Fascinating article, JavaMan. I've always felt that Freud's theories of mind were applicable as descriptions of an obvious dynamic, though he lacked, as the article points out, the technology to delineate biological mechanisms. His descriptions were also flawed by the blinders of his age (and gender), most apparently (to me) in his conclusion that the patients who reported incestuous abuse were not accurately reporting their experiences.
It is becoming increasingly clear that a good deal of our mental activity is unconsciously motivated.
Indeed: I'd go further and say a good deal of our mental activity itself is unconscious.
My own mind has always been an enigma to me. As a fourth grader, I was selected on the basis of achievement and IQ tests to participate in a program for gifted children that was provoked by Sputnik, funded in a defense act, and clearly aimed at producing scientists with which to combat the Evil Empire (the USSR).
We soon realized we were being groomed as weapons and reacted strongly against it--otherwise, I suspect, I would have gravitated to science rather than the humanities. The program ignored class and essentially selected the highest scoring student from each of our city's grade schools; apparently only white kids were eligible.
Quite a few of us were from lower income homes. A number of us left behind schools that had decided that our boredom, withdrawal, and behavioral issues indicated retardation: as a fourth grader I was reading at a high school level but labeled a slow learner.
We marveled at and puzzled over our new status, trying to find some experiential component to our supposed superiority. We agreed there was no sensation of effort or merit. While we apparently learned more quickly and remembered what we had learned more readily and thoroughly than other kids, there was no conscious participation. Questions elicited answers, but our conscious experience was that of a bystander--the question is put, the answer appears: no sweat, no effort, no conscious identification or involvement with the process.
We discussed whether we would surrender enough of our intelligence to rescue another from retardation and leave us average; we talked about how, when we daydreamed (I might call it meditation today, for we all sought thought-less moments as relief from the constant focus on our intellectual gifts), our fixed sense of identity slipped away. What the world most valued about us seemed not to be part of our conscious selves, and for their purposes we could be anyone at all as long as our brains performed; we found that being anyone at all was a sanctuary.
The most insightful discussions of consciousness and being I have ever known were with a group of fellow 10-year-olds.
We pondered Hell, and how extreme physical pain seemed to overwhelm and erase identity in the same way that stopping thought did; we all struggled with the idea that a punishing God would have to take special care to prevent a conscious identity from crumbling under the weight of torment: either Hell destroyed your identity, in which case God was eternally tormenting an empty shell, or God supernaturally preserved your identity in order to torment you eternally. Neither possibility brought us to a closer walk with Jesus.
We did, of course, discover Freud. I recall with some embarrassment finding a passage that described some of the impulses and drives Freud felt were normal for all females--we would ask the girls if they were normal, then howl in delight when they cautiously supposed they were.
But Freud's focus on the unconscious intrigued us all because it described our dilemma. Our experiences conformed to his theories: urges--sexual, aggressive--that came from who knew where, and cognitive processes that whirred along like little motors without requiring our participation. Our minds chattered along incessantly about both, but when we floated out into our "daydreams" we found a spacious sense of being that was free of them, and we spent long hours talking about what this could mean.
We were also sent once a week to Bible school in an office trailer parked nearby but off school grounds (I gather this was a recent separation meant to satisfy the law). We learned a great deal there about the godless evil of communism. I discovered Buddhist texts and brought them along with great excitement at finding experiences and considerations of consciousness that so paralleled our own; I was suspended briefly for refusing to leave those books at home. Eventually we refused to attend the Bible trailer, and those classes were abandoned.
We are, I think, natural explorers of our own consciousness. It takes considerable effort to stop or control this exploration, at considerable expense to the children who are stopped from wondering about and inspecting their own minds. Of our original class of 10, two became high school suicides, two experienced high school "nervous breakdowns," and most of us became cultural and religious rebels later.
We had considerable interest in science but turned away from it in reaction to our assigned path as rocket scientists or nuke designers. The program had taken a group of bright children and shocked them awake to the big questions of consciousness and identity, and in so doing largely defeated its own purpose of producing weapon-minds.
To return to topic(!), militarization of science and the regimentation of philosophical/religous thought estranged us from science and traditional religious belief alike. I'm sure a Freudian could do a delightful precis of this process in terms of Id, Ego and Superego, and it would be descriptively accurate as far as it went, but it would deal less well with that daydream of universal being, that refuge of stopped thought we discovered.
Science and art are sisters in wonder. Any cultural divide between science and the humanities (loosely termed) is, I think, not so much the fault of science as the political and social agenda of empire, appropriating science for physical power on the one hand, and the humanities for political/propaganda utility on the other. Much turning away from traditional religious belief has more to do with the tendency of religious institutions to hear only voices of power than any corrosive effect from science: Christianity and militarized science got along quite well in those days.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
Wilfred Owen
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. Didn't you know he's flavour of the month again? (The following article appears in the latest issue of Scientific American Mind).
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