We continue the presentation we began in the last column, here offering:

Thesis #6 – There are defense mechanisms in individual psychology, habitual patterns of mental schemes and individual behaviors aimed at defending against potentially threatening, anxiety-provoking information. Each of these mechanisms may manifest itself in both creative and destructive forms.

As we have seen, we humans, with a mental structure characterized by the features of the Reflective Symbolic Self, in a very real sense know “too much” for our own good – that is, we know that we are mortal, that we will die, that we in fact face potentially mortal dangers in each and every moment, and this knowledge runs smack up against that deepest evolutionary urge we share with all living beings, the urge to continue living. Only a species whose mental structure is characterized by the features of the Reflective Symbolic Self must deal with that kind of ongoing and permanent death anxiety. As a result, we humans have had to develop an area in our mental structure that, as far as we can tell, is unique only to our species, at least on this planet. This is the mental sphere that has been called the ‘unconscious’ mind.

The nature of the human unconscious mind is controversial. Like consciousness itself, it is fleeting, elusive, and hides itself from us each time we think we have nailed it down. What we can say is that no serious person doubts the fact that most of the vital processes that go on in our bodies, controlled by our brain take place totally outside of the sphere of conscious awareness – this is the so-called ‘autonomic’ nervous system processes. Likewise, no serious person would doubt the experience of having ‘gut reactions’ to experiences that take place prior to reflection upon the experience, and that may or may not align with our reactions once we have had to chance to think about it more objectively. I would venture to say that all serious people have had the experience of doing or saying something in the moment, about which they are later puzzled and wonder why in the world they did or said what they did. We know what it feels like to have internal motives that are relatively hidden from oneself – often motives that friends and observers can recognize initially much more clearly and readily that we are able to do ourselves.

Based on my own experience, I tend toward a view of the unconscious mind as very complex, enigmatic and powerful. On the other hand, I also understand that I may tend toward that view exactly because of my psychoanalytic training. It was during analysis that my understanding and experience of the unconscious mind expanded radically, and so whenever I try to sort out which is fundamental, my experience or my training, it always comes down to the old chicken-and-egg problem. I understand that people whose experience and training is tied more closely to behavioralist or cognitive understanding rather than to a psychodynamic or existential understanding may well interpret their mental lives much different than I do my own.

Happily, the Theory of Generative Death Anxiety, while having originated in the more psychodynamic and existential end of the psychological pool, is not inextricably tied to that end of the pool, nor is it at all incompatible with views at the end of the pool that place much less emphasis on the workings of a dynamic unconscious. We can build on a set of common and familiar experiences, for example, that of doing or saying something in the moment based on motivations that puzzle us and remain somewhat hidden from ourselves until another observer points them out to us. In other words, we must know that our reactions and behaviors are not always and in all situations governed by our conscious minds. Furthermore, in finding ourselves reacting and behaving in ways that are at least initially opaque to ourselves, if we start to catalog these instances and look at them with hindsight, we quickly begin to see that what they have in common is that they are designed to shield ourselves from mainly negative information about ourselves, information that would threaten our positive self-concept, and in other ways would be anxiety provoking. These catalogued reactions can then be categorized into what in psychology have been called the Defense Mechanisms, stereotypical human gambits in the psychological and emotional realm to hide from ourselves what is truly happening. Like our primate sibling with a highly developed theory of mind and self-recognition, who engages in deception with others of her species based on knowing that she knows something about the situation the other does not (for example, that the trainer has moved the food from this box to that one) we humans also engage in deceptive strategies in order to keep certain information concealed. The difference is that we species of the Reflective Symbolic Self have developed strategies to conceal reality, to the extent it is possible, even from ourselves!

I’m getting a little long-winded here so let me cut this off for now and finish up my treatment of Thesis #6 in the next entry.

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