide of madness rises.