Shadow

that might be one of the reasons this shadow stuff is so fascinating; it is believed that there are two selves… one underneath, and one on top, that can get in touch with the one underneath. but here’s the prob. the one underneath isn’t pre-reflective like immediate consciousness. it cannot have any intentionality, and therefore it is unable to direct its activity toward any meaningful object. the shadow would exist as a kind of despository of instinctual and learned reflexes. for instance, you’re on jung’s couch and he’s like ‘you hate your wife… and you need to face this before you can rid yourself of such hatred. and you better hurry because of you don’t, it’ll become neurosis and you’ll have to pay me for three more months of therapy.’ but the moment this comes to your mind - that you hate your wife - you have to re-decide that the reasons why you hate her are still substantial. that is, you become open to reassess that hatred with the possibility of changing your mind if you understand even the slightest thing differently. what’s happening here is… what is called the ‘unconscious’ is an inert depository of habitual feelings that resulted from thinking about things a certain way, e.g., her obsessive cleanliness is a negative feature of her personality. but if you are led to believe that this behavior is actually a characteristic of a person who is quite healthy and motivated to be so obsessive about cleaning because, say, she wants to maintain a sterile and orderly household, suddenly you undergo a reorientation of the understanding of the causes of your hatred, and intentionally redirect, or i should say dis-attach, your immediate consciousness from the habitual behaviors of your hatred.

but now here’s the thing. the unconscious part underneath didn’t ‘hate’ anything, because in order to hate, consciousness has to be directed toward a meaningful object in order to have ‘intent’… and you can’t hate unless you intend to hate, see. the unconscious therefore doesn’t harbor anything but a collection of habitual behaviors that were formed in the past when consciousness, at that time, established the meaningfulness of the feeling. once you have your ‘reasons’ in mind, they are subject to change through/with language. hate a nigga today, love him tomorrow. all depends on how you rationalize and inventory the perceived causes of those feelings. and you don’t get to choose to be convinced or not of a line of reasoning that reorients your feelings.

much of what i’m saying here is also in line with sartre’s thinking concerning the ‘sub-consciousness’. it’s around so you can google it. the basic premise is that reflex, instinct and habit cannot be counted as intentional behavior, and because consciousness must involve intentionality, there can be no such thing as a ‘sub-conscious’ or ‘unconscious’… unless by that you mean asleep or inna coma or something.

so much for the ‘shadow’ magic trick that victorian shrinks were selling to their unwitting patients to make a buck. bourgeois psychology. that shit is so 80s.

In order to reject my point of view you objectify me as a “they”.
Images like the shadow arise spontaneously in my conscious as do thoughts. I seem to be able to make choices about them like whether to entertain them and interpret them or to ignore them.
Some are more interesting than others. Some surprise me and tell me things about myself that I didn’t know. Or they bring me music or beautiful or ugly visions.
So mental images are primary to me not theoretical.
Now when I speak of “the unconscious” that is theoretical. But how else can mental phenomena be explained?
Most of the activity of the nervous system goes on unconsciously. It’s not like you have to consciously will every heart beat or stop your heart from beating by a direct act of will. Likewise the images and thoughts that arise to conscious.
Unless you don’t dream or have visual and auditory images in your mind, I am not proposing anything alien to you.
“The shadow” is just a metaphor for aspects of one’s self. You may already have access to and perhaps think about mental images that I’m calling the Shadow in a different way. However, the metaphor resonates with my experience.
That you don’t validate my experience is just more grist for the mill that is my consciousness. Of course, I surmise what that rejection may say about you. But, since there is more about you that I don’t know than what I do, I hold my view of you in a tentative way that is subject to change.

Why can’t the unconscious self have intentionality? Why must the unconscious psyche be inert? Psychological evidence shows that the unconscious is motivated and dynamic. Neuro-science confirms that consciousness is the tip of the iceberg of the fully functioning human organism. Insofar as Sartre argued for an autonomous Cartesian ego that is transparently conscious of itself, his position isn’t supported by the evidence. It’s like saying that the desktop display is the whole computer. It ignores the hardware and the software that underlie what the desktop does. Much of human behavior that appears irrational on the surface can be explained on the basis of evolution. Rationalization and the other conscious phenomena that you describe supervene upon unconscious processes.

The unconscious is definitely motivated, trying to get things, interfering with concscious choices and more. And the unconscious mind can drive a car, get you to think the reason you went the store was milk when it was actually beer, sabotage a relationship, ‘forget’ to do something you are supposed to do but don’t want to, make Freudian slips. Try to go against the unconscious mind, if it is fairly unified on wanting something, and you’ll begin to wonder if the conscious mind has intentionality? Ask an addict. And if you think your not an addict, try going without your mobile, computer, tv, books and other distractions for a couple of days. Or try to change you emotional habits or just plain decide to show people how you really feel. Good luck conscious minds going against a vastly more motivated powerhouse that is going to make decisions for you.

Long ago I decide to own the unconscious as much as I could. If you can’t beat’em join’em. At least in the case when them is you.

That seems wise. It sounds like you are endeavoring to actualize the principle of coniunctio oppositorum, the union of the polarities between your conscious ego and your unconscious Self.

because consciousness is a phenomenological complex of schemes that must cooperate under the guidance of intent, there can be no consciousness without these structures. things like memory, anticipation, expectation, language-use, evaluating means and ends, are all necessary for there to be any ‘motivation’ in behavior. otherwise physiological processes are non-thetic and simply the result of the physical and chemical laws that govern them. of course all this other stuff is governed by these laws too, but only when they are combined and organized at the level of self-awareness and goal-oriented behavior, can they be called ‘conscious’. this means that there can be no ‘unconscious hating of your wife’, because in order to ‘hate’, you have to move through all those characteristics of intentional, object-directed thinking. what happens ‘underneath’ consciousness is just a series of inert physical and chemical processes in your nervous system. there is no planning here, no deliberation, no foresight, just a non-teleological system of electro-chemical impulses.

really man, the whole freud/jung theory of the unconsciousness is just a money making sham these nob-gobblers made up to stay in business.

here’s some relevant reading from the frenchman with the lazy eye:

the thing with this shadow nonsense is that it allowed the shrinks to create through the power of suggestion an alternative you, and then fill it with all kinds of insidious bullshit so that you’d get all paranoid and be like ‘omg help me doctor!’ i read some greek mythology and now i think i wanna kill my father!’

You are way out of date. Modern cognitive science shows unconscoius decision making and overriding of conscious decisions, even, everywhere in our lives. And anyone paying attention to their own lives will notice how they find themselves doing, saying things they thought they did not intend, and also fighting very hard and often losing when trying to change habits - t hat is repeated decisions made by the unconscious. And you don’t get to dismiss the unconscious as merely determined and then concede that everything is. Either being determined means it cannot be intentional or it does not.

And your first sentence on the subject reverses necessity

You are saying that consciousness requires intent. The question is whether intent requires consciousness.

And all through this is the assumption that the little thinky I in the mind AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT THAT WE ARE FOCUSED ON is the only consciousness.

Pretty much all of us have had the experience of NOTICING that we were, in fact, aware of something without being aware we were. The observers and experiencers in us are shifting around. The little I merges and disengages.

But in any case, referring to Freud and Jung is missing out the vast amount of current and recent research (that is in the 21st century) that shows unconscious decision-making, unconscious intentions saturing the lives of we humans who have this little I in the mind that thinks it is boss and further thinks it is not, right this moment merged with some part of the unconscious’ pushing and pulling.

You’ve confused parts for the whole.

True will, the mercilessness, amoral violent sneaky of it, is never conscious.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9v-UVSy_vo[/youtube]

We call it “Hell” and it is not a passive thing.

K.Tunnel, we might not be disagreeing as much as we are calling something… a certain process of feature… what the other isn’t calling it. Mind you there is plenty of controversy around the existence of the ‘unconscious’ shared between very well established intellectuals and scientists (Searle as one). So, the denial that it exists isn’t ‘an old idea’ by any means. Most likely there’s a misunderstanding of terms going on here between us.

Perhaps, though I doubt that. But it sure is intentional. And why be sneaky if you ain’t conscious. What’s the motivation to be?

Or lets put it this way; it is conscious of itself, but the ego isn’t conscious of it.
The ego as I see it is a social construct. It is conscious of the place in the world of logoic hierarchies of power but it isn’t conscious of its will.

We slip into different layers of consciousness in trances.

The process is rather savage.

Many people go through it in youth, and many of these become criminals.

Those that have the sort of life that allows for slow integration in adulthood are people with whom the superego of society evolves.

To evade consciousness… :wink:

Yeah, Sartre and his autonomous floating ego consciousness lost in space. Nobody that knows anything about neuro-science or evolutionary psychology or archetypal psychology thinks his brand of “condemned to be free” conscious is supportable. I don’t see Sartre getting any 21st century scientific support for his philosophy. That blurb that you cited above talks about one small aspect of Freud’s take on repression. It hardly deals with the vast phenomenal relationship of consciousness to the unconscious psyche.

Sartre had to coin a word “non-thetical” in order to deal repressed material. Well, sure it’s conscious until the ego stuffs it. Then where does it go? It’s forgotten. And what shall we call that? Whatever your euphemism is for the unconscious. Oh, I know…it becomes "non-thetical’. #-o

FELIX — “Why can’t the unconscious self have intentionality? Why must the unconscious psyche be inert? Psychological evidence shows that the unconscious is motivated and dynamic.”

PROM --=“because consciousness is a phenomenological complex of schemes that must cooperate under the guidance of intent, there can be no consciousness without these structures”

Am I hallucinating or is there a subterranean agreement lurking here?

Intent precedes consciousness. Intent does not have to be conscious.

I always loved this quote.

It is the inferior side (or what we feel is the inferior side) of our self which we refuse to look at, to acknowledge.
We always seem to see it within someone else but not our self. It is called projection.
I’ll get back to you as for the rest.

The unconscious psyche reveals the shadow through dreams. And other people can tell us things about ourselves that we can’t see, that is, things about which we are unconscious.

Pet peeves about other people can tell a lot. Ask people who know you what you seem to overreact to negatively in other people. There’s the shadow. You think you’re bugged because they are ‘bad’ or ‘annoying’ etc., and while this is ALSO true, you’re probably jealous they let themselves express that facet of themselves you lock in the basement.

Yes and when people who know us tell us things about ourselves that we are unaware of, it’s easy to become defensive and deny the truth of their observation. We seem to see this happening right here on ILP, as for example, in the case of our moral nihilist friend. He won’t accept feedback about what he does even though multiple people are telling him roughly the same thing about himself.

Many times an archetype like the Shadow can affect our mood and we don’t know why. A friend who knows our situation may be to explain our mood to us better than we can explain it ourselves. We should listen and try to be open to what they are telling us about ourselves. They may be onto something we don’t have conscious access to.

I can do this on occasion. And I have allowed some really horrible feelings and intentions in myself to bubble up to the surface and be expressed. Violent denied aspect of myself, for example, I let ‘take over’ and express their rage - though I was, of course, alone and did not live this out on anyone else. I did not like what I found but I noticed that once expressed there were more healthy versions (of standing up for myself or of expressing desire, even) that were more accessible. I really hate it when someone else notices something first in me. I wish I could say I always take this gracefully, though sometimes I do. Easier when it is someone who loves me, though I’ve managed to work with some reflections from people who dislike me.

I think this is most important bravery. Can one do this?