Consciousness, identity and self

INDIVIDUAL MIND AND SOCIETYLecture Number 6: Consciousness, Identity and Self

Lecturer: Dr Chris Till

Email: c.h.till@leeds.ac.uk

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams”William Shakespeare Hamlet

Consciousness Awareness, subjectivity, thinking, feeling, a

sense of self Eg, critical self-reflection, comparing oneself to

others, thought and reflection of which we are aware

Unconscious Aspects and processed of the mind which are not

available to consciousness Eg, dreams, habitual though patterns, memories

which have been forgotten

“Unlike other animals, we not only know; we know that we know. We are aware of being aware, conscious of ‘having’ consciousness, of being conscious. Our knowledge is itself an object of knowledge: we can gaze at our thoughts ‘the same way’ we look at our hands or feet and at the ‘things’ which surround our bodies not being part of them”

Zygmunt Bauman Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies

“Self-awareness, reason, and imagination have disrupted the ‘harmony’ that characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, the freak of the universe. He is part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet he transcends nature; he is set apart while being a part; he is homeless, yet chained to the home he shares with all creatures…Being aware of himself, he realizes his powerlessness and the limitations of his existence”

Erich Fromm The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS? Descartes

Cogito ergo sum Evidence of senses could be misleading but the fact that I am

thinking and doubting must be evidence that my consciousness exists

Individual thought and consciousness came to be seen as central, essential and fundamental

“I thereby concluded that I was a substance, of which the whole essence or nature consists in thinking, and which, in order to exist, needs no place and depends on no material thing”

See Discourse on Method and Burkitt Social Selves, chapter 1. Nietzsche

“I think” assumes: An “I”, an “I” that can be the cause of something, a

relationship between cause and effect, “thinking” See Beyond Good and Evil Chapter 1, aphorism 16.

THE INTERNAL WORLD

Every instinct which does not vent itself externally turns inwards—this is what I call the internalization of man: it is at this point that what is later called the ‘soul’ first develops in man. The whole inner world, originally stretched thinly as between two membranes, has been extended and expanded, has acquired depth, breadth, and height in proportion as the external venting of human instincts has been inhibited. (Nietzsche 2008: 65).

CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS

Freud to Jung on arriving in New York:

“They don't realize we're bringing them the plague”

See Jacques-Alain Miller

“The Desire of Lacan and his complex relation to Freud” 

THE UNCONSCIOUS

Human beings driven by animal instincts still existing in the unconscious mind

Instincts are transformed by society through repression and sublimation forming the conscious mind

From “pleasure principle”

To “reality principle”

Immediate satisfaction Delayed satisfaction

Pleasure Restraint of pleasure

Joy (play) Toil (work)

Receptiveness Productiveness

Absence of repression Security

Table adapted from Marcuse, H. (1969) Eros and Civilization. London: Sphere.

CONSCIOUSNESS Child has no perception of separation between internal

world of mind and external world. Awareness of separation develops from obstacles placed

in the way of attainment of pleasure. Ego becomes disengaged from mass of sensations in

external world Gain sense of self and develop “reality principle” “An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego

from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him” 14

“Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it” 15

See Civilization and its Discontents (particularly chapter 1)

THE STRUCTURE OF THE MIND Id

Major part of the unconscious, disorganized, irrational.

Ego coherent organization of mental

processes, barrier between conscious and unconscious. Consistent with reason and common sense

Ego-ideal How we would like to be

Super-ego Largely unconscious, conscience,

contains ego ideal, produces guilt, aligned with parents, teachers, etc.

See Freud’s essays ‘Repression’, ‘The Unconscious’ and ‘The Ego and Id’

CONSCIOUSNESS IN SOCIOLOGY

ELIAS

Built sociogenetic approach onto Freud’s psychogenetic approach

Develop sense of self and individuality through internalization of social constraints

Manners and etiquette become more stringent over history

Social stability enabled people to look into their inner world – “internal pacification”

“Court Society” promoted Self-reflection “Objective” attitude towards self Seeing self as “one among many”

ELIAS

Less complex societies, more direct connection between individual and environment, everything seems to be directly related to feeling, more “involved”

More complex societies we increasingly “conceal our passions” and “act against our feelings”. See ourselves as one among others, more “detached”.

Development of consciousness and repression of unconscious necessary for development of rationality

Greater detachment enabled development of rationality, empiricism and science

See Elias’ The Civilizing Process (handout) and Involvement and Detachment

GEORGE HERBERT MEAD

“I” Response of the organism to attitudes of others

“Me” Organized set of attitudes of others which one

assumes Consciousness requires organized sense of self,

an object that can be reflected upon “…it is due to the individual’s ability to take the

attitudes of […] others in so far as they can be organized that he gets self-consciousness. The taking of all those organized sets of attitudes gives him his “me” ”

See G.H. Mead Mind Self and Society.

THE CONSCIOUS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS IN SOCIETYRace, art and politics

RACE AND DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS

W.E.B. Du Bois Double consciousness

American and “Negro” Black people in America are

“…born with a veil, and gifted with second sight” “One ever feels his twoness, - an American, a

Negro two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings”

See W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk and Paul Gilroy The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.

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“Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices”

SURREALISM AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Revolution of the mind Unlock the unconscious through drawing on

imagery of dreams Sought to remove barriers from unconscious “The imagination is perhaps on the point of

reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights. If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize them -- first to seize them, then, if need be, to submit them to the control of our reason”.

See Andre Breton Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)

POLITICS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS Conservative - Philip Rieff

Repression of instinctual drives by society produced dissatisfaction, suffering and neurosis.

3 ideals dominated Western culture all “commitment” based Political Man Economic Man Religious man

Freud provides new “psychological man” Consolation based on release of instinctual

drives and private well-being rather than commitment to a cause.

See Gabriel Freud and Society

POLITICS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Marcuse synthesised Freud and Marx Self-realization through satisfaction of individual

desires damages critical capacity producing “One Dimensional Man”

Marx’s concept of man was one who needs the world and whose passions lie in potential to collectively achieve goals.

“No longer used as a full-time instrument of labour, the body would be resexualized….The body in its entirety would become an object of cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed – an instrument of pleasure” Marcuse

See Herbert Marcuse Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man

SUMMARY

Consciousness produced through self-awareness, taking oneself as an object

Separation between conscious and unconscious produced through internalization of social norms

Conscious and unconscious often in conflict Consciousness developed historically through

increasingly stringent social constraints Theories of consciousness and unconscious

influenced politics on the left and right

TUTORIAL READINGS

Freud, S. (2004 [1930]) Civilization and its Discontents. London: Penguin. Chapter 1:

http://www.archive.org/details/CivilizationAndItsDiscontents

Marcuse, H. (1969) Eros and Civilization. London: Sphere. Chapter 1:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/eros-civilisation/ch01.htm

Elias, N (2000) The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell (Volume II, Part 4, V: ‘The Muting of Drives: Psychologization and Rationalization’)

See photocopy

TUTORIAL QUESTIONS

1. What is the relationship between consciousness, the unconscious and repression? To what extent do you agree that repression is a necessary part of society?

2. How does Elias develop Freud’s understanding of consciousness?

3. How is the notion of rationality related to consciousness in the work of Freud and Elias?

4. “Self-awareness, reason, and imagination have disrupted the ‘harmony’ that characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, the freak of the universe” (Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness). To what extent do you agree with this quotation?