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.
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:
One of the central notions connected with that of the for-itself is the idea of bad faith, or self-deception. Bad faith is Sartre's replacement for the Freudian notion of the unconscious. Bad faith for Sartre is false reflection on my own mental states; a systematic self-deception about the nature of the pre-reflective basis for reflection (which is, of course, for Sartre, appearances or projections of the real world). So, if for example I hate my father but do not admit it to myself, Freud would say that my hatred of my father is an unconscious mental state, which systematically effects my behavior, but which cannot be made conscious without deep analysis and the uncovering of the psychogenesis of that hatred.
Sartre, on the other hand, rejects the notion of the unconscious entirely. For Sartre, this situation would be described as one in which I (consciously) hate my father, and am conscious --- non-thetically --- of that hatred and its object. But in reflecting, I lie to myself, and tell myself that I don't really hate my father. My non-thetic consciousness is of hating my father; but my reflective, thetic consciousness of self --- my consciousness of my self as an (empirical) object --- is that of me as not hating my father. This distortion is imposed because of a desire to not hate my father, and reflection then is twisted by that desire. But I am fully (if non-thetically) conscious of hating my father --- that is, my consciousness sometimes has the form of a hatred of Dad.
The most central difference between Sartre and Freud which underlies this apparent disagreement is that Sartre thinks that all dealing with the intentional is conscious, more or less by definition. The intentional properties of something are ones it has not in itself, but ones which are to be found in what it is not (what it's directed on) rather than what it is. But being what it is not rather than what it is is the essential mark of consciousness, the for-itself, and nothingness for Sartre. So the only thing which is sensitive to the intentional is consciousness itself.
Pretend that this is so for a moment to understand the disagreement with Freud. If this were so, then consider the process of repression for Freud. Repression is certainly sensitive to the content of mental states --- things get repressed because of what they mean. But since only the for-itself can be sensitive to meaning, repression must be done by a consciousness. In fact, this requires a second consciousness: If it were my consciousness, then as soon as the process of repression considered that meaning to see if it should be repressed, that meaning would be conscious --- and hence, not repressed. So if only consciousness can deal with the intentional, repression would require a second, independent consciousness, which is not mine --- which Sartre takes to be absurd.
The alternative for Sartre is that it's my consciousness which does the repressing --- which means, of course, that even "repressed" thoughts are conscious. This is, of course, just bad faith. I am conscious of all my thoughts; none are unconscious. And it is my consciousness which grasps even the intuitively repressed thoughts. I thus have conscious access even to the things which I do not admit to myself --- I instead lie to myself in reflection about something I perfectly well know; and this is the essence of bad faith.
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!'
I frequently think this can be expanded to encompass most of philosophy.
