Consciousness and the Unconscious

Jung divided thinking into directed thinking and nondirected think-ing. Directed thinking is conscious and creates innovations and adap-tions; it imitates reality and seeks to act upon it. Evidently it directs itself to the outside world. Directed thinking is also known as intel-lectual, logical, or adapted thinking. Nondirected thinking lacks an overarching or major idea and lacks direction. Thoughts float, sink, and rise according to their own gravity, so to speak. Nondirected thinking does not exhaust a person, and it prefers fantasies of the past and of the future rather than images of reality. Nondirected thinking is also known as passive, automatic, dreaming, imagination, or subjec-tive thinking, which turns away from reality, knows no hierarchy, con-tinues on without trouble, works spontaneously, sets subjective wishes free, and is wholly unproductive. This state of mind is as infantile as the subjective, fed by our egoistic wishes. The thoughts may even be antagonistic to the ego (Jung 1963, 13–16, 20–22, 36–37; 1989, 27).

The unconscious is always first, and consciousness arises from an unconscious condition. In early childhood we are unconscious. The most important functions of an instinctive nature are unconscious.

Consciousness is a product of the unconscious. The field of the unconscious is enormous and always continuous, while the field of consciousness is narrower and can hold only a few pieces of content simultaneously at any given moment (Jung 1968, 8).

It is possible to communicate with the conscious products that originated from the unconscious, even though unconscious can-not be directly apprehended. The unconscious psyche has an entirely unknown nature; nothing can be known about the unconscious and how it rules life (Jung 1968, 6). When the unconscious is distorted, the conscious reveals unconscious content indirectly; the mildest

forms are what we call “lapses.” Most of our lapses of the tongue, of the pen, of memory, and the like are traceable to unconscious content.

An unconscious secret can be more harmful than one that is conscious (Jung 1995, 32–33). The unconscious manifests in unsystematic and even chaotic forms. The unconscious produces dreams, visions, fanta-sies, emotions, grotesque ideas, etc. (Jung 1980, 284).

Jung (2010, 78) explained that just as conscious content can vanish into the unconscious, other content can arise from it. New thoughts and creative ideas that have never before been conscious can appear in the conscious mind. Dream material does not necessarily consist of memories; it may just as well contain new thoughts that are not yet conscious. I believe that dreams are important reminders of issues that people are consciously trying to suppress in their everyday lives. For example, a dream can remind you to try harder, if you have not done your best to accomplish a desired goal.

Jung (1983, 216) believed that the unconscious has enormous potential. Jung (1980, 279) also maintained that unconscious thinking can shift to the past and to the future: “The unconscious has a Janus-face: on one side its contents point back to a preconscious, prehistoric world of instinct, while on the other side it potentially anticipates the future—precisely because of the instinctive readiness for action of the factors that determine man’s fate.”

The unconscious is dynamic and relative. Jung (1968, 69) explained that “Freud is seeing the mental processes as static, while I speak in terms of dynamics and relationship. To me it is all relative. There is nothing definitely unconscious; it is only not present to the conscious mind under a certain light. . . . The only exception I make is the myth-ological pattern, which is profoundly unconscious, as I can prove by the facts.”

Conscious decisions depend upon the undisturbed functioning of memory, and memory—stored in the unconscious—usually func-tions automatically. Jung (1968, 190–94) explained that if the uncon-scious should prefer not to give any ideas, one could not give a speech,

because one could not invent the next step. A human mind’s abil-ity to function depends entirely upon the kind cooperation of the unconscious. If it does not cooperate, the human mind is lost. As Jung (1983, 219) wrote, the unconscious collaborates with the conscious without friction or disturbance, so that one is not even aware of the existence of the collaboration. Therefore, the unconscious naturally plays a part in our conscious behavior. However, memory often suffers from the disturbing interference of unconscious content. Furthermore, Jung wrote that memory uses “the bridges of association,” but that sometimes certain memories do not reach consciousness at all (Jung 1983, 219; 1980, 282).

Besides normal forgetting, there are cases described by Freud of disagreeable memories, which one is all too ready to lose. Freud rec-ognized that the “blocking” of the traumatic affect was due to the repression of “incompatible” material. The symptoms were substitutes for impulses, wishes, and fantasies that, because they were morally or aesthetically painful, were subjected to a “censorship” exercised by ethical conventions. The unwelcome memories, then, were pushed out of the conscious mind by a particular moral belief, and a spe-cific inhibition prevented them from being remembered (Jung 1966, 34–35). When pride is insistent enough, Jung (2010, 82), borrowing Nietzsche’s words, said that memory prefers to give way. Jung stated that the unconscious mind must always rely on the conscious mind. In his anonymous letter of December 1937, Jung (1984a, 47) described the unconscious: “You trust your unconscious as if it were a loving father. But it is nature and cannot be made use of as if it were a reli-able human being. It is inhuman and it needs the human mind to function usefully for man’s purposes. . . . The unconscious is useless without the human mind.”