On Making the Unconscious Conscious

ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων. A person’s character (ethos) is their fate. -Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE)

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Making the unconscious conscious is a key to growth and wisdom—and healing. This much is agreed on by most philosophers and spiritual traditions, and of course by psychotherapists. When Socrates warns that the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s because being unconscious is not as fully human a life. Philosopher John Stuart Mill drove the point home saying it’s better to be a dissatisfied Socrates than a satisfied pig. He added, “if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question."

When Heraclitus observes that our character is our fate, he means that our conscious and unconscious thoughts, feelings, actions, and habits make our lives what they are. In this note, I consider that becoming more conscious increases our power over our fate. I tie this to the theme of the recent notes, concluding that any technology that diminishes access to our bodies will affect our ability to make the unconscious conscious—whether in our role as allies to others, or as allies to ourselves.

DALL-E made this “surreal” image (its word, not mine!) in response to my prompt: “Create an image depicting the unconscious human mind.“ Look familiar?

But mostly I tell a story about the ordinary but transformative experience of becoming more conscious. One hopes this is a frequent experience in therapy, but the story I’ll tell is more general. It happened years ago, back when I was teaching at the wonderful St. John’s College, long before I had any first-hand acquaintance with therapy. I remember it like it was yesterday because my experience that day so astonished and delighted me—and changed my fate a little.

I was walking home from campus on a beautiful spring afternoon, oppressed by a class that had been dull and awkward and disappointing. My dog Aktis was with me and eager to play. I’d turn my attention to him and the lovely day, but the pit in my stomach and feeling of anxious dread kept drawing me back into rumination.

I don’t know why—maybe because it was spring and Aktis was beckoning and I was desperate to get out of my head—but somehow I shook off my ruminative trance and decided to examine what had happened. That way, I told myself, I could learn from what had happened, and that at least might help me feel better about my mistakes. It was the easier to assume I was at fault because I adored this group of students, and our meetings were a highlight of my week.

Yet, as I sorted out what happened it became clear that more responsibility fell to them than I had recognized. To my surprise, many of them hadn’t been prepared to demonstrate the theorems (this was the senior mathematics tutorial), which was unusual. A few students groused that they had too much to do, and resented having to prepare for class. (What preparation?!) The mood was sour, and I saw now how my way of handling it only soured things further. Then there was another factor I’d overlooked, which is that it was a beautiful spring day in their senior year of college. I thought how I would have felt in their position, and was (rightly) irritated with myself for not having more empathy for their ethos—the gist of their situation.

By the end of this review my mood had changed completely. The pit in my stomach was gone, as was any trace of anxiety and dread. I felt relieved and glad—for all of us. I saw their contribution and I saw mine; it all made sense, and it was no big deal. Making the unconscious conscious had utterly transformed how I felt. The swiftness with which my mood changed impressed me, and I resolved that day to practice postmortems when things went badly. Then I found a stick for Aktis to fetch.

By committing to postmortems I nudged my fate a little. I reinforced what I was learning from meditation practice, that my negative feelings were signals rather than what I unconsciously tended to assume they were: testaments to some painful existential truth, in this case, “I’m a lousy teacher.” I was learning to see anxiety as a signal that something was bothering me and needed my attention. I often remind patients to think of their anxiety as a well-meaning friend who is warning them that something needs their attention.

How does this relate to the question of how the medium through which we connect affects the quality of our connections? My story seems to be an example where the medium is not at issue at all. After all, it wasn’t as though I was FaceTiming or texting myself. I was right there! And even if a therapist had been guiding me, this work could have been done remotely. Unconscious material can be made conscious through telehealth. For example, the psychoanalytic technique of free association pioneered by Freud can be employed remotely. A phone session can even approximate classical psychoanalysis, in which the patient lies on the couch and there is no eye contact—just the sound of each other’s voice.

That said, there are times when we’re habitually dissociated from our own felt experience. This is especially true of traumatized patients, who may not even feel their feelings, much less be able to express them. In such cases, the more a therapist can see, hear, smell, even in some cases touch their patients, the more we can help them connect to what their bodies are telling them about the environment, inside and out.

Because they limit the use of our senses, remote connections can be a hindrance to making the unconscious conscious. For isn’t it evident that the body and our senses must play an outsize role in making unconscious material accessible? After all, we can’t say what we don’t know.