According to
psychoanalytic doctrine, the unconscious, roughly summed up, is where one
stores thoughts and health-threatening emotions. In order to protect oneself from overwhelming experiences, one denies such
emotions and thoughts by devising ways to avoid them. Yet, not always can they
be kept buried. Sometimes, such unpleasanties surface and, reportedly, reveal
to one a monstrous mirror image.
Such a postulate calls
for at least two angles to look and be looked at. First, the hidden
undesirable/guiltily desirable can hardly be imagined without entailing some
kind of agency. Be it even unconscious. That said, once revealed, such secret
monsters become consciously accessible, which calls for questioning how one
detects their unconscious character, i.e., what is the wager of their statuses.
If the unconscious has an independent life in its own right, the questions
arise: How does it “decide” to reveal itself to the conscious?
How does the
transformation into a conscious content occur? Further, if there is an area in
the psyche called the unconscious, could it also conceal contents of the nature
other than threatening, terrifying, and/or devastating? Put differently, could it be that what ends
up as unconscious is not merely what endangers one, but simply what escapes
memory? If so, can a magical dismantling of such knots bring to light joy, as
well? If so, can such occurrence be other than sheer denial?
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