Opened up to the world
The Ego and the Id, chapter 2
This is where things get interesting to me.
The analyst has the task of bringing repressed (unconscious) stuff to consciousness. For something presently unconscious to be brought to consciousness, it must get bound to the language of consciousness: perception.
That goes even for things that were never perceived, so says my doctor, anyway:
“only something that has once been a conscious perception can become conscious, and anything arising from within that seeks to become conscious must try to transform itself to external perceptions: this becomes possible by memory traces.” [that is, memory traces of perceptions that lodge themselves inside of us as word-presentations… meaning, symbols of what we’ve experienced.]
A Revelation:
The whole of mental life is indexed toward and organized by external perception. My inner-world is an analogy of the outside world, for, even what begins inside of me must transform itself to something like an external perception to be held by my conscious thought. I tend to think of mental life as something far more interior and set apart from the external world. I need to think about this more.
Freud explains this dynamic by describing the ego as the part of our interior life that is shaped by interactions with the outside world.
“It is easy to see that the ego is the part of the Id that has been modified by direct influence of the external world through the medium of perception-consciousness.”
The ego is like a mental projection of our bodies. That should really change how I think about thinking. My consciousness is bound to that part of me that is perceiving and testing my inner-world against the reality of the world beyond me. (In doing so, aren’t I just keeping myself alive? attuning myself to objective reality, remaining constantly in-step with it?)
This helps to explain how it is that internal feelings and thoughts must get transformed to something like a perception in order to be grasped by consciousness.
The entirety of my conscious mental life is indexed towards the experience of the external world. I think I could say that a million times over and it would never really hit home, so strong is the assumption of the split between mind and body. But this is a good start. We always talk about how the mind and the body are in sync, that thinking is a bodily reality. But this idea gives flesh to that principle: the ego, the part of me that consciously thinks, is also the part of me that is transformed by perception, a projection of my experience in the world. So, of course, I’m thinking of my friend Heidegger, now. For, he was the one who told me that my existence as a human is that of being-in-the-world.
