Another View of the Unconscious

In western psychotherapy—and very prominently in Freudian and Jungian analysis—the “unconscious” plays a rather major role. It is also present in the work of Milton H. Erickson, a remarkable therapist—but there it has a quite different flavor. The following quotation comes from Volume 1 of a fascinating book: Conversations with Milton H. Erickson, M.D., edited by Jay Haley, himself a psychiatrist (p 106-107):

Haley: Talking about metaphors or analogies or stories, you have said you reach the unconscious with them.

Erickson: Yes.

H: Now you chose the word “unconscious” as a description of this process. I wonder if it is really essential, or if you could deal with it in terms of how to get someone to follow a suggestion which they cannot resist because they are not aware of it. They are not aware they are receiving the suggestion. An awareness difference, rather than an unconscious-conscious difference.

E: I’m trying to think of a patient. She told me about her horrible self-consciousness in a bathing suit because it seemed to her that whenever she wore a bathing suit her genitals were too prominent and everybody looked at that area of her body. She didn’t like to go swimming for that reason. Another thing she mentioned was the question that had come to her, whether or not at the age of 35 she should relinquish her virginity. She wasn’t willing to talk about that, and she only talked about the temptations she had had. But she was utterly indefinite, and so I steered her away from the subject. I knew that she was self-conscious in a bathing suit, everybody looked at her genitals, and that she had, at the age of 35, wondered about the desirability of keeping her virginity. She was a decidedly attractive woman. Of course, if she wanted to wonder about the desirability of keeping her virginity, she mentioned the age of 35—well, I drew my own conclusions. So one day I told her, “You know, Eisenhower, and Patton, and—who was the other general? Suppose you tell me about the Battle of the Bulge?” And I got the whole story about the time she went to bed with a man and then wondered and wondered and fought the man off on the battle of the bulge.

H: Milton, that’s a remarkable metaphor. But suppose the idea of conscious and unconscious had never been proposed. Now, how else would you explain what you did in that example? If there was no such concept as the unconscious.

E: Are you going to get rid of the back of the mind?

This comes from a chapter concerned with the Unconscious, Insight, and the Use of Analogies. This segment powerfully reminded me of Sufi teaching methods—which use stories, metaphors, and analogies. But why? Because in Sufi doctrine the ordinary self is a habit self, a structure produced by social conditioning. It reacts to straightforward, linear presentations reflexively. Stories, and humor, however, are able to penetrate this mask and reach the real, read higher, self and stir it into awareness.

The thought then occurred to me that the really unconscious mind is our habitual mind—and that what psychiatry calls the “unconscious” is actually the higher mind. Erickson, famed for his uses of hypnosis—albeit he rarely had to use it in practice—had a way of getting past the superficial but stubborn surface layer society builds to stir up a deeper layer. In his methods, that deeper layer is not the accumulation of detritus and of repressions but a potential—awakening which leads to insight and healing.