Can we ever really know ourselves, let alone other people? For Sigmund Freud and his followers, our lives are shaped by forces we are totally unaware of. Although we think we're in charge, we just keep repeating the same blunders without knowing it. Like a broken record, we choose jobs we don't enjoy, we fall out with friends and we alienate our partners. Sometimes we are forced to realise that something is awry: a bad dream that won't go away, an unexplained physical symptom or a bizarre intrusive thought makes us realise that we are not masters in our own house. This, Freud believed, is the unconscious at work.
Freud's fascination with the unconscious was triggered by his work as a neurologist. In case after case, he found symptoms that did not behave as anatomy dictated. The distribution of pain or the loss of sensation ought to have followed the medical, biological map. Instead it was as if these bodies obeyed a different anatomy, made up of words and ideas. In one case, a boy's hand froze after his mother urged him to sign a letter denouncing his father in a divorce: the paralysis saved him from the violence of the denunciation.
Why couldn't the boy just have refused to sign the letter? Why the paralysis? For Freud, the unconscious was inherently conflictual, and in this example, the boy may have felt both the wish to sign and not to sign the letter. This would have stirred up his oedipal conflict with his father and the guilt that went with it. The symptom allowed him not to sign and, through the physical pain of the paralysis, punished him for his guilty wish.
Contradictory thoughts generate tensions in our minds, and symptoms in our bodies. Through listening carefully to his patients, Freud discovered that our conscious thought is just the tip of the iceberg: most of what we think takes place at an unconscious level, yet exerts powerful effects on our lives.
The other major discovery Freud made at the same time was about our need to rationalise. If a hypnotised subject is told there is no furniture in a room, and then instructed to cross it, he will naturally avoid the furniture. When asked why he took such an odd route, rather than admit the existence of the furniture he will invent false explanations: for example, the picture on the wall looked interesting so he moved towards it. Rather than seeing these false explanations as restricted to the hypnotic state, Freud believed that they were a basic feature of the human ego.
Although we might not crash into furniture, we spend every day deceiving ourselves about why we do things. We tell ourselves we love this person because of some inner quality, rather than because they share some trait with our mother.
We think we get angry with our bosses because they are unreasonable, without noticing it is because they are echoing the behaviour of our father. We are excessively kind to other people, not realising this is overcompensation against our wish to harm them.
Reaching the repressed
The world of the unconscious isn't nice. It's all about the sexuality and violence directed to those closest to us. These thoughts are unbearable, so we repress them. But repression is nearly always incomplete: the repressed returns in slips of the tongue, dreams and symptoms. By taking these strange phenomena seriously, we can be led back to our unconscious desires.
Making this kind of connection can hardly ever happen through armchair introspection, and that is why Freud had to invent a new technique to access the unconscious. The patient would lie on a couch and "free associate". As they said anything that came to mind, repetitive motifs would emerge, and little details would surface that allowed connections to be made. Repressed ideas seeking representation would use the most inconspicuous trivia to smuggle themselves past our psychical censorship.
With dreams, for example, it is often the tiniest, seemingly trivial details that turn out to have the greatest significance.
Psychoanalysis was thus a strange kind of conversation. The patient would be speaking on a couch to a listener they couldn't see, following the associative threads of their discourse, however meaningless or random they seemed. Where many other therapies offered a straight face-to-face chat, with advice and guidance, here was something else. Analysis didn't even claim to offer cure or happiness. Freud compared it with a train ticket - an access to the unconscious - which we can either use or discard.
Yet it became clear to Freud and his colleagues that there is much more to the psyche than what we repress. The id, for example, was made up of drives that never fully became part of the unconscious. Later analysts explored those areas of our psychical life that were buried even deeper than the repressed. Some material, they thought, could never be accessed through ideas or images, yet caused us the most intense suffering and misery. Its effects could be seen in problems such as drug addictions and alcoholism.
The challenge for them was to find new techniques to engage with this lost part of our psyche.
Beyond Freud
Distancing himself from Freud, Carl Jung felt that there had been too much emphasis on personal history at the expense of collective human history. If you talk to your analyst about your mother, it is not simply your own mother but also a representation at an unconscious level of everything we understand by "mother". Jung called these universal forms "archetypes" and believed that we can never know them directly. He encouraged the study of myth, folklore, religion and dreaming to learn more about archetypes, and he saw therapy as involving an organic process of self-realisation he termed "individuation".
Later analysts such as Jacques Lacan emphasised not only symbolic forms but their absence. For them, it was the non-existence of archetypes that gave rise to human invention, creativity and neurosis. Since there was no archetype of birth or death, the child must invent solutions for him or herself.
As psychoanalysis became part of popular culture, the analyst was often pictured as a kind of detective: the missing piece had to be found for the whole puzzle to become complete. Yet Freud recognised that things were hardly so simple. Human beings tend to cling to their symptoms and suffering and are usually loth to give them up. There is a powerful pull to self-destruction, a kind of masochism and pleasure in pain that Freud called the "death drive." Later generations of analysts were divided on this.
Melanie Klein believed that the unconscious was formed from a complex set of processes of introjection and projection, while Lacan thought that it was created through speech, the words that are imposed on us in our childhood. We act out scripts without knowing it, while at the same time a crucial area of our mental life is governed by an unrepresentable and unbearable domain that we only ever encounter fleetingly: in a nightmare, a panic attack or a hallucination.
Where Kleinians tend to interpret the relationship between analyst and analysand systematically, Lacanians don't believe that they know
more than the analysand. For Lacan, the analyst knows very little: he is more like a cross between a beggar and a clown, coaxing material from the analysand and interpreting rarely and in unexpected and often startling ways.
Klein became the most influential theorist in British psychoanalysis while Lacan's work has held sway worldwide. Jungian analysis and the new relational psychoanalysis are also flourishing.
Gaining truth
Despite more than 100 years of research into the unconscious, it is still an unpalatable idea to most people. The idea that we might not know what we are thinking and feeling is too big a blow to our narcissism. We like to believe that we are in control of our lives, and psychoanalytic ideas still arouse the greatest resistance.
Getting to know one's own unconscious is never easy. It will mean becoming less familiar with ourselves, and questioning the false rationalisations that we have lived by. It may deliver what Freud called "a gain of truth", yet this will be the result of a long and painstaking work. Analysis lasts a long time, and involves both the acquisition of a certain knowledge and a recognition of what cannot be known: we will be forced to give up any hope of complete understanding of ourselves and others.
Recognising uncertainty and incompleteness can allow us to live more authentically and creatively. We might start to follow our real interests rather than those we have adopted out of fear or to please others. We might also realise the futility of trying to control those around us, and give them the space we have deprived them of, allowing our relationships to develop and grow. But if analysis can help us along these paths, it almost never results in peace and harmony: rather a state of war and peace, perhaps less devastating and more tolerable than before.
Further reading
For an excellent introduction to psychoanalysis read,
The Wolfman and Other Cases by Sigmund Freud (Penguin)
On Klein, read Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein (Hogarth)
On Jung, read Andrew Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians (Routledge)
On Lacan, read Darian Leader, Introducing Lacan (Icon) and Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry (MIT Press)
About your expert
Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst practising in London and president of
The College of Psychoanalysts UK. He is a member of the Centre for
Freudian Analysis and Research (cfar.org.uk), and his books include Why do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?, Why Do People Get Ill?(with David Corfield) and The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression.
For further information visit his website darianleader.com.
Getting to know your 'dark side'
People often refer to a "dark side" - their own, or someone else's - but Carl Jung had another name for the part of us we like to keep hidden from public view. The "shadow self", as he called it, is one aspect of our unconscious - the instinctive part of our psyche that we try to repress. It represents the direct opposite of our "persona" - the public face we like to present to the world.
Our shadow will possess qualities that we might find distasteful, or threatening. If we have been raised to believe in the importance of good manners and acceptance, our shadow self may be rude and intolerant.
For the most part, our shadow self rarely surfaces, but we may find that it emerges when we feel threatened or stressed - and some therapists believe it can be useful to embrace it. You may not like to own up to a long-hidden aggressive side, for example, but there could be an occasion when it saves you from harm.
Sarah Wilson