Unconscious

The unconscious is a vast, dynamic thing. I understand it as a force - one which acts upon an unsuspecting ego. (Our egos, for the lay person, are the part of us that allows us to say "I." You might say: How can there be a "part" of us that says "I?" Isn't ALL of our person the "I"? This is a common misunderstanding, but ask yourself: Is your liver a part of you? Yes. Does IT say "I"? No. So we acknowledge that there are parts of ourselves that don't have the right to say "I". The ego does.)

People used to think that our ego was ourself. They did not think that the person could be measured beyond what he consciously knew. Smart people thought this. Brilliant people thought this. In fact, many people still do think this. But psychology has laid this myth to rest. Dreams, for example, are not products of the ego. That is, there is nothing volitional about them. Another example of a clearly unconscious phenomenon is when an emotion "overtakes" us. We had no intention of experiencing this emotion, or reacting to a situation as we did, but unconscious factors caused it to be so. The unconscious can often make us feel embarrassed, or ashamed. Because we are so caught up in the idea that WE, our ego, control our life, we see it as a failure when something like this comes over us.

My view of the unconscious differs somewhat from contemporary thinking. In short, I see the unconscious as the rest of your life. I see it as the sum total of possibilities of the life you have yet to live; the experiences you have yet to experience. You may ask yourself: Where, then, does the ego figure in? If the unconscious is everything you haven't done, and the unconscious is not ego, then where is our ego? I would say that the ego is, in actuality, a very small part of our psychic economy. By psychic economy I mean that part of us which can be considered psychological.

So if the unconscious is the rest of our lives, what, then, is left for the ego to do? In my view, the ego only acts as a container, or boundary. It has nothing to with the content of psychic life, only the form. It is that which gives shape to psychic activity, not psychic activity itself. If you can imagine a river where the water is the unconscious, the ego would only be the banks. It's a rough approximation, but if you were asked what constituted "the river," you would say the water. Nobody would say the banks. So too with life: the unconscious is life, in all its dynamism and power. The ego is just the walls keeping the water in one place.