Adela Toplean
University of Bucharest
adela.toplean@gmail.com
Researcher, collaborator-lecturer at FJCS ( Univ. of Bucharest ),
Has translated a book on qualitative methodology, published 8 studies on the anthropology of death and history of death representations. Researcher at Lund Universitet beginning with Sept. 2005, Department of Psychology of Religion.
The Shadow : I didn’t hear you talking in ages
Today I will give you this opportunity.
The Traveller : I hear voices. Who’s talking? Where this talking comes from?
It’s like I hear myself talking. It’s just that the voice I’m hearing is
weaker than mine…
(F. Nietzsche, The Traveller and His Shadow)
(our translation)
Is the reality of the dream something (slightly) different from the psychic reality? We will try to answer this question by fitting the problem of dream into a classic communication pattern and looking at the psychic agencies from a communication-related perspective. Thus, the dream will take the form of a message whose shape is influenced by the sender and the receiver requirements, but also set as an (apparently) autonomous product of the unconscious. How much legitimacy would then lie in assigning the regulation of the onirical reality to “another” consciousness? Would it be possible for the reality “state” we experience while dreaming to be due to a sort of onirical awareness that arises from an integration-reflex in the moment when the dreamer encounters a world that lacks any kind of antagonistic sensations and so, seemingly, very real? Such faultless integration into the dreamt world through precise reflexes that are just the same as the ones used for appropriately approaching the outside world, seriously moots the problem of an (appearing) autonomy of reactions of the sleeping man – still perfectly awake in the strange light of a new, paradoxical and less approached “vigilance”.
Keywords: communication pattern, Freudian topics, onirical consciousness, psychical space, autonomous reality of the dream, Ey’s consciousness vs. Freud’s consciousness, the problem of presentations in psychoanalysis and phenomenology.
Introduction
We will try to take a look at our dreams through less common lenses that were never called down to clarify any of the psychic realities; moreover, such lenses are, seemingly, totally ineffective in the problem of dreaming: we are referring to the classical Shannon-Weaver pattern of communication (see Dinu M., 1997, esp. p. 24) which allocates (and divides) the “responsibility” of a well-done communication process to the sender, the sent message, the received message, the channel, the gate-keeper and finally the receiver. After manufacturing and polishing the right lenses through which we intend to watch the psychic agencies, we will try to place the dream in a pattern which would be suitable enough for revealing both its – paradoxically – autonomous nature and its tributes paid to those that design its shape and supply it with raw materials.
The problem we intend to approach could be however never endingly branched out in all sorts of perspectives, all risky, all venturesome and, of course, finding themselves in a permanent fight for exclusivity. As our readers surely know much better than us, the reality of the unconscious as well as that of the consciousness were either trusted, either totally distrusted by different trends as behaviorism, humanist psychology, cognitivism, psychoanalysis or phenomenology, and so the experience of dreaming was, together with the trends above, either lessened or surcharged. But then again, when one of the two terms tends to disappear, our discussion on the particularities of communication within our psychic apparatus would be completely useless.
Freud is among those who raised the problem of such communication. Yet, to him, it is not the communication between the consciousness and the unconscious that produces the dream; conversely, communication is counted among the functions of the dream, along with those of defending the Ego, synthesizing and hedonic ones (Zlate, 1996, p.265). Let’s see then, at leisure, who adjusts to whom. And, furthermore, why.
As we are finding ourselves at this very moment looking for a less disputable connection between dream and the unconscious, we decide to call a halt for Ey’s observation: if dreaming and psychopathology wouldn’t have existed, Freud wouldn’t have discovered the unconscious (Ey, quoted work, p. 326); because the natural disposition of the consciousness is to disguise it, not to reveal it. And here we stand all of a sudden in front of two psychoanalytical basic assumptions: 1. a hardly deniable connection between the unconscious materials and the ones parading on the dream-stage and 2. the (at least seeming) clash between the conscious tendencies and the unconscious ones. Both features will prove themselves useful during our attempt to find out if one can indeed talk about a communication process within our psychic apparatus, having the dream as a message.
The unconscious – a conceivable sender?The sign reveals, and yet conceals.
M. de Certeau , The Mystical Fable
(Our translation)
It would be a naivety from our part to imagine that the nature of the unconscious can be revealed and summarized in a few pages. So we will mainly aim to make a direct and as licit as possible leap towards a few significant conclusions concerning our matter: why the unconscious seems to be taken as the first responsible for our dreams, and to what extent the unconscious should be seen as a sender of information? Furthermore, assuming we have found a positive answer to the last question: whom these pieces of information are addressed to?
In ancient times, the difference between what we now call “dream” and some matters that, at some point, could fall under the vigilance level, wasn’t very clear whatsoever. Moreover, such a difference sometimes happened to be explicitly absent. Among the archaic people and then later on, among ancient ones, the overwhelming amount of dreams was of the sacred type (premonitory, mantic etc.) Hippocrates himself found them helpful in treating patients following both the symbolical and the straight shapes of some “diseased physiological states” (Dodds, 1998, p. 109) of the soul who scrutinized its own body during sleep. Equally, Asclepios’ cult in the Greece of the 5 th century B.C. turned incubation into a frequent practice.
We can also mention, without too many details though, the somehow vague, but still possible connection between what we now call the unconscious and the process of dreaming, and Plato’s try in Timaios to bring out an explanation for mantic dreams: the dreams that can reveal a cataclysm or a certain physical condition arise from the intuition of the rational soul and then they are perceived by the irrational soul that reflects them as images on the plain surface of the liver (ibid., p. 109); and so the interpretative approaches of these images are taken as being perfectly reasonable .
Leaping over more than 2000 years, we will find Jung’s definition for intuition formulated as following: a function that “mediates perceptions through unconscious means” (Jung, 1997, p.491); moreover, the object of these perceptions may have an inner, an external or even a mixed nature. Going back in time at Aristotle’s explanation on visionary dreams (Dodds, the quoted work, p. 110), we may notice a common shade: certain ignored symptoms during wakefulness may get through the consciousness, then suffering changes during sleep and eventually suggesting the dreamer certain ways of action.
The very fact that Plato attributes such an intuition to the rational soul might have a fine alliance with Jung’s remark on the implication of perception in the intuition-process which basically provides its absolute certainty, close to the sensation-based processes. Through Socrates’ voice, Plato explains to Simmias in Fedon: “if one has a visual or audible perception, another piece of information, forgotten at some earlier point, is now arousing in one’s mind, through the resemblance or the lack of resemblance with the newly perceived one” (Platon, 1995, Fedon, 76a, p. 177). In his endeavour to approach and explain the remembering process, didn’t Socrates speak to Simmias about that “reservoir” of feelings, ideas and old knowledge that our soul learnt in his extremely long experience of humankind which can (and has to) be produced in the light of consciousness through a sort of anamnesis using – what we now call – the free association process ? But let’s not get lost in too many speculations. The “palpation” of the unconscious deals, by all means, with the specific usage and intentionality of the late 19 th century, whilst its “intuition” was, as we could see, much earlier.
If, in the old times, the dreamer looked at his dreams as being – spontaneously or provocatively – coming as a warning or consolation from Gods and always connected with his or her destiny, “maintenant nous utilisons le reve … comme expression de l’inconscient” (Jung, 1993, p. p. 51). Freud and Jung are still sharing the observation above. They also take the same path when referring to the manifest dream (the one we remember in the morning) as being nothing more than a pale shadow of the weird, intricate edifice we build up during sleep.
In the first instance (see Freud, 1992a, pp. 28, 29), psychoanalysis indeed counted among its goals the revealing of the unconscious; the concrete attempt consisted in stressing the contrast between the reality of the psychic phenomena that tends to an illusory satisfaction (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1985, p. 14) and the material reality that always tries to impose and extend itself (which is also one of the most well-underlined ideas of Ey ).
But Freud will soon realize that revealing the unconscious will always remain an unaccomplished task: there are “the most” unconscious – please read blamable – phantasms that the sick person mainly fears; these are the ones regularly forgotten, whilst the psychotherapy may, possibly, prove that the very overlooked fact is nothing but the essential. The tendency of the consciousness is indeed that of choking somehow the unconscious and Freud’s “chance” to discover it basically consists in the practical investigation of the daily slips, mental disorders and, of course, dreams.
And thus we may have here a basic communication problem: the consciousness, as a possible receiver doesn’t seem too eager to welcome the message emission coming from the unconscious; on the contrary, it looks like trying to ward off , more or less successfully, any kind of unconscious attack.
About where the consciousness begins and ends and a prime communication problemBut let’s take it at leisure. Freud, on one hand, has written it plainly: “the consciousness state easily disappears” (Freud, 1992a, p.97). Ey, on the other hand, in spite of his following a Freudian-related tradition, points out: “what we take as being the self-consciousness and structure of the living presence-field actually implies the unconscious in the very constitution of our consciousness as well as in the self-construction of the Ego” (Ey, the quoted work, p. 319), our being-conscious unfolds “within an environment founded on everlasting comings and goings between consciousness and the unconscious” (ibid., p. 320).
However, Ey’s position represents more or less the modern view on the relationship between the two agencies and may also be described as consisting of “mobile thresholds: synchronous and alternating” (Zlate, 1996, p. 244).
Freud wouldn’t have subscribed to such dynamics, still, we assume, the mobility of an unconscious which has to limit its influence to the advantage of a pre-conscious that it’s free to slide “up” an “down” between the unconscious and the conscious (see Hall and Calvin, 1979, p.54) within his first topography may suggest and anticipate the above dynamics. Freud’s subconscious seems to be more afraid of some possible unconscious infiltrations (Chartier, 1998, p. 121) than of the conscious stamps: “the difficult, delicate, effort-taking intellectual work itself can be, after all, fulfilled at the preconscious level, without even reaching the consciousness.” (Freud, 1992a, p.104).
Paul Ricoeur believes that Freud’s second topography (Ego , Id, Super-Ego) does not exclude the first one (unconscious, pre-conscious, consciousness), on the contrary, the two topographies may be seen as completing each other (Ricoeur, 1998, p. 75); more connections are needed to be considered this way as long as the dream remains for both of them “an over fulfilled and yet unfulfilled pattern” (ibid.). In Freud’s psychoanalysis, the dream is basically related to the wish that is also, at least to Ricoeur, an idea , a fulfilled thinking in a disguised manner: through the dream-work the dreamt thinking is very much distorted until it becomes the weird manifest content we manage to remember in the morning; this transposition actually “splits up the dream from the rest of our psychical reality” (ibid., p. 37), shaping it in an unique manner.
If the unconscious thoughts openly operating in dreams would be, by any chance, compared with the ones we have when we are awake, we would be surprised to discover them as being more or less similar. In other words, the nebulous nature of the dream is due to the censorship that “alters and disguises the repressed contents” (Freud, 1991, p.52). All the things that our consciousness finds inappropriate, all that appears distressing (within our unconscious, the presentations “do not know any denial or doubt” (Chartier, the quoted work, p. 121) would suffer the needed transformations for becoming befitting; only the converted dream is to be communicated to the consciousness.
At first sight, we can only notice a faint attempt of one-way-road communication: from the unconscious to the consciousness, affecting the Ego and so the individual’s behavior in the outside world. But what can we say about a communication initiated by the external environment and directed towards our inner world? Freud assures us of one thing: “D’une autre cote, le danger exterieur (reel) doit aussi avoir passe par une interiorisation pour pouvoir prendre un sens pour le moi…Il semble qu’une connaissance instinctive des dangers… » (Freud, 1973, p. 97). However, there are more ways to stress the bi-direction of such a communication, for instance: “le danger reel menace a partir d’une objet exterieur, le danger nevrotique (interieur!) a partir d’une revendication pulsionelle » (ibid.). The consciousness itself (through sensations, perceptions, attention and memory), as a receptacle of external stimuli, sends its own messages towards the unconscious, and it is obvious that some of them could carry potential harmful contents. And so we might say that, under certain circumstances, with some people more than with others and definitely with all mentally-ill patients, the unconscious and the consciousness disturb each other through communicating, in spite of some effort-taking adjustments of all inputs and outputs.
But let’s go back to Freudian topographies, especially to the first one to whom Ricoeur sometimes ascribes an abstract nature. This particular topography, he thinks, has the mission of “determining that particular area that may be considered the very root of the true dream-thoughts” (Ricoeur, the quoted work, pp. 116, 117). And so, wanting to sleep (always connected with wanting/needing to dream) is a part of the very substance of the unconscious. We could clearly see that a Freudian conclusion irremediably binds dream and the unconscious: not even a very strong wish (although intermittent) as the wish for falling asleep cannot be sufficient for producing the dream, it has to be overlapped with a permanent wish represented by the forbidden impulses that are asking for a dreamt exposure; and all these, because, Freud adds, “nothing ends, nothing passes and nothing falls in forgetfulness within our unconscious” (ibid., p.118, quoting Freud, p. 555). And here we can notice the gap between the importance conferred to the unconscious and that conferred to the consciousness: as Ricoeur says, we deal with a sliding from the Adjective-unconscious to the Subject-unconscious . The consciousness is somehow put on “stand by”, it’s less operative compared with the force, the urgency and, after all, the efficiency of the unconscious.
If, in the beginning, the quality of the unconscious was understood and evaluated only through relating it to the consciousness, now the unconscious seems to be (it’s a way of saying, of course), on “its own”: it has its own persisting presentations that may remain there, at the unperceivable level , acting independently of our conscious intentions, even though its label discloses a hard-to-deny comparison-reflex: latency state . These unconscious “thoughts”, excluded at some previous point from consciousness or even born at the unconscious level, are impended by certain forces to conquer (or re-conquer) the conscious territory. “It is the energetic pattern that motivates the re-orientation ; and then reaching the conscience is only an add-on-extra job. Consciousness does not exist by right; it only rises from the unconscious.” (Ricoeur, the quoted work, p. 131). Thus, it represents the defending ; a bit closer to the consciousness is the preconscious that only makes interdictions , with revocability, and finally, the unconscious which means resistance .
Now, by only transferring these (force-) relationships to whatever commonsensical communication pattern, we wouldn’t lack a sender that seems to move quite freely and be quite secure about its own pieces of information when trying to send/impose them to a receiver that doesn’t seem to share the same “sensorial area” (Dinu, the quoted work, p. 67) (it’s a way of saying) with the sender, and thus the presence of a gate-keeper meant to filter and select the information for a finical and circumspect receiver also seems to be unavoidable.
The problem of becoming-conscious-of-an-unconscious-”thought” may be set in the following terms: assuming that, in the beginning, the receiver rejects the communication as long as its laws and codes are completely different from those suggested by the sender, we may say that a real communication only takes place at the moment when the resistances are finally defeated, the gate-keeper fails to work at full capacity and “decides” to give up to a certain extent; the receiver will be then compelled to accept the invasion of unconscious contents that, still, had enough time to disguise themselves (did the gate-keeper help with the disguising-process?)
What happens though if the resistance cannot be defeated? Let’s suppose that the patient (or the dreamer) has become indeed conscious of some previously repressed presentation, but only because a psychoanalyst dug for it in his or her unconscious and then brought it out for therapeutical purposes. At first sight, we may think that such an assisted case is as communication-based as the naturally-occurred one seemed to be: a repressed content ends up in the very consciousness, with a specialist’s help. A problem rises though: the effect of such communication process – that of rectifying the patient’s behavior – is still far from being achieved: we shouldn’t be surprised if his/her reaction would be that of vehemently denying that particular presentation while we will notice a typical situation of “double registration” (Freud, 1992a, p.102 and the following ones, Ricoeur, the quoted work, p. 134): as long as the resistance wasn’t really defeated and the “guilty” piece of information didn’t pass through the gate-keeper’s “hands”, the particular presentation will remain by right in the sender’s possession even though it seems to be in receiver’s area as well, with the essential remark that the last one cannot recognize it as a message that has just came from the unconscious, but only as a disreputable piece of information that has to be fought with. Without taking the right form, it won’t get recognized by the receiver for what it really is: a precise psychical presentation standing for an instinct will be thus rejected by the consciousness .
As for the Swiss psychoanalyst, he tries to value both, the consciousness and the unconscious without taking the autonomy of the unconscious away which proves to be, he thinks, crucial to a balanced psychic state. Jung assumes that the unfolding of the unconscious processes has great influence upon the organism as a whole while his psychiatric experience helps him to conclude: “we wouldn’t need a big disaster for our psychic unity, hardly coagulated in years of evolution, to break into pieces, to split up and dismember it within seconds.”(Jung, 1994b, p. 30). As for an unconscious-related psychology, it would obviously imply the study of dreams. The dreams are the natural products of unconscious psychic activity. Thus, they couldn’t lack certain compensatory (Marjasch, the quoted work, p. 135) features as long as, Jung thinks, the firm connection between the unconscious processes and the conscious ones “can be described best as being a compensation, which also means that all existent deficiencies in our consciousness … are correctly counterpoised through unconscious processes” (Jung, 1994a). And so, from a Jungian perspective, we couldn’t really bring out a discussion on a strained communication between a “naughty” sender and a “bashful”, conventional receiver, but on a never-ending effort of re-balancing the relations between the unconscious and the consciousness through communication: two psychic agencies (one being ready to counterpoise, when and if needed, the other’s deficiencies) try to function together for a most propitious working of the whole psychical system. Under such circumstances, the dream, as essential message coming from the unconscious, holds a high relevancy concerning the general working of the psychic mechanism and the “replies”-exchange between the two psychic agencies.
For getting closer to the Jungian approach of the nature of dreams we have, of course, to remember the crucial importance of “those shared unconscious connotations” (Jung, 1994b, p. 71), the well-known archetypes that work independently of the individual’s psychology and which are often present in people’s dreams, still having no connection to any repressed content. These universal and uniform data are grounded on similar premises for the entire humankind (Jung, 1994a, p. 27). Not having other means for being revealed, they will make themselves available through singular individuals . Basic images of this kind often seem to have mystical germs, rallying philosophical and “religious visions of people that use to think about themselves as being far away from experiencing such weak moods” (ibid., p. 73). Such archaic contents also seem to open their own ways to the consciousness by modifying it, but also fundamentally motivating it. On one hand, they have the constraint of the instincts , and, on the other hand, they seem to provide some excellent adjustments to our consciousness, grounding the highest human preoccupations. Being endowed with a great flexibility, they are able to conjure up “certain feelings” or supplying them with “a proper path to express themselves” (Jung, 1997, p. 478). They are, Jung thinks, preliminary steps leading to ideas (ibid., p. 479).
Would we then be allowed to assume that, for knocking the archetypes together, a special communication channel is established between the unconscious and consciousness, apart from the one generally conducting the usual drives? The communication between a repressed unconscious and consciousness has its specific degrees of tension caused by the conflicting nature of the instincts and the marked coercive nature of the consciousness whose duty is to take action against these drives by inhibiting them; still, what can we possibly say about a communication process initiated by the collective unconscious and leading towards consciousness ? Would it be more relaxed or, at least, different in certain points from the one already discussed? Jung plainly answers the question: no. “The archetype and the instinct are finding themselves in the most obvious imaginable contrast as we can easily notice by comparing a man being conducted through his drives with another one guiding himself after his spiritual propensities. Still, as the contrasts are always tightly connected to each other … the common quip les extremes se touchent has its perfect justifiability in this case as well” (Jung, 1994b, p. 74) – they meet each other, indeed, in dreams, raving images, visions, masterpieces, and this very coexistence has nothing really ill-fated as long as the archetype in itself cannot be labeled as being good or bad, in exactly the same manner in which the instinct cannot be detrimental through its very essence. All in all, everything seems to take shape in a perfectly closed, but still haphazard relationship, compelling us to refer to an unique communication pattern that might include, in extreme situations, either the instincts alone, either the archetypes alone; the domination of one tendency upon the other one as well the equilibrium between the two of them mostly depends on the level of understanding of a certain person (see ibid. for more details, p.75) and of the “state” of his or her consciousness at that very moment, the condition of the consciousness usually sliding up and down between archetype and instinct.
Here, as in any other communication-based situations, the place and the moment of the process are remarkably important: the sender practically speculates a suitable “state” of the receiver for favoring the acceptance of its message.
The consequences of such communication may be decisive for individual’s existence as long as we agree, together with the generic psychoanalyst, upon the fact that the human being is mainly threatened by his/her innermost gulfs and secondarily by the outside world. Thus the communication of a primordial image may concur to a general counterpoising of the individual in both ways (Jung, 1993, p.121), in spite of their lacking in any rigor and their arising a real blast of feelings (see ibid., p. 125).
If Jung does not hesitate in supposing that all psychic functions appearing as being conscious were, at a certain far-off immemorial moment, a part of the unconscious luggage but still taking action as if they would have been conscious (Jung, 1994b, p. 79), Freud surprisingly speculates upon a supposed connection between affectivity, taboo and the genesis of the self-awareness and endows the archaic man with a strong, constraining moral consciousness understood as being “the inner perception of the interrogation upon certain impulsive drives dwelling inside us” (Freud, 1993, p. 81); these impulsive instincts, Freud thinks, lie at the basis of the taboo whose existence implies an affective ambivalence due to “the awareness of the taboo-sin” (ibid.); this awareness appears in the very moment when the taboo is encroached upon, as a sort of imperative of the consciousness that suddenly gives birth to the guilt-feeling. All in all, the clash between the unconscious (repressed) drives of the archaic people (the killing of their kings and the fathers of the tribe, the eating of the forbidden animal etc.) and the moralizing consciousness generates an anguish that Freud sees as being a sort of “reaction au danger” (Freud, 1973, p. 77). Unlike Jung, Freud seems to attach to the dawn of our consciousness a whole range of capacities that lack any kind of spiritual shades, rather taking into account the “founding”-repressed-gestures through which our ancestors stood against commandments as “do not kill” or “do not feed yourself with the totemic animal” – all of them, unconscious orders that aroused, even from the beginning of time, repulsion and attraction (see also Laplanche, 1996, p. 103) .
Following the above angle, we may say that certain communication paths – trodden for at least 10 thousand years – exist between the unconscious and consciousness, and they are strictly configured by a pattern like this: instinct – interdiction – rejection and, if need be, anxiety that could have leaded, in time, at a sort of improvement of the repressing manners, of the “coaching” of the gate-keepers and, last but not least, to the perfecting of the requirements imposed by the receiver that was becoming, in time, even more susceptible and finical concerning the codes-standards of the reaching messages. It is difficult though to guess who “uses up” whom: would the destiny of the rejected unconscious messages be always the same? In its turn, is the warding off of the consciousness always a successful job? Freud stresses out as often as he can the fact that, in spite of the weird dream we manage to remember in the morning, the foremost importance always rests in the primary raving idea whose sense is always well-determined. Because of the displacement, the concatenation of the dream ideas we find in the morning in our consciousness does not reflect the real coherence of our dream: ‘the relation between the dream-ideas may be inverted if not completely shattered or completely replaced with a brand new relation between its elements” (Freud, 1993, p.111). As a result of the secondary revision of its content, the dream will be given a new meaning which is always relevant for what could be labeled as the communication requirements of the consciousness . Any material reaching the agency of consciousness needs an approved clothing; thus, for fulfilling this job, a special function (Freud simply calls it “the intellectual function”) enters the game and modifies the relations between the dream-ideas.
It is known, the unconscious tension grows proportionally with the “number” of rejections of the messages reaching the receiver. At our previous question “who uses up whom?, we could answer through another question: is it really necessary for one agency to “use up” the other one?
The common sense and an evolutionist approach of the psychic could tempt us to imagine a certain evolution of communication processes themselves: the experience of the involved agencies, their flexibility, their dynamics, the adjusting of one to the other are, all in all, their very qualities that certify the psychic coherence of a certain individual could assess such evolution. This kind of reasoning is however vehemently incriminated by Jung. He believes that the Ego doesn’t need to get through changes otherwise the risk of a psychological disorder is considerably increased. After each unconscious uptake, the Ego, a “well-settled agency” (Jung, 1994b, p. 96), suffers more or less profound transformations. If its structure is not strong enough for facing the threatening unconscious invasion, then the assimilation/communication process reached its goal and the Ego might become, eventually, richer and better grounded. Still, Jung says, such case is quite rare; prevailingly, the Ego, once moved from its fixedness, can easily be shattered, making room for a real colony of unconscious impulses, good ones and bad ones, that can be seen by the psychoanalyst’s eye as shaping a psychopathological diagnosis. In short, the Ego is indeed ready for improvement only to a certain extent, but less disposed to reshape its contents at the unconscious’ will.
If we’d follow Laplanche’s explanation regarding the loss of the real sexual instinct (Laplanche, 1996, p. 34) and its replacement with a rather mimetic instinct, then we should also submit to the idea that, through evolutions, stoppings, returns, regressions and identifications, the instinct par excellence (the sexual one) has been re-invented by each and every generation, losing bit by bit its “natural” character. For regaining it, Laplanche thinks, we should come back at the starting point, or even beyond it: to the inborn phantasms , brought back into the light together with another psychoanalyst, J. B. Pontalis. At first sight, it seems that they are not rigorously different from Jung’s archetypes: the phantasms make an attempt to conduct – from the unconscious – conscious reactions and gestures for determining them to go back at the primary order (?) that these phantasms once used to direct. The very thing imposing a difference between the phantasms and the Jungian archetypes is the location of the first ones: they are a part of our memory and take the shape of remembrances (or remembrance-patterns) revealing themselves from time to time only. A good example of such phantasm is the fear of castration shaped, in the first instance, as a reply to child’s curiosity regarding the sexual differences. These phantasms could represent “l’objet psychanalytique par excellence” (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1985, p. 35). In spite of their being relatively autonomous and thick, these fundamental fantasies are still intangible, just like dreams and just like the “world” they come from: the psychical reality that Laplanche still avoids (Laplanche, 1996, p. 13) to define by stressing the differences between this one and the real world .
But why such a discrepancy? Why the impossibility of comparing the two “worlds”? Is the world explored and ruled by the unconscious totally distinct from the one explored by our consciousness? The unconscious, Laplanche says, is the heir of a world that, at the very beginning , was established as the one and only reality of the subject, exclusively built on the pleasure principle – there was the place where the phantasms were born; and to this inner world, the “reality”-proof doesn’t have any relevancy (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1985, p. 14)
Of course we could not speak in absolute terms about such separation between the inner world and the world outside us. We shouldn’t forget that the Ego (even to Freud) is unconscious to a certain extent, even though it also dominates the consciousness by controlling “the access-ways to motility” (Freud, 1992a, p. 102) (which means that the Ego undertakes the responsibility of the responses to external excitations, including the communication with the “objective” reality.) An Ego seen as being responsible for the libido-cathexis (“the Ego is the proper, basic reservoir of the libido”, ibid., p. 75) but also playing the main part in the apperception of the environment, hardly can be suspected as being unfamiliar with one of the two worlds. We could rather say that the Ego is the key-witness letting us believe that we recognize a certain degree of “non-reality” (of imaginary) to the outside world, just as well as we sense a dose of reality in our inner world due to a certain pattern through which the Ego gets accomplished into a “presence-field”, as Ey says. Dreaming or living at the daylight, a person is still the same person, regardless the very psychological state he or she is in, and however, a certain psychological state is born “through the reflex of all the others” (Bergson, 1993, p. 115) without losing any of its more specific features. The display of a psychological state – on the inner or on the outside stage – appears as a free act, “and it always expresses the entire Ego” (ibid.). Bergson also thinks that on the Ego’s surface “certain independent adenoids” (ibid.) may float – for instance, the suggestions made to a person found in a half-conscious state or under hypnosis will be incorporated into his or her consciousness (preserving Bergson’s terms) (ibid., esp. p. 115) and into his or her Ego (preserving Freud’s terms). The Ego promotes objectivity without being its slave. The Ego itself being overloaded with contradictions (see Ey, the quoted work, p. 324), it keeps the objectivity “through its effects only, more exactly, through its deeds” (ibid.). Ey calls this dark side of the Ego that is unaware of its inabilities and thus transforms them into principles (ibid.), “the paradoxical unconsciousness” (ibid., p. 325). But this “unconsciousness” implies and grounds the unity of the Ego even though the last one denies it as long as its “self-construction…cannot be other except the one wanted by the Ego” (ibid.).
We may then conclude that experiencing certain parts of reality is not an impossible task for the unconscious. From Freud – “our entire knowledge is connected to our consciousness. The unconscious itself cannot be known otherwise but through consciousness” (Freud, 1992a, p. 104) – to Ey – “this subjective-objective reality, this essential ambiguity actually grounds the ontological pattern of the conscious phenomena: neither entirely objective, nor exclusively subjective. Our consciousness corresponds to such reality, firstly conceived as a ligament between objectivity and subjectivity” (Ey, the quoted work, p. 36) – the long ramifications of consciousness, reaching even the deepest gulfs of unconscious, are always reminded.
A strategic inversionBefore proceeding in making the first changes in the communication pattern between the unconscious and consciousness, we will invert – not for long – our perspective trying to take a look at the communication process as it may be seen from the consciousness to the unconscious.
Among other manners of denying the consciousness, Ey also counts its reduction to a common feature of our psychic or to a common function usually named “vigilance” (ibid., p. 83); we, of course, stumble across this very “sin”, at Freud. In Beyond the pleasure principle , he concludes: “the consciousness is the surface of our psychic apparatus…we understand it as being a function of a system that is, spatially speaking, in the very proximity of the external world” (Freud, 1992a, p. 104); or “the consciousness is, before everything else, a purely descriptive term…our psychical life is rather marked by the fact that the consciousness quickly disappears” (ibid., p. 97). From the moment when the reference-point status is refused to our consciousness, the place of the real sense (Ricoeur, the quoted work, p. 451) would be then looked for elsewhere: namely, among the unconscious obscurities. This way, Ricoeur thinks, the consciousness itself becomes problematical within Freud’s psychoanalysis: “from this point on, we deal with “qualms” of conscience, more exactly, with the problem of getting-conscious…that replaces the so-called evidence of being-conscious” (ibid.).
But such difference is not psychoanalysis’ own point. Moreover, in its very essence, it seems to be a rather fortunate wording. Ey has meant his book on consciousness as a come-back to the basic Freudian theory “that discovered the reality of the unconscious by gradually crossing over…the reality of the conscious structures” (Ey, 1983, the foreword to the 2 nd French edition, p. 22) and he subscribes, we believe, to such disposal through the thetic function conferred to the consciousness. Since this thetic function is a faculty of “recognizing in each move made by the consciousness and for each of its modalities, the precise contents that belongs to it, that proceeds from it, that misses or overlooks and stumbles in” (ibid., p. 137), we may assume that, to Ey, the consciousness doesn’t only play the part of an organizer that is tightly connected with the “constitutional acts of the living reality” (ibid., p. 11) (memory, perception, verbal communication), but also one of becoming-conscious-through-apprehension : we could say, an uninterrupted decreasing of the entropy if we’d consider the Freudian approach of the consciousness as being the bound energy while the unconscious represents the free energy. In the formulation “becoming-conscious” lies the dynamics that our psychic apparatus needs for surpassing each moment the bi-polarity somehow interpreted as being an unconscious determination from which one has to escape not by ignoring it or getting rid of it, but by integrating it and assimilating it.
It would be fanciful to believe that, at some point in the future, the communication between the consciousness and the unconscious would become profitless thanks to a total assimilation of our soul’s gulfs by our comprehensive consciousness, and the human being would become hyper-aware of himself or herself and of his or her very place in the world and not having anything shameful to repress anymore. We’d rather have to underline that both agencies implied by such communication process are never endingly fed by their own contents, strengthening their positions this way: “through becoming-conscious the unconscious is repressed, though it never ceases imposing itself” (ibid., p. 24). The communication between the two agencies will never become unserviceable.
For a better demonstration, we should borrow Ey’s metaphor describing the consciousness as a performance on a theatre stage (ibid., p. 137) and we will take advantage of his analogy by guiding it to our own purposes: the individual performing on a stage (living, fully experiencing) always communicates (more or less discreetly) with the “backstage”, with his prompter. While performing, he doesn’t only reproduce the lines he learnt by heart (that is he doesn’t only resorts to his memory, perceptions and reflexes of all kinds as a secure harvest of a long living-exercise), but he also improvises. In other words, the “objective legality of the outside world” (ibid.) (the connections with his audience and with the location of his performing), his hidden wishes (maybe the wish to be liked by a certain person in the audience), his fantasy (permanent adjustments of his lines, fortunate corrections of his slips) and the stage directions he gets, in whispers, from the prompter backstage, are all melting together in the act of living. All these factors successfully interfere providing, in the end, a definite shape and a definite value to that experience (performing). What happens then when the audience is gone and the performer himself goes backstage, washing his make-up off and throwing away the stage outfit?
These are the moments when our performer – sleeping or being psychically ill – lets himself sliding down through the labyrinths of his own unconscious, on the backstage halls. Imagining the life of an old performer: we could “see” a tested man, but still liable to stage-fright, making the same moves for years and years: entering and leaving the stage.
We’ve just provided a suitable analogy that could baffle a hasty opinion about the fact that to-be-conscious, to live and to experience, to be into the world means rejecting the communication with the unconscious; however, such an opinion is probably based on the fact that rejecting means – indeed – stopping, thwarting the communication with the unconscious contents, the single “communication”-states actually being those of a de-structured consciousness. In reality, the last ones are the only ones that do not require any communication: in such case, we dwell in the world of darkness.
When we wake up and remember what we dreamt during night, the non-communication becomes communication. Thus, the impossibility of recalling our dreams shouldn’t lead us to the conclusion that they did not exist: it only means they were strictly kept at the unconscious level. Merely in the moment when the dream reaches the level of the consciousness we can refer to its communication . So the dream appears as an independent unconscious message , quite easily distinguishable when compared with other unconscious diffuse contents that may interweave with the real living experiences. Caught with the right eye, Ey’s statement: “to-be-conscious means ceasing being unconscious” (ibid., p. 20) wouldn’t look that deep-seated anymore; especially if we’d choose to continue it this way: but being conscious integrates the unconscious state as long as, without being really (and excessively) wide-open to communication, the consciousness admits (permits) the communication precisely through its attempt to dominate, forbid and impose order (see ibid., p. 146 where Ey seems to suggest more or less the same idea).
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Notes
This specific phrase was however noticed by Ricoeur and immediately amended as an undeniable index of the psychoanalyst’s weakness : Freud relates himself to the consciousness without even wanting it and knowing it.
The term “mental apparatus” is, as we know, used by Freud because of its energetic, economic and topographical applications that succeed in structuring the psychic in Freudian psychoanalysis. Still, Henri Ey prefers the formulation “psychic organism” distrusting the absolute importance of a mechanical and structured-based approach of the human psychic. See Ey, Henri, 1983, Constiinta, ed. by Ed. Stiintifica si enciclopedica, Bucharest, trans. by Dinu Grama, p. 146.
The sick person should sleep into a temple and dream about what his or her treatment should consists of.
For more details concerning the importance – not excessively great – of dreams in Plato’s works, see Brès, Yvone (1975), La Psychologie de Platon, P.U.F., Paris, Publication de la Sorbonne “N.S. Recherches” – 4, the chapter “Le Rêve et le savoir”. We won’t specify the concrete attributes of the vehicle of the soul, later improved by Artistotle and then taken over by Neoplatonic philosophers of the Middle Age. On the same matter, we also suggest the following works: Viseax, Dominique, (1989), La mort et les états posthumes selon les grandes traditions, éd. de la Maisuie, Guy Trédaniel, Paris, pp. 77-85, Ficino, Marsilio, (2000), Les Trois livres de la Vie – Des Triplici Vita, Fayard, Paris, tr. par Guy le Fevre de la Borderie secretaire de Monseigneur frere unique de Roy et son interprete aux langues entrangeres, texte revue par Thierry Gontier, Culianu, I. P., (1996), Eros si magie in Renastere.1484, ed. by Nemira, Bucuresti, tr. by Dan Petrescu, who also shows the filiation between Ficino’s magic and the Aristotle’s vehicle of soul ( pneuma). See esp. pp. 24, 25, 51, 52, 53, 55 and the Anexe 1, “The origins of the doctrine concerning the vehicle of soul”, p. 307. See also Aristotle, (1966), De l’âme, Société d’édition “Les belles lettres”, Paris, tr. by E. Barbotin.
Jung himself seems to accept the possibility of the pre-existence of archetypes in the soul; see Zlate, quoted work, p. 240.
See Ey, the quoted work, chapters “The reality of consciousness”, “The consciousness and the experience of reality”, ” General talking about being conscious”, “The two ways of being conscious” and the foreword to the 2nd French edition.
It’s important to take into account Sonja Marjasch ‘s observation concerning Jung’s day-”uproar”: “Jung soutient ici la thèse selon laquelle nous rêvons continûment, c’est-à-dire que les petits psychismes secondaires sont toujours en action, mais que le vacarme diurne et la volonté consciente du complexe Moi sont si forts que le murmure persistant des complexes est habituellement perçu en surimpression”, Le Rêve et C.G. Jung in 1967, Le Rêve et les sociétés humaines, R. Caillois and G.E. Grunebaum (coord.), Gallimard, Paris, p. 130.
We still have to mention that in Freud’s works the Ego does not represent the conscious being par excellence; the Ego may also have an unconscious part just as well as the unconsciousness does not perfectly coincide with the repression, even though each repressed material should necessarily be unconscious.
Freud also talks about a cathectic energy of our mental apparatus; following Breuer, he makes a distinction between “a free energy that tends to dischargement, and a bound energy”. See Freud, Dincolo de principiul placerii, pp. 45, 47.
From this point on, Freud only speaks about unconscious psychical acts.
There is no enough space for more details about the relationships imposed by Freud’s second topography: the Ego (which cannot be superposed with the consciousness from the first topography) is here the one resisting to unconscious invasions. Now everything depends on the strength/weakness of the Ego, everything stays or falls with the very manner in which the Ego bears the specific dominations of the World, of the Super-Ego and of the Id. (which, once again, cannot be superposed with the unconsciousness). See Ricoeur, the quoted work, p. 229 and Freud, Dincolo de principiul placerii, p. 112. Following a 2nd topography-based perspective, an exemplary communication should have one direction only: namely, from an Ego always threatened and always ready to re-balance the present situation, towards the other agencies. “The one who suffers from neurosis is basically the one who lost control of his own household” ( Ricoeur, the quoted work, p. 199). In other words, within the 2nd topography, the sender could be the Id. while the Ego does nothing but trying to ward off the inappropriate messages and eventually receiving them to a certain extent only. In such case, the Ego would have to face not only the Id. but also its ideal, the Super-Ego (another possible sender) that urges it from the opposite point trying to impose its own standards usually inaccessible to the Ego: ” this way, the Ego is not only closely watched upon, but also tortured by both, its inferior and its superior agency.” (ibid., p. 201). Seemingly, the gate-keeper’s job is still available; still, we could assume that the Ego is the one trying to shoulder this job as well, the Ego is the one suggesting solutions for the conflicts controlling the access to the consciousness more or less successfully. We could also say that its prolongations (not negligible at all) in both, unconsciousness and consciousness validates its involvement in filtering information and makes it look more flexible. In short, the receiver par excellence will be once again the consciousness (the “consciousness-perception”, as it appears in Freud’s system). The effect of the communication process will be then once again that of an action exerted from inside to outside, the goal: integration of the personality.
And here Jung discusses in great detail dreams and raving images crammed with archaic fantasies that his patients remembered when asked to express themselves artistically through drawing, painting, music, dance or literature. He eventually states that “All possible mythical themes were to be found at a certain moment in those imaginary products of people”. Useless to add that none of his patients knew anything about the objective existence of the mythical themes they innocently (re)produces. See ibid.
Jung talks quite ambiguously about “the spontaneous amplification of the archetypes”.
Much later, Laplanche will underline the fact that certain dream-states can be seen to a certain extent as being regressions to an “old” age when, he says balancing and synthesizing the classic psychoanalytic approaches, there was no gap between the unconscious and the preconscious. The “old” times are not only the times before language, but also the times before the censorship: “as a matter of fact, the language and the censorship were responsible for the distinction between the preconscious/conscious mechanism and the unconscious one. (Laplanche, 1996, p. 103)
We will recognize here an aspect that Jung mentioned already.
The two French psychoanalysts agree with Freud when he states that “avec l’introduction du principe de réalité une forme d’activité de pensée se trouve séparée par clivage; elle reste indépendante de l’épreuve de réalité et soumise uniquement au principe de plaisir” (quoted from Formulations sur les deux principes du cours des événements psychiques, in Résultats, idées, problèmes I , 1911, P.U.F., Paris, pp. 138, 139).
Without straightly stating it, it’s very possible that Ey himself to agree upon the unconscious part of the Ego; he talks about its undertaking of all facts and events engaged in its construction and that are, as a matter of fact, developed by the Ego itself. By stating that the individual disposes of himself through his Ego, Ey also comes closer to Bergson who connects the Ego with each free act that we do. See also Bergson, 1993.