The Ninth Street Center Infrequently Asked Questions

When can an examined life
tell you more than an unconscious mind?

I don't believe that there is an "unconscious mind" of which we have no awareness and which can override and redirect our thoughts and behavior any time it chooses. Anyone who believes that would need to conclude that there is no use managing his own life since that back seat driver will always have its way. Since I have seen enough evidence that when I manage my own affairs (with wisdom and strength) things comes out the best, I have concluded that I have no such reputed second person inside me. Nor have I ever found one in anyone I have come in contact with. For me such evidence is more than enough to refute the "unconscious mind" hypothesis. Sorry, Sigmund.

Why was the theory of the "unconscious mind" so popular earlier in the 20th century, at least among laymen? Mostly because people are always looking for an easy way out of the hard work of introspection and consciousness-raising. If only they could unlock their lover's heart merely by learning his astrological sign, for example, or inventory his unconscious motivations through dream symbolism. Nor can we easily blame them. Every once in awhile some such "key" does come along to unravel an age-old mystery. Plate tectonics used to be adjudged a silly daydream, after all, until the evidence started piling up (sorry). Medicine still searches for "magic bullets" and indeed, every few decades, finds one.

The difference between our fascination with the "unconscious mind" and and our search for "magic bullets" is that when researchers don't find the magic bullet they refocus their investigations. They don't say, "No, no, we just haven't found the right variety of wormwood yet. We must go deeper into the Amazon!" It's one thing to have a hypothesis worth testing, and quite another to have an obsession that won't let you sleep at night.

But if it's time to let go of the hypothesis of the "unconscious mind," there are undoubtedly other things going on inside us which indeed are unconscious in the simple sense that we're not aware of them. Most of our memories are sleeping, for example, until we need to recall through association enormous amounts of data that serves to inform us about our past and warn us about our future.

(Our memory works quite differently from the written records we have used for thousands of years, by the way. Our memories decay and become quite unreliable, unlike (in principle) a deed written on parchment. Partly this decay is random, but I think that part of it comes from the fact that, unlike parchment, our memory is actually intelligent in the following sense. I think that when we memorize something we're not only storing the raw information but also an interpretation of this information that tells us how valuable it is and why. And whenever we remember anything we also "re-memorize" it — we keep the raw information intact but feel free to revise the accompanying interpretation. Thus, memories of our arch-rival in elementary school are tainted with horror and shame until many years later we meet him again and become business partners, at which point those very same pictures and sound-bites become that of nothing more than a cute little boy with lots of entrepreneurial potential.)

Some memories, of course, we try to forget. And when we fail to forget them, we do the reverse of what the "unconscious mind" was supposed to be doing to us all these years: we override what our memory is telling us. We literally bully it into silence by repeatedly telling ourselves that some other version of the past actually happened — until finally it becomes very difficult to recall the truth at all. When people suffer too much, they can enter a state of denial that leaves them secretly longing for nothing more than an end to it all. Too many people at one time or another have suffered defeats so painful that, rather than recognize their true sensitivities, they pretend to be something they're not for the rest of their lives.

If you believe, with Thoreau, that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, you can easily imagine that some wise man could readily help such injured souls back to reality with patient and understanding counseling about what it is that each of them is denying and about their inner needs. Good psychotherapists have been doing this, under various professional monikers of course, for thousands of years — all because they saw more deeply into human nature and the psychic boundaries of their time and place.

But the most important way of talking about what is "unconscious" was given to us by Socrates who, through Plato, said, "The unexamined life isn't worth living." So instead of worrying about the "unconscious," I'd rather try to understand what it is we gain by examining our life in the first place.

I was shocked in college to hear an iconoclastic professor tell a student, "Oh it's perfectly possible that we may know more about you than you do yourself." How arrogant, I thought at first. Yet it didn't take me more than a few seconds to realize in how many ways he was indeed right. And I've spent most of my life realizing how important it is to understand why and how this is true.

Firstly, nature has conspired to arrange the early life of mammals to be burdened with immature brains that are not up to the task of survival. That's why we have parents who know what's best for us. They know more about us — and what we're becoming — than we do. We only come into the world equipped with the ability to learn basic skills and emotional patterns. We may sense that we want to do brain surgery some day, but it's our parent who is aware — as a psychic proxy — of all the learning and training (and expense) which that will entail.

This human capability for parental oversight (literally, seeing a more distant horizon on behalf of another person), naturally comes into being whether we have children or not. If we are psychotherapists, our patients are our children. If we are politicians our constituents are our children. The college prof knew more about his student because he had a deeper and broader understanding of human nature than she did and would therefor be more clearly aware of the dangers and opportunities lying ahead.

Objective insight into the human condition is almost the most important kind of knowledge there is. Of course, you don't need to go to college to get it. But you do need to embrace a particularly arduous agenda of lifelong learning. Yet, this kind of knowledge is fallible, because individual lives diverge in unpredictable ways, not only genetically but in terms of family history and personal experience. And here is where the discipline of the examined life comes in. In fact, this discipline turns out to be the most important after all, because it is only by examining in depth an actual example of consciousness — yours is the only one you'll ever see first hand — that you can decide how important various faculties are. You may decide, for example, that all of modern psychology is based on rather superficial features that have nothing to do with the real inner mechanisms of human growth and development, and may go on to found the psychological science of the 21st century.