What is the Unconscious?

A 79yr old man asked me this question last year. He's someone I respect a lot. In my opinion (and I've told him this!), he lives out his unconscious through his art, specifically painting.

He can draw or paint in any style he likes and is surrounded by his and other people's art in his modest terraced house here in Durham.

He's an inspiration - fit, healthy, creative, charitable, kind, passionate, earthy etc.

Needless to say, I wanted to give him the best explanation I could and now I have it.

In, 'The Way of the Dream', a film with Marie-Louise von Franz (Carl Jung's longest collaborator), Marie-Louise is asked by the interviewer,

"What do you mean by the term unconscious?"

This was her answer:

"All that which we know is psychically real but is not conscious... it's not conscious, it's a negative concept.

And we use that negative concept in order not to have a prejudice. Because some people call it Supra Consciousness and others would call it the Divine Sphere... the Existential Ground of Existence... you can have a thousand names; we (I think she means Jungian analysts) prefer the word unconscious because it says nothing. It says only - it is not conscious. It leaves it as a mystery, we don't know what it is. We only know that there are psychic phenomena which manifest through dreams or through involuntary gestures or speech mistakes or hallucinations or fantasies which are not conscious.

You can for instance be befallen in daytime by a fantasy and tell it to your analyst and say, "It's a completely weird fantasy, it's crazy, I don't know what it means." So, as you don't know what it means and you think it's crazy, it's obviously not conscious because if it were conscious you would know what it means and you would know to what it refers to."

What Marie-Louise seems to imply here is that the unconscious needs to be understood, in order to become conscious and therefore integrated.

I found this explanation of hers very helpful because not only does she make the word unconscious easy to understand, 'un'conscious - not conscious - she also teases us into seeking to understand things which aren't conscious.

Given I'm more conscious about the word unconscious, I can get back to my previously unconscious mate, and hopefully he'll become more conscious too!

Cheers Marie-Lousie.