Beyond Freud: From Individual to Social Psychology by Fromm Erich

Author:Fromm, Erich [Fromm, Erich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: American Mental Health Foundation Books
Published: 2010-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

THREE

Dealing with the Unconscious

in Psychotherapeutic Practice

(Three Lectures 1959)

1. My Understanding of What Is Being Unconscious If one uses the term repression as it is used usually by Freud and as it is used in analytic literature, one thinks primarily of something which was conscious and then was repressed. While in my concept here I refer to that which is not conscious, in equal ways, both to that which had been conscious, and to that which we had never been aware of. Therefore, perhaps it would be better, maybe to word the term, dissociation, rather than repression, because in the term dissociation you have more of a possibility to comprise both: what has arrived and what has not arrived in awareness. It has not quite the active pushing back quality. In order to give another example for that kind of dissociations which I had in mind as being that which we are not aware of, take a very simple example: You have seen the face of a person, let us say, who is well known to you; you have known him for many years, and one day you suddenly see the face entirely afresh. Suddenly, you see this face with what you would describe as simply a greater degree of reality. You know the face; you could describe it, you see a quality, you see an essence, which is much more real than anything you have seen before, and actually for a moment you have the feeling, “I have never seen this face before, it is completely new.” What has happened? You are aware of something in the reality of this face of which you have not been aware before. The face was always the same, that is to say the man or the woman was always the same; you are always the same, but you had a veil and you didn’t see. You were, what one might say, half blind and suddenly your eyes open and you see.

The whole process really of making the unconscious conscious is a process which could be described as seeing, and actually you have in the mythological literature, the symbol of blindness, utter blindness, and then you become a seer. Tireseus is blind and he’s a seer. Oedipus becomes blind and he becomes eventually a seer. In Goethe’s Faust, the character becomes blind at the very moment when he sees and he says then, an inner radiance came out from him.

This concept of repression in which one speaks of not being aware of that which exists in myself has the premise that really all is in us. Or, if you put it differently, that we know everything, except that we don’t know what we know. If I assume, I have never before seen you as I see you now, then I must in my way of putting it, assume I really knew you before but I was not aware of what I was knowing. If I had not known you before, if I had been

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.