How can we have a theory of ‘The unconscious’ without a theory of consciousness?
Can we talk with any confidence about a model of something that infers the existence of another thing that we struggle to define or explain?
Freud’s theory of the perceptual system rebounds - usually unacknowledged - in areas like computer science, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy when enquiries are made into the nature of consciousness. Yet Freud was not really interested in consciousness, turning his attention instead to the Unconscious. The Conscious System is acknowledged by Freud, but left unexplained.
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Julian Jaynes (1920-1997) proposed a theory of consciousness, distinct from sensory awareness and cognition, rooted in language and culture. In his theory of the ‘bicameral mind’, Jaynes posits the presence of a conscious - non-conscious duality.​ Whereas Freud looked towards Sophocles’ Oedipus to explain the cause and mechanisms of the Unconscious via the unexplained illness of patients, Jaynes looked towards Homer’s Iliad to explain the evolution of Consciousness via the metaphor. With reference to the film, Medea, directed by Peri Pablo Passolini, I consider what consciousness is and is not via Jaynen's theory of The Bicameral mind, and Sigmund Freud's theory of The Unconscious.
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Colchis. No talking, just drum beats, and music of a primordial kind. A dark-haired woman, tall, veiled, jeweled, turns to her waiting women. They prepare her in robes, her hands are bound in chains.
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There is moaning, dust. Barefoot and shrieking, she runs through fire. At the base of the rock, she looks up, and moaning, she ascends into the sacred temple.​ In the temple of Helios, the woman looks towards the Ram’s Fleece, she looks towards the sun through the windows, and she falls unconscious.
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Time passes, she wakes. She is not strong enough to remove the fleece from the temple.​ Her feet bare, she runs through the town. ‘Brother, come!’ she urges.
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Her brother wakes, and without a word, he follows her. He cuts down the Ram’s fleece. She urges him to command a war chariot, and she directs him towards a band of marauding men. The temple women observe the stolen fleece, and they cry out the alarm. Medea meets Jason with the Golden Fleece, and they flee together towards the shore, the people of Colchis in pursuit.​ When it looks as if their pursuers might overtake them, Medea turns towards her brother, raises an axe, and… hacks him to pieces.
She scatters the body of her brother behind the fleeing chariot. The pursuing army of Colchis stop to gather the dismembered body of their ruler heir, and Jason and Medea board Jason’s ship and sail towards Corinth.
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The film is Peri Paolo Pasolini’s Medea, 1969. It’s truly an extraordinary film for someone seeking to understand who - or what - is the chorus in Greek tragedy; that strange body of many people who speak as one and have exchanges with main characters, deliberating ethics or fate prior to a life -or- death act.​ There was no chorus that Medea deliberated with in Colchis: she looked at the sun, she fell asleep, and she acted. Medea looks about, her face stern, perhaps listening. She steps off on to the land of Corinth and she rushes about.
‘Speak to me, earth!’ she cries ‘
Speak to me, Earth! I cannot hear you!’
‘Rock! Speak to me!’
‘Grass speak!’
Distraught, she collapses onto the earth.
Julian Jaynes, published The Origin of Consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind in 1976. He proposes that at one time, human nature was split into two, consisting of an executive part called a god, and a follower part, called a man. Neither part, he tells us, was conscious.​ Modern people, who, Jaynes tells us, are ‘conscious’, try to identify with ancient people, but we cannot. ‘We feel,’ says Jaynes,’ that there must, there absolutely must be something he [i.e. the ancient person] feels inside!’
According to Jaynes, we are trying to invent a mind space and a sense of self in ancient man, just as we do in ourselves and our contemporaries. But he says, the ancient mind was ‘preconscious’: there was no sense of self: there was no ‘I’ as distinct from the ‘world’ out there.1
Jaynes proposes that there was separation between the left and right brain hemispheres - a little tedious I know - but hear a little more. He claims to lean on Bleuer’s work on Dementia Precox, in particular the hallucinatory aspect of schizophrenia. Jaynes proposes that the mentality of the ancient world was similar to that of a modern day schizophrenic, who hears voices. The voices may take any and every relationship to the individual: they may admonish, console, mock, command, or announce things.2​
‘During the eras of the bicameral mind, we may suppose that the stress threshold for hallucinations was much, much lower than in normal people or schizophrenics today. The only stress necessary was that which occurs when a change in behavior is necessary because of some novelty in a situation.
​ Anything that could not be dealt with on the basis of habit, any conflict between work and fatigue, between attack and flight, any choice between whom to obey or what to do, anything that required any decision at all was sufficient to cause an auditory hallucination… Volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a neurological command, in which the command and the action were not separated, in which to hear was to obey.’3
In short, people didn’t have the experience of making decisions: they had the experience of the Gods commanding them to do something.
Jaynes’ argument reminds me of Euripides’ Heracles. When Hercules comes to his senses after a period of amnesia, he looks around as sees that he has slaughtered everyone and everything. He sees the bodies of men, and animals, and finally his wife and their own dear children. He laments that the Gods sent a madness upon him. He was seized by a hatred and fury that came not from within, but from the gods. Jaynes looks at words that appear frequently in Homer’s Iliad - words like Thumos, Phrenes, Noos, Kradie and Psyche - words that might denote being seized by trembling, seeing, feeling, hurt or longing or pain in particular parts of a person’s body - this was before there was a sense of ‘I’ or ‘myself’ - and he argues that these words locate the origin of affect and bodily sensation as something that is bestowed upon a person from the Gods.4 Jaynes argues that the ancient mind was not conscious. He says that consciousness came about only with the break-down of the bicameral mind. The evolution was not a biological one, but rather, it came about through the use of language.
In Colchis, Pasolini’s Medea hears the voice of the God, and acts. In Corinth, Medea sinks into despair for the voices of the gods are silent for her. The voices have stopped, and she is paralyzed.
‘The people fear you,’ says the wet nurse.
Medea paces backwards and forth, and her chorus of distressed serving women match her ‘Why do they fear me?’ she asks, striding.
‘Because you are spiritual,’ the wet nurse tells her, turning when Medea turns, pacing when Medea paces. ‘You are spiritual in a way that the Greeks are not.’
‘No!’ Medea says, ‘I have no power here!’ and she turns away.
Through dialogue with the chorus of serving maids, however, Medea recovers either her ability to hear the voices of the gods.
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​ Pasolini’s Medea speaks, and she begins to speak with ambiguity, with metaphor and with euphemisms. She does not disclose her plan, but the face of the wet nurse betrays the distress of the chorus. Medea has found a way to act, and she finds a way to kill Jason’s new women - not with an axe, but through deception - and then she slaughters her own darling children.
Has Medea become conscious?
She is not a subject, she is a character, so she may represent anything here. This turning point in the story begs the question ‘What is consciousness?’
Jaynes answer is that consciousness arose with metaphor.
‘In early times, language and its referents climbed up from the concrete to the abstract on the steps of metaphors, even we may say, created the abstract on the bases of metaphors. The lexicon of language, then, is a finite set of terms that by metaphor is able to stretch out over an infinite set of circumstances, even to creating new circumstances thereby.
Could consciousness be such a new creation?’5
Where Medea would cut up, Jaynes would stretch out. Metaphor, Jaynes tells us, increased our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally created a new object. Language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication6. Jaynes argues that the conscious mind is a spatial analogue of the world and mental acts are analogies of bodily acts. Consciousness acts on only objectively observable things. There is nothing in consciousness that is not an analogue of something that wasn't in behaviour first. Jaynes says that the subjective conscious mind is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogues of behaviour in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics.
Unfortunately, Jaynes proceeds to describe the metaphor as something like a hammer which he applies to everything he considers to create the world as it should be, based on some kind of reality that is common to us all. The consciousness that Jaynes hammers into theoretical shape is nothing more than an analogue of the real world. He actually goes on to tell us what the real world is:
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'The world is organised, highly organised, and the concrete metaphors that are generating consciousness thus generate consciousness in an organised way. Hence the similarity of consciousness and the physical- world: the physical world is echoed in the structure of consciousness.’7
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Consciousness, according to Jaynes, is that which allows us to shortcut behavioural processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. ‘Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or repository.’8
Jaynes seems not so much to be making an inquiry into the mind, as telling me, what my own thoughts are. He even attempts to demonstrate this, by asking me to imagine something - a circus - and then telling me what my own associations are to this word. As a conscious reader, however, I didn’t for a moment think that his writing was my free association, or that my own free associations would be the same as his writing.
How could Jaynes get this so wrong?
Freud discovered a small part of the psychical apparatus, seelisher Apparat, or, soul apparatus, which was involved in the pathological defense of unconscious thoughts. He called this consciousness.​ Like Jaynes after him, and Theodore Pells before him, and Breuer at the same time, Freud thought that consciousness was but a small part of the mind. But Freud had a very different idea of psychical reality than the conclusion that Jaynes arrives at.
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In A Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud writes that ‘The unconscious is the true psychical reality. It is as much unknown to us as the reality of the external world. It is as incompletely presented by the data of consciousness as is the external world by the communication of our sensory apparatus.’9 For Freud, consciousness was a far cry from an analogue of the physical world. ‘Psychical reality is a particular form for existence not to be confused with material reality’ (Freud, 1895, 620). Later, in The Ego and the Id, Freud writes that ‘Sensations and feelings, belonging to the pleasure-unpleasure series - are more primordial than external perceptions.’ (Freud, 1895, 22). Freud had a theory of the drive: Jaynes, it seems, does not.​ Where Jaynes writes that ‘there is nothing in consciousness that is not an analogue of something that wasn't in behaviour first,’ Freud tells us that ‘Everything that is conscious has had an unconscious preliminary stage, however, everything that is unconscious may remain unconscious.’ Later he would define repressed and latent thoughts of the unconscious and precocious systems.
In A Project for a Scientific Psychology, Freud states very clearly the problem of consciousness that Jaynes never manages to conceptualise: that is, how to conceive of a system that can contain traces of what is passing through it, while remaining open to fresh stimuli. If consciousness is flowing - or something is flowing through it - how can it be imprinted and changed by memory trances unless it stops flowing?
Freud solved this by positing the existence of two systems.’10 The system at the start receives the perceptual stimuli, but has no trace of them (no memory). While behind it there is a second system which transforms the quantities of the first system into permanent traces or memories. The role of consciousness for Freud is that of a censor and the perception of psychical qualities.11 Furthermore, and crucial to Freud’s theory of the mind, material flows into the conscious from not only one direction, like it does in Jaynes model. In Freud’s model of consciousness, consciousness receives input from both the perceptual system and, crucially, from the interior of the apparatus itself (via the pleasure- unpleasure series) which, when subject to modification, make their way to the conscious processes.
For Jaynes, thoughts evolved from an ancient system split between speaking and hearing, to a modern day analogue of the physical world. Jaynes writes that most of our psychological processes - including thinking - do not require consciousness - but he does not describe what these not-conscious processes are, unless he means to suggest that they are the remnants of the bicameral mind, gone in many of us, but still present for schizophrenics as well as a large number of the non-clinical population who simply hear voices.
Freud said he was unable to explain how the excitatory processes at the level of neurons brought consciousness with them, and the conscious system that he describes in the Interpretation of dreams is the progenitor of the later ‘ego’. With The ego and the id (1923) Freud’s exploration of the mind had gone far beyond a need to locate consciousness.12
The two theorists approached the problem of consciousness from very different angles. Jaynes, from a - somewhat reductionist - reading of ancient texts - and Freud, through a study of the problem of hysteria, which lead him to a hypothesis of repression, or more generally defense. Jaynes theory comes in at a very poor second. However, Jaynes does provide food for thought.
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Last week, French Psychoanalyst, Radu Turcanu, presented on Anxiety. He spoke about a schizophrenic patient who could not locate the origin of his own affect. When gripped by sadness or regret, he couldn’t be sure that the constriction he felt in his throat came from within, or from without. The patient concluded that he didn’t have a soul, or L’ame in French. When the schizophrenic patient self-harmed, he cut himself with a blade, a Lame. I’ll leave it for the french speakers among us to help us understand the differences in pronunciation between these two words with different meanings but similar spellings. Radu observed - to us, but not to his patient - that the patient was possibly ‘cutting himself with the soul he couldn’t find.’
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I can’t help thinking of Jayne’s bicameral mind. I wonder whether, if Radu’s modern patient had existed in the ancient world, he would not have had the problem of trying to ‘locate his soul’ in a world where affect came from the gods.
Perhaps the modern analyst here, is something of the Greek chorus - a kind of intermediary between the bicameral mind and a sense of self. I am not proposing Jaynes’ bicameral mind as a model for treatment anymore than I am proposing it as a theoretical model, however, I do wonder if the suffering of the Schizophrenic is due, at least in part, from the demand of a predominantly neurotic world, to see the other as ourselves.
Notes
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1Jaynes, 1976, 84
2Ibid, 88
3 Ibid 93-99
4 Ibid, 258-260
5 Ibid, 51-52
6 Ibid, 50
7 Ibid, 58​
8 Ibid, 59​
9 Freud, 1895, 614
​10 Freud, Ibid, 538
​11 Freud, Ibid, 615
​12 Freud, 1923
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Bibliography
Freud, Sigmund, 1895, Project for a Scientific Psychology, trans Jame Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 1
Freud, Sigmund, 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans Jame Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol 5
Jaynes, Julian, 1976, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Pasolini, Peri Pablo, 1969, Medea (film)