Beyond the Pleasure Principle (20 page)

‘Unconscious’, however, is a term or concept that we have arrived at by a different route, namely by looking at experiences in which the
dynamics
of the psyche play a role. We have found – or rather, we have been compelled to assume – that there exist very powerful psychic processes or notions (a quantitative and hence
economic
factor enters the picture for a moment here), all of which can have a considerable effect on the subject's inner life, just like any other notions, but which themselves remain unconscious even though their
effects
may in turn become conscious as notions.
⁴
There is no need to repeat at length here what has so often been propounded before. Suffice it to say that psychoanalytical theory comes into play at this point, arguing that the reason such notions cannot be conscious is that a certain force actively opposes such an outcome, and that otherwise they would indeed be able to become conscious, whereupon it would become clear how little they differ from other psychic elements already acknowledged as such. This theory is rendered irrefutable by the fact that psychoanalysis has devised techniques enabling us to neutralize the opposing force and make the relevant notions conscious. We use the term
repression
to describe the status in which these notions existed before they were
made conscious, and we argue that the force that brought about the repression and then kept it in place makes itself felt during the psychoanalytic process as
resistance
.

We thus derive our concept of the unconscious from the theory of repression. The repressed
⁵
is in our view the paradigm for the unconscious. As we can see, however, we have two forms of the unconscious: one that is latent, but capable of becoming conscious, and one, consisting of the repressed, that is not inherently and spontaneously capable of becoming conscious. The insight we have gained into the dynamics of the psyche inevitably influences both our nomenclature and our definitions. For the latent component – which is unconscious only in the descriptive
⁶
and not the dynamic sense – we use the term
pre-conscious
; we restrict the term
unconscious
to the dynamically unconscious repressed. Thus we now have three terms – ‘conscious’ (
Cs
), ‘pre-conscious’ (
Pcs
) and ‘unconscious’ (
Ucs
), none of which any longer has a purely descriptive meaning. The P
cs
, so we assume, is much closer to the
Cs
than the
Ucs
is; and having defined the
Ucs
as psychical, we shall do so all the more readily in the case of the latent
Pcs
. But wouldn't it be preferable for us to stay in line with the philosophers, and rigorously separate the
Pcs
as well as the
Ucs
from the conscious psychic element? The philosophers would then suggest that we describe the
Pcs
and the
Ucs
as two forms or levels of the
psychoidal
⁷
– and hey presto, harmony would reign between us. But endless expositional difficulties would result from this, and the singularly important fact that these ‘psychoids’ correspond in almost all other respects to the psychical as it is generally understood, would be pushed into the background for the sake of a prejudice – and a prejudice dating from a period when nothing was yet known of these ‘psychoids’, or at any rate of their most important aspect.
⁸

We can now operate very happily with our three terms
Cs, Pcs
and
Ucs
, provided we bear in mind that whereas there are two kinds of unconscious in the
descriptive
sense, there is only one in the
dynamic
sense. For the purposes of our account of things, we can in some cases ignore this distinction, while in others it is of course indispensable to the argument. After all, we have become quite
accustomed to this ambiguity regarding the unconscious, and we have coped with it perfectly well. We cannot get rid of it, so far as I can see: whether something is conscious or unconscious is ultimately a question of perception that can only be answered ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and the act of perception itself tells us nothing whatever about the reason why something is or is not perceived. We have no right to complain about the fact that when the dynamic element happens to become manifest, it does so only in an ambiguous form.
⁹

As our psychoanalytical work proceeds, however, it soon becomes clear that these categories, too, prove to be inadequate, to be quite simply insufficient for practical use. Amongst the various situations that demonstrate this, let us single out one in particular – and the most important of them all. We have evolved the notion of a coherent organization of the psychic processes present within each individual, and we call this organization their
ego
.
¹⁰
It is this ego that consciousness attaches to; it controls the pathways leading to motor activity, i.e. to the release of excitations into the external world; it is the arbiter
¹¹
that controls all the psyche's constituent processes and, despite going to sleep at night, still contrives to censor dreams. This ego is also the source of the repressions that are intended to exclude certain psychic tendencies not only from consciousness, but also from all other areas where they might come into their own or be otherwise activated. In psychoanalysis, these tendencies, having been thrust aside by the repression process, present themselves in direct opposition to the ego, and it is the job of the analysis to remove the resistances mounted by the ego against any involvement with what has been repressed. Now in the course of analysis we find that the patient encounters difficulties when we set him certain tasks: his associations fail to work whenever they are meant to get anywhere near the repressed element. We then tell him that he is under the sway of a resistance, but he is wholly unaware of this fact, and even if his feelings of unpleasure cause him perchance to guess that a resistance is at work within him, he is incapable of identifying or defining it. But since this resistance undoubtedly emanates from his ego and entirely belongs to it, we find ourselves confronted with an unexpected situation. We have come upon something within the
very ego itself that is
also
unconscious, something that behaves exactly like the repressed element in producing powerful effects without becoming conscious itself, and which we can render conscious only by working on it in a special way. The implication of this discovery for psychoanalytic practice is that we shall incur endless difficulties and ambiguities if we carry on doggedly using our accustomed terminology, and thus for instance seek to attribute neurosis to a conflict between the conscious and the unconscious. On the basis of our insight into the structural conditions that obtain in the life of the psyche we need to replace this antithesis with a different one – namely that between the coherent ego and the repressed element that has been split off from it.
¹²

The implications are even more significant, however, with respect to our general conception of the unconscious. We first corrected our position as a result of considering the
dynamic
aspect, and a second correction is necessitated by our insight concerning
structure
. We now realize that the
Ucs
and the repressed are not conterminous; while it remains correct to say that all of the repressed is
Ucs
, it is not also the case that all of the
Ucs
is repressed. Part of the ego – God alone knows how important a part – may also be
Ucs
, indeed is undoubtedly
Ucs
. And this
Ucs
component of the ego is not latent in a
Pcs
sense, otherwise it could surely not be activated without becoming
Cs
, and it would surely not be so enormously difficult to render it conscious. If we thus find ourselves compelled to postulate a third kind of
Ucs
, i.e. a non-repressed one, then we have to admit that ‘unconsciousness’ as a category loses some of the significance that it otherwise holds for us. It becomes a multivalent quality that allows no scope for the far-reaching and definitive conclusions that we would have liked to draw from it. And yet we must be careful not to disregard it, for in the end the attribute ‘conscious/unconscious’ is our one and only beacon in the darkness of depth psychology.
¹³

Pathological
¹⁴
research has focused our attention too exclusively on the repressed. We should like to learn more about the ego now that we know that it, too, can be unconscious in the proper sense of the word. The only touchstone available to us throughout our investigations so far has been the designation ‘conscious’ or ‘unconscious’ – and we have finally realized how ambiguous this can be.

Now our entire knowledge depends at all times on consciousness. Even the
Ucs
can only become known to us in so far as we make it conscious. But wait a moment: how is that possible? What does ‘making something conscious’ actually mean? How on earth can such a thing happen?

We already know exactly where to start in order to answer this question. We have said that consciousness constitutes the
outer surface
of the psychic apparatus, which is to say that we have defined it as a function of a system that is spatially the closest to the external world – a spatial proximity, incidentally, that applies not only in terms of function but also, in this particular case, in terms of anatomical location.
¹⁵
For the purposes of our present investigations, too, we need to take this ‘perceiving surface’ as our starting point.

All perceptions that come from without (sense perceptions) and from within – what we call ‘sensations’ and ‘feelings’ - are Cs from the very first. But what is the position with respect to those inner processes that we might sum up – albeit crudely and imprecisely – as ‘thought processes’? These processes that occur somewhere in the depths of the apparatus as displacements of psychic energy on its path to becoming action – do they betake themselves to the outer surface that gives rise to consciousness? Or does consciousness
betake itself to them? As we can see, this is one of the difficulties that result once we make any serious attempt to envisage the workings of the psyche in spatial,
topical
terms. Both alternatives are equally inconceivable, and the truth must surely lie in a third.

I have already put forward the hypothesis elsewhere
¹⁶
that the real difference between a
Ucs
and a
Pcs
notion resides in the fact that the former runs its course wholly within the context of material of which the subject remains unaware, whereas in the case of the latter the connection with
word-notions
supervenes as well.
¹⁷
This represents our first attempt to propose identifiers for the two systems
Pcs
and
Ucs
that rely on something other than their relationship to consciousness. The question ‘How does something become conscious?’ can thus be more pertinently formulated as follows: ‘How does something become pre-conscious?’ And the answer would be: ‘By being connected to the corresponding word-notions’.

These word-notions are residual memories; they were once perceptions, and like all residual memories they are capable of becoming conscious again. Before we deal with their nature in more detail, however, the following new insight suddenly dawns on us: the only things that can become conscious are things that have already at some point been
Cs
perceptions; and anything - apart from feelings - that wants to become conscious from within has to try to convert itself into an external perception. This is made possible by means of memory traces.

We conceive of residual memories as being contained within systems that are immediately adjacent to the
Pcpt-Cs
system,
¹⁸
with the result that the cathexes of these residues can easily extend outwards onto the constituent elements of the
Pcpt-Cs
system. One immediately thinks of hallucinations at this point, and of the fact that even the most vivid memories remain readily distinguishable from hallucinations and from external perceptions – but an answer to this problem presents itself no less quickly, namely that when a memory is revived its cathexis is retained within the memory system, whereas a hallucination that is indistinguishable from a perception may well arise when the cathexis passes completely from the memory trace to the
Pcpt
system instead of making simply a minor incursion.

Verbal residua derive in the main from
auditory
perceptions, and this means that the
Pcs
system may be said to have a specifically sensory origin, as it were. For the time being we can disregard the
visual
components of word-notions, these being secondary elements acquired through reading, and the same applies to the
dynamic
images of words,
¹⁹
which play the role of auxiliary signals (except in the case of deaf-mutes
²⁰
). After all, a word is strictly speaking the memorative residuum of a word that has been
heard
.

We should not be tempted – for the sake of simplicity, for instance – to forget the importance of
optical
memorative residua (in respect of physical objects), or to deny that it is possible to make thought processes conscious by reverting to the relevant visual residua, and that for many people this seems to be the preferred method. We can get an idea of the specific nature of this visual thinking from the study of dreams and pre-conscious fantasies written on the basis of his own observations by J[ulian] Varendonck.
²¹
We discover that in most cases only the concrete matter of the thought becomes conscious, whereas the various relations and connections that give the thought its particular character find no visual expression at all. Thinking in pictures thus only makes for a very imperfect form of consciousness. It is also rather more akin to unconscious processes than is thinking in words, and it is without any doubt both ontogenetically and phylogenetically older than the latter.