The Unconscious, Aldous Huxley

The Unconscious

The unconscious can in all circumstances work either to our advantage or to our disadvantage—it is both negative and positive, creative and destructive. In orthodox Freudian theory there is much more concern with what may be called the negative side of the unconscious than with the positive. This was inevitable, seeing that the theory was developed in a therapeutic context; Freud, after all, was working with neurotic people in the Vienna of the late nineteenth century.

Quite recently a collection of Freud’s papers, called by the editor Creativity and the Unconscious, was published. When one looks into the papers one finds that there is remarkably little on the subject of creativity; even when he was discussing the positive side, Freud had very little contribution to make.

In dealing with the positive side of the unconscious I would say that the work of the pioneer psychologist F. W. H. Myers is much more illuminating than the work of Freud. Myers was about fifteen years older than Freud but died about forty years before Freud did. His great work, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, published posthumously in 1902, still remains after nearly sixty years a mine of information on the subject, above all, of the creative and positive side of the unconscious. This is a book which I recommend very strongly to anybody who wants to know about the positive aspects of what Freud dealt with on the negative side.

Let us begin now with the negative unconscious and with certain idiomatic phrases which we constantly use. Language contains a great deal of fossil wisdom, and many idiomatic phrases throw a great deal of light on the insights of the ages into the problems of man. We use phrases such as, ‘I don’t know what came over me’; ‘I must have been mad’; ‘I must have been out of my mind’; ‘He can’t have been himself when he did that’; ‘I don’t know what possessed me’. In the last phrase we come straight back to the idea of demonic possession which we found in Homer and in the Bible. It is very significant that we find in these idiomatic phrases such a clear picture of an ego surrounded by irrational forces which are continually breaking in upon it and compelling it to do all sorts of things that it really doesn’t want to do.

We find that the unconscious can be dealt with as the representation in the mind of certain physical anomalies, that one type of negative unconscious influence is due to congenital physical defects of one kind or another. The physical defect of extremely low IQ, or of some kind of malformation, leads on the unconscious level to terrible feelings of inferiority which have to be over-compensated. Defects in the endocrine system lead to all kinds of very strange psychological results which are felt as barriers and hindrances and compulsions on the unconscious level and which interfere with the conscious self doing what it wants to do.

Then we have to consider what happens to people who find themselves born with a certain kind of temperament but who live in a society where that temperament is undervalued or even regarded as abnormal or disreputable. In this context, it is worth quoting a very touching little poem by William Blake:

O! why was I born with a different face?

Why was I not born like the rest of my race?

When I look, each one starts! when I speak, I offend;

Then I’m silent & passive & lose every Friend.

Then my verse I dishonour, My pictures despise,

My person degrade & my temper chastise;

And the pen is my terror, the pencil my shame;

All my Talents I bury, and dead is my Fame.

This is a very vivid picture of what happens to a person of one kind of temperament who finds himself living in a society in which that kind of temperament is greatly undervalued and where other kinds of temperaments are regarded as the only moral and reputable ones. Another example is the predicament in which an extremely introverted cerebrotonic child finds himself in a school where he is compelled to be a good mixer, to be constantly with other people, to join in the fun, etc.—all things which he finds completely opposed to his deepest ingrained nature. The result is that all kinds of disturbances go on in his unconscious and he very often develops a neurosis.

Freud was in part responsible for this ‘somatotonic revolution’; he says in so many words that the extroverted way of life is the way of health for every man. Freud himself was an extrovert of a rather aggressive type, and undoubtedly that way of life was the way of health for him, but it seems to be perfectly obvious from observation that this is not the way of health for many people and that any attempt to force these people into adopting this way of life against ingrained and congenital tendencies is bound to have the most disturbing effects upon the unconscious.

Next among the influences from the physique are the influences of sickness, particularly chronic sickness—and much chronic sickness is actually of psychosomatic origin. The conscious ego starts interfering with what Aristotle called the ‘vegetative soul’—the wisdom of the body; the body then goes wrong, and the normal processes of psychology are thrown out. The ego feels itself more than ever frustrated and in turn interferes with the normal functioning of the body still further, so that the whole process goes round and round in a terrible vicious circle, with mind and body making each other constantly worse and worse.

Human misery is greatly stressed by all the world religions. The Christian religion insists that this is a vale of tears, and the Buddhists say, ‘I show you sorrow’, meaning the world which we find around us, and ‘I show you the ending of sorrow’, which is the road to enlightenment. Now, probably about one-third of human misery is inevitable because it is due to the fact that we are sentient beings in a largely insentient universe which is not concerned with our well-being. But about two-thirds of our misery is strictly home-made and the product of ignorance, stupidity, and, to a less frequent extent, malice. The moral is, as the Duchess in Alice would say, to get rid of stupidity and ignorance, which naturally is a great deal easier said than done.

Now we have to consider that aspect of the negative unconscious which has been specifically the concern of the psychoanalysts and which is obviously an extremely important part of the whole picture. This is the side of the unconscious represented by repression. Freud himself said that we obtain our theory of the unconscious from the theory of repression. What happens is that we have, in childhood above all, certain urges, wishes, and purposes which do not conform with the cultural standards around us and which we soon learn to regard as highly discreditable. We therefore push them down into an area of the mind where we are no longer aware of them. However, repressed urges continue to exist, and they exercise a great and very pernicious influence upon our thoughts and feelings and actions on the conscious level. The age during which cultural pressure weighs upon us most heavily is infancy and childhood, and it is during infancy and childhood that most of the work of repression goes on.

It is not only the discreditable wishes and urges and purposes that we repress. We also repress incidents which are too painful for us to think about. We just cannot take the thought of certain things which have happened to us, and consequently we push them down out of sight. In neurosis, then, we are suffering the penalty of things which we did and things which happened to us many years ago, as well as the penalty of urges and wishes repressed.

Along with repression from the inside in the name of cultural ideals and of duty there goes conditioning from outside, and this is of equal importance in the history of the negative unconscious. Conditioning can take place no matter what the state of the subject, but, as Pavlov has shown, it is most effective when the subject is under great physical or mental stress. When the subject is in pain or is suffering from fear or is in the throes of some violent emotion—anger or even joy—he is peculiarly susceptible to conditioning. It is during these times of lowered resistance that conditioned reflexes are set up most easily and are most permanent. Pavlov found it exceedingly difficult to get rid of the conditioning which had been imposed upon dogs under a great state of stress. And precisely these Pavlovian techniques have been used in the so-called brain-washing both of enemies and of friends (brain-washing is probably used more intensively on Communist workers in China than it was even on prisoners during the Korean War). While it is quite clear that some conditioning is absolutely essential and very good, it is equally clear that plenty of conditioning is extremely undesirable and may lead in later life to very severe troubles.

We see then that a great part of our negative unconscious is due first to repression and then to the undesirable conditioning which has been put into us at an earlier period, often under conditions of stress, and which continues to act upon us very much as a post-hypnotic suggestion. Neurosis is the failure of the conscious ego to deal with the events of the moment in terms appropriate to the moment. Instead of dealing with what is happening