Unconscious

Definition.

The unconscious mind is the part of our mental experience which operates below the level of conscious awareness. Sometimes called the subconscious, our unconscious world speaks to us through our imaginative processes, through the images of our dreams, and in the voices of our various subpersonalities.

Much of depth psychology is involved with making unconscious material conscious, as with practices like active imagination.

Though depth psychologists were not the first to consider the idea of an unconscious portion of mind, they developed the concept into an area of dedicated study, empirical research, and therapeutic practice. Among these thinkers, Carl Jung was a central figure in developing our understanding of the unconscious psyche, and much of today’s ‘common knowledge’ about the unconscious derives from his work.

Unconscious to whom?.

The ‘unconscious’ reveals a striking consciousness of its own which often sees and knows more than we do.

— Patrick Harpur^{footnote 1}

To understand the difference between the conscious and unconscious parts of the psyche, we must begin with an important figure: the egoic self, the part of ourselves that we experience as ‘I.’ When we speak of what is or is not conscious, we are generally defining our terms relative to this egoic ‘me.’ With this understanding, we can establish these simple classifications: the conscious psyche holds everything that the egoic self is aware of, while the unconscious contains all those things that the ego is unaware of, including things forgotten and dissociated, as well as involuntary biological functions, and those things that cannot be grasped consciously.

It is important to understand that this division — conscious versus unconscious — is not an anatomical one. There is no part of the brain which holds exclusively conscious contents, nor one which houses the material we call unconscious. Instead, the depth psychologists invite us to think conceptually and experientially. Some things we are aware of, and some things we are not. These domains constitute the conscious and the unconscious, respectively.

Additionally, Jungians often make a distinction between the personal and the collective unconscious.

The personal unconscious.

There are a number of things in our unconscious mind which are unique to our individual lives:

The unconscious depicts an extremely fluid state of affairs: everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but now have forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want and do; all the future things that are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness.

— C.G. Jung^{footnote 2}

Here, then, is the overstuffed closet of things we mentally pick up and set aside, the things that we perceive and accumulate, but may not have a present use for. This pile of ‘stuff’ has to do with our inner and outer experiences of the world, and is essentially, personal. It is unsurprising, then, that we would find this storehouse in a place Jung called the personal unconscious.^{footnote 3}

But this this collection of flotsam is not all that we find in our depths. There are other regions in our personal unconscious, and they are full of life. This is the ‘home’ of our personal complexes.

The collective unconscious.

Though complexes ‘reside’ in the personal unconscious, their roots originate in the area Jung called the collective unconscious.^{footnote 4} This connection exists because every complex has an archetypal core around which a shell of personal experiences grows. Unlike the personal material in the shell of the complex, these root archetypes are universal, belonging to the collective of humanity — hence the name collective unconscious.

The things we find in this domain cannot be grasped consciously. Their roots are numinous ones and they transcend the limits of any individual ego. Because of their transcendent nature, we can only experience archetypes through archetypal images. In the case of the complexes, these images are then ‘dressed’ in the ‘clothes’ they find as they pass through the territory of the personal unconscious — essentially, they adorn themselves in the images of our individual lives and the culture around us.

Is it possible to obtain definite information about what is ‘unknown’ to consciousness? The answer is yes. Not directly, however, but only through such effects and indirect manifestations as the symptoms and complexes, images and symbols that we encounter in dreams, fantasies, and visions.

— Jolande Jacobi^{footnote 5}

The unconscious speaks.

The unconscious psyche speaks to us primarily [in] dreams and fantasies,^{footnote 6} using a language of images. We might understand these images as symbols — packets of meaning that convey an archetype’s essence. Our artistic and creative works, too, can be understood as emissaries from the unconscious. In fact, as Robert Johnson noted: It is nearly impossible to produce anything in the imagination that is not an authentic representation of something in the unconscious.^{footnote 7}

As for what the unconscious talks about when it speaks, it is common for dreams and other unconscious productions to attempt to compensate for areas in our lives where we are too one-sided.^{footnote 8} We might think of this as the psyche’s attempt to create balance in a lopsided situation. For instance, if our conscious life is too strongly weighted toward work, we might dream that our family is isolated and in need of help. If we have been neglecting our artistic side, we may spend our dreamtime wandering a vast, empty museum, its walls aglow with spotlights directed at all the places where artwork should hang.