The Psyche: Exploring the Structure of Human Consciousness
The Philosophy of Psyche and Soul
The Psyche has long been a subject of fascination for philosophers and psychologists alike.
It is the source of our individual experience and inner narrative, the container of our consciousness and identity, the expansive heights and shadowy depths of our mind; The seat of our very Soul.
The ancient greeks named the Soul “Psyche”.
They thought of the psyche both as life energy — the divine breath of the gods that animated our bodies and imbued us with life, and also as our mind, which contains our distinctly human intellect.
The Greeks came to view the psyche, or soul, as the essence of a person. It defined how one acts, and thinks. It forms everything which makes a person unique. The soul, they thought, is our original divine state. The incorporeal spiritual form that persists even after death.
The belief in the soul is one that is universal across time and culture. Humanity has always conceived of a spiritual, life-animating quality that exists within all of us. A divine essence that both connects us with nature yet sets us apart from it.
Humanity’s first spiritual beliefs — ancestor worship, and animism, were heavily centered around the concept of the soul. Ancient cultures all throughout the world identified the soul, and attempted to understand its nature.
Philosophers Plato and Aristotle believed the psyche was responsible for human consciousness — intellect, thought, reason, rationale, and will; Everything which set us apart from other living beings such as plants and animals.
Their philosophy of the psyche would go on to define how the western world viewed the human mind for hundreds of years. It was not until the advent of depth psychology that the concept of an “unconscious” was introduced.
Jung’s Model of the Psyche
It was Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung that turned our attention from consciousness to something far greater, far deeper, and far older.
For them, the Psyche not just consciousness, but the totality of all psychological processes, both conscious and unconscious.
Jung believed that consciousness was only a mere island in the vast ocean of the psyche. Much of our psychological lives were completely unconscious — unknown or unaware to us.
Furthermore, it is our goal in life to make the unconscious conscious to come to a greater sense of self-awareness and understanding.
They founded the school of depth psychology in an attempt to better understand the structure of the psyche, and also the psychological dynamics that produce our lived experience. Jung and Freuds contributions to the field of psychology have largely defined how we now think of the Psyche: as containing both consciousness and unconscious.
It is Jung’s contributions however, that we will focusing on.
Consciousness
How do we define consciousness? This is a question that has been asked by philosophers and thinkers for millennia. Depth psychology provides us with a fairly comprehensive definition:
We can think of consciousness as our field of cognitive awareness — everything that we know, remember, feel, sense, everything we are aware of, thinking of, and directing our attention towards at any given moment in time.
All of the talents, and skills that we possess and can use automatically without much effort or forethought; all of our motivations, goals, intentions, everything we set our mind to; everything that we are aware of, can name, describe, and speak of rationally…
…this is all consciousness.
The Ego
The Birth of the Ego
We cannot understand consciousness unless we understand the Ego.
From the moment we are born, we are faced with a dilemma. We are thrust out from the security of the womb and for the very first time we are forced to make our biological needs known.
So we scream, and cry, and wail for attention. We do everything in our power to fight for the life that has just been afforded to us. This struggle is what births the Ego.
The Ego is born from the friction of internal need and external reality. It is a way of adapting to the world around us to ensure that our needs and desires are met; To differentiate ourselves from our environment and to form a unique identity.
The Ego provides a sense of continuity to our lived experience. It holds our memories, establishes the basis of our personal identity, forms our self-concepts, and self-beliefs. It is the way in which we differentiate the outer world from our inner experiences.
It is our sense of “I”.
Ego-Consciousness
Furthermore, the Ego and consciousness are inseparable.
Whereas consciousness is our cognitive field of awareness the Ego is our continued sense of Identity, our subjective reference point of reality. Consciousness, as it were, is a function of the psyche that relates psychic contents to the Ego. That which is not related, or recognized by the ego is therefore unconscious.
The Ego mediates the conscious and unconscious aspects of our psyche. It floats between both domains, functioning, at times, on a more conscious level, acting on will, reason, and rationale, and at others, on an unconscious level, becoming caught up in unconscious complexes.
However, the Ego is only a small island on the vast ocean of the unconscious. Occasionally, something breaks through the surface of those murky waters, arising from the depths of the unconscious into our awareness.
This is how we start to grow more self aware.
A healthy ego is one that can balance both the conscious and the unconscious, incorporating elements of both to create a more integrated and whole psyche. This process is the transcendence from the Ego to the Self, the process of Individuation, and the ultimate goal of the Psyche.
The Unconscious
Defining the Unconscious
While ego-consciousness can be thought of as our sphere of awareness, the unconscious psyche is the opposite. We can think of the unconscious as anything that we are not actively aware of.
Since the conscious psyche is limited in its scope, it can only hold onto so many contents at once.
We can not recall every single granular detail of our lives, our memories are imperfect. We don’t notice every detail of what we’re actively looking at, much of the world goes unnoticed by us. We can’t always directly acknowledge the way in which something makes us feel, emotions rise up from within us without our control.
This is because the psyche must direct its attention carefully.
It is constantly processing information from our external environment and our internal experiences. However, due to the limitations of our conscious processing power, it must prioritize which stimuli we attend to, and which we ignore in order to operate efficiently.
This selective attention helps to manage the overwhelming amount of information that bombards us on a daily basis. By focusing on what is most important at any given moment, we can conserve our energy and better utilize our cognitive resources for critical thinking and problem-solving.
Making the Unconscious Conscious
The Unconscious is a vast reservoir of subliminal perceptions, memories, emotions, complexes, and instincts, all of which has the potential to rise into consciousness given the right amount of effort.
Some unconscious contents are more easily recalled into conscious awareness than others. These are what can be considered subconscious, floating on the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness. These are the memories, thoughts and emotions that are most accessible to us.
We can probably remember what we had for lunch last Tuesday, even though isn't to immediately top of mind.
With a bit more effort, we can likely remember the basic plot a movie we saw, or a book we read some time ago.
Given more effort still we can probably recall the exact motions we felt during a certain milestone in our lives. Not everything that’s unconscious is inaccessible.
However, there are certain contents of the unconscious that remain under the threshold of consciousness and can only be brought about with great effort, or intense emotion.
As a defense mechanism, many traumas and psychologically damaging experiences are banished into unconsciousness. They are simply too painful to be dealt with in a conscious manner. Confronting them head on would feel be catastrophic to our ego, so they are repressed.
When these deeply unconscious contents become so charged with energy and emotion that they can no longer be ignored, they burst forth into consciousness. Suddenly we are made aware of emotions and memories we’ve never fully processed. Our complexes, which take over us and make us act uncharacteristically, are revealed.
The bringing of the unconscious into consciousness is the foundation of Jung’s theory of psychological development — individuation. However, there is much more to the unconscious than that which comes from personal experience.
Jung called this part of the psyche “The Collective Unconscious”.
While the (personal) unconscious contains all of the elements we’ve gained throughout our life experiences, the collective unconscious contains the inherited psychological history of humanity.
The Collective Unconscious
Defining the Collective Unconscious
Jung believed the collective unconscious contained the ‘entire spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution’.
Primal instincts and drives, shared symbols and experiences, universal patterns and motifs, the very blueprint of the psyche itself, all exist within the collective unconscious.
The collective unconscious acts as an archive of ancestral experience and data. It connects us to universal patterns of action and behavior — instincts, and universal patterns of understanding and recognition — archetypes.
Defining Instincts & Archetypes
Instincts are predispositions to certain behaviors and biological needs, driving us to take action. In the same way that birds know to migrate in the winter, or a caterpillar knows it must eventually turn into a cocoon, the instincts of the collective unconscious guide our behaviors without our conscious understanding.
Archetypes, on the other hand, can be thought of as shared symbols and thought-forms. Representations of the shared motifs, ideas, experiences found throughout human history.
Just as instincts are predisposed modes of behavior, archetypes are predisposed modes of perception and understanding.
Archetypes function like psychic organs (organs of the psyche). Just as our physical organs direct and maintain the functioning of our body, archetypes direct and maintain the functioning of our psyche. They strive for realization within the individual, and can influence and direct behavior in the same way instincts can.
Instinctively, we know to avoid fire, that it is dangerous and will harm us. This is a common instinct in many animals.
Archetypally, we are predisposed to understand fire as a source of warmth, and comfort, but also as a force of transformation. Fire can cleanse, purify, melt, destroy, and burn.
Both of these inherited thought patterns serve an important evolutionary purpose, and define how we as a species interact with and think of the same natural phenomenon
Like instincts, archetypes are formed over long periods of time throughout our evolutionary history. As more symbolic representations of instinctual forces, archetypes appear throughout myths, folklore, literature, and art.
Archetypes, and the collective unconscious are the reason why so many commonalities can be found in the stories and myths of completely separate and distinct cultures.
The collective unconscious is therefore the bedrock beneath the ocean of the unconscious; the bedrock upon which the psychic (psychological) experience of all of humanity, is founded.
Conclusion
Psyche Opening the Golden Box, John William Waterhouse (1904)
Depth psychology, and the works of Carl Jung specifically, have revolutionized the way we think of consciousness and of our mind as a whole. It has illuminated that consciousness makes up only a fraction of the totality of our psychological reality.
By understanding the structure of the psyche, we understand the nature of our own minds. Just like understanding our physical anatomy helped to revolutionize medicine, so too can understanding the psyche can revolutionize the way we think of personal growth and development.
Jung dedicated his life to understanding the psyche, the archetypes, the role consciousness plays in the grand scheme of the cosmos.
His theories on the psyche and on human consciousness have allowed me to find a way to ground my spiritual practice in psychological fact; to understand tarot, astrology, mysticism, and alchemy in terms of depth psychology.
Next week will continue our exploration of Jung by delving deeper into the archetypes that make up our Psyche: One of Jung’s most popular, yet most misunderstood theories.
