The Difference

The difference between psychic contents that are conscious and psychic contents that are unconscious has typically been described as spatial. Something is either "in" consciousness, or "outside" of consciousness. There is a "here" that we know and a "there" that we don't know. Nobody understands exactly how this works, but the distinction seemed to be the best approximation and it was subsumed by popular culture. It is not uncommon for people to make a further, physical, distinction with regard to their actual skull. Something conscious is indicated by pointing to or touching their head, while waving a hand outside (or behind) their head
represents something about which they are unconscious.

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung fiddled with developing a quasi-spatial model of consciousness based on energic potential. In other words, the unconscious contents that ended up reaching consciousness were the ones charged with enough affectivity to cross a "threshold." Neither man, however, came to rest on a definitive hypothesis. The reason for their reticence is clear when we examine the fundamental problem with thinking about consciousness as location-specific.

In the first place, the notion of something being "in" my head and "out" of my head is utterly baseless. That we have agreed to call the head the center of consciousness is only a matter of convention and should not be taken as representative of the facts. Nothing literally comes into your skull when you learn something new. In other words, consciousness is not strictly "of the mind." Ancient Egyptians would have laughed at the notion that thinking takes place in our heads. They "thought" with their hearts. Even today we distinguish between being in accord with our head, our heart, our gut, even our genitalia. So, from a physical standpoint at least, there is no one "center" of consciousness.

So we must play with the idea that the psyche is not inside the body at all.

Perhaps a qualitative model of consciousness might be more appropriate. In this model, unconscious and conscious contents differ on the basis of certain properties rather than some location. Namely, the property (or quality) of light.

In this way we may speak of something merely being in an unconscious state rather than purely unconscious. This descriptive way of talking is beneficial, as it does away with the absoluteness of both conditions. Consciousness and unconsciousness, after all, exist on a continuum, as the literature referring to "pre-consciousness," etc. attests. At the risk of sounding "too" spiritual, we might instead say that a certain content has more light than another.

But to seriously take up this notion we must examine in greater detail the argument that psyche is a reflection, or "aspect" of matter.