yo,
Mag:
Actually, it's the other way around: I've been reading a lot of psychology disguised as philosophy.
And no, I don't think of the unconscious as a "separate entity", but simply as the "unconscious", the unknown or hidden aspects of our personality. It doesn't quite work apart from cognitive processes: everything in our mind is closely related, and its natural dynamics aims for integration. Some parts can, however, split from our conscious mind because of neurotic complexes. I just emphasised the difference to distinguish it from our thinking traits, but in reality everything works as a whole, or at least tries to.
I'm particularly a Jungian on this. I believe there's this "collective unconscious" formed by archetypes which pretty much makes up the human race's mind configuration. Archetypes are collective and impersonal at their center, but they are shaped by our individual traits and particular external circumstances, and so they appear to us mixed like that. They are
autonomous from our conscious mind, that is, we have no control over them. We can't tell an archetype to act or behave in certain way, but what we can do is listen to the archetype and understand its meaning in the different situations and moments it presents to us, be it in dreams, through creative acts, through whatever inspiration or revelation we may have. The archetype must be integrated with our conscious thinking in order to make conscious what previously was unconscious, so to expand our perspectives. Now, these archetypes are quite mysterious at their very essence, they are extremely dynamic and changing, because they are psychic energy, libido. Every psychologist who works with the unconscious, even if he doesn't agree with the collective unconscious, would tell you that we have only excavated the tip of the iceberg that is the unconscious. And speaking of neurology, remember we only use a small percentage of our brain capacity? That goes with the idea that only a small part of the unconscious is revealed to us through our lifetimes.
And I totally differ from what you say on Freud. There's a lot of empirical evidence of the existence of the unconscious, even if, as you said, there's no proven "material" cause for it. Hell, there are still a lot of psychoanalists around (even Freudian ones), with couch and all, there's still a lot of reasearch being done in hundreds of psychoanalitical institutions of all sorts, even if the current trends are the so-called cognitive-behavioral and empirically-validated forms of therapy. The unconscious is made valid through psychotherapeutic practice. So you know, psychoanalysis is far more -I should stress it out-
FAR more than what Freud said, as thousands of revisions throughout almost a century have concluded, even if a lot of Freud's ideas are still rather valid. It is a very common mistake to trash on the figure of Freud to disqualify psychoanalysis, and it is very easy to ignore all posterior investigations. You talk of the theories of the unconscious as if they were things of the past, and that only shows prejudice and a tremendous lack of information. I haven't been misled on these aspects of psychology. On the contrary, I'm positively sure that at this point I've read more on the subject that you'll ever do in your entire life.
Another thing: I don't assign a "supernatural quality" to the unconscious. Empirically,
scientifically, there's no supernatural quality to it. All studies have been mostly phenomenological, and this phenomenology describes the unconscious as a driving force behind religious thinking. Jung used to say that the unconscious is religious or mythical at its core, and from that point on we can only speculate. The are more complicated aspects of his theory (like synchronicity, for example, or certain aspects of dream interpretation) that barely suggest the existence of a consciousness apart from our biological brain-spinal system, but there's no way to prove that, same as there's no way to prove the opposite. All we have are a few indications.
But, certainly, nothing tells us that the unconscious cannot be a medium through which we may communicate with the spiritual. At all times and in every corner of the world, dreams and visions have been the natural ways through which humans are said to contact the divine. Why not? Ancient philosophers and mystics have always described man as a confluence of two spirits or forms of energy: the eternal or divine, and the mortal or material. Could it be that the unconscious is the bridge that binds together these two natures?
To see this point more clearly (I mean the unconscious, not the divine thing), I suggest you try an exercise to contact the unconscious. It's called "active imagination". Put yourself in a comfortable position, go sit on your favorite sofa, lie in bed a bit or something, whatever you prefer. Try to clear your mind and focus on an image from your fantasies. Just let it come to you. Once it is there, try speaking to it in your mind. You might want to ask questions like "who are you?", "is there anything you want to tell me?", but it's up to you, you formulate them. Just do it with an open mind, try to get rid of prejudices or else it won't work. It's a really nice exercise, and quite frankly, in a way it's very similar to what artists do when they create. Give it a try, you don't lose anything and it might help you more than you think to understand some aspects of yourself.
