Fear of Our Own Minds
“To peoples everywhere, darkness connotes evil, threat, and danger.”
—Mark Schaller
One of the most notable features of human beings is our lack of accurate self-knowledge. No matter how hard we try, it seems, we fail in this regard. And, whether it is a failure to see our faults or a failure to see our virtues, fail we do. But what is even more distressing is that we have a blind spot about our blind spot.
In thinking about others, whether friend or foe, it is quite easy for us to see the places where accuracy in self-knowledge might be lacking. I am pretty confident that all of us have had the experience of wondering how it is possible for someone to be so blind to themselves. But when it comes to our own self-knowledge, we seem quite comfortably identified with our own self-ignorance.
In speaking of comfort and ignorance, however, I am not implying that we are all happy and at ease in this state—quite the contrary. In my work as a psychologist, I am aware that much of what has brought my patients into therapy seems to pivot on how well they have been able to maintain this knowledge gap. In fact, it is often when life comes crashing down upon us that the false images we have of ourselves begin to crack, and we begin to notice things are not well with us. This was the case with my patient Mason.
I had seen Mason briefly for couples therapy with his boyfriend a few years earlier. They didn’t stay in treatment long, just long enough to reset their relationship, give voice to some building resentments, and continue on their way. Even back then, however, I could see that there was something pulling Mason away from himself.
Sadly, just before Mason called me again, his boyfriend, now husband, had had an affair and fallen in love. Mason didn’t know what to do or what to feel, so he decided to give me a call.
Even though Mason said he wanted help, I could tell immediately that he had one foot out the door, both in his relationship and in therapy. He made a point of telling me that things were going well for him and he didn’t think he needed to come back to therapy. His husband had decided to leave him and that was that. I suggested that we take a few sessions just to see what happens—“No need to commit to anything.” He was relieved by the absence of pressure from me and agreed to come.
Like so many other patients in my practice, Mason was driven and successful but ultimately felt an emptiness inside. He wished he could feel something—pleasure, pain—but all he felt was just “okay.”
Our work initially centered on feelings of grief and resentment. As much as Mason didn’t want to admit it, a part of him was very angry at his husband. And beneath that we found a sadness. Even though they both had occasionally “hooked up” with other people, falling in love was not part of their deal. The few sessions turned into a few more sessions, and soon, Mason allowed himself to feel the sadness, the betrayal, and, most importantly, the hurt. Then, one day, Mason came in and realized that he wasn’t angry anymore.
Over the next few weeks, Mason cheerfully reported to me that he was feeling great; everything seemed in place, and his work was going well. Quite predictably, then, Mason came in one day and told me he had run out of things to say. He sat there quietly in the big oversized chair, and that odd sensation came to me again. I could “feel” him edging toward the door. I initially imagined that this feeling of mine was a result of picking up on his reluctance to “go deeper.” No crime in that. But in addition to this “feeling,” I began to notice the vague outlines of an image in my mind’s eye. I saw him running.
I wondered if my feeling and these images were related to a sense that he was running from the pain of his breakup. I decided to cautiously share what I was experiencing with him. When I told him, he looked at me intently and, from his expression, seemed freaked out. He nodded and said, “That is really weird.” He went on to tell me that, when he is quiet and has no outside stimulation, he himself has the sensation of running. Even though he might be absolutely still, he runs.
With Mason, the sense of his running seemed to foreshadow what eventually came to be a recognition that some part of him was attempting to distance him from something. It was not that Mason wasn’t what he said he was—kind, caring, self-sacrificing, and easygoing—it’s just that he was also so much more than that.
As our work progressed, Mason’s running pace seemed to slow somewhat. More and more, he allowed himself to wonder about himself. Who he really was, how he came to be this person, and most importantly, what he was actually feeling inside. One day, Mason looked like he had a secret to tell me. With almost a hint of innocent shame, he revealed that for most of his life, he had suffered with the sense that an animal was following him, ready to pounce. He admitted, shamefully, that this was why he was running. The animal, he told me, was more shadow than substance, always in the distance, but it went everywhere with him. Every time he turned around, there it was; yet he could never quite see it clearly.
With time, Mason spoke of how difficult it was for him to have his own needs growing up. His sister, whom he had not spoken of much, was quite depressed in his childhood. She was older and demanded almost all of his parents’ attention. Mason was the “happy one,” the “good boy,” but underneath, there was more. Who he was, it seems, was kept hidden from everyone, including himself. Even his closest friends knew only the outward persona that he presented to the world. One day he said to me, “What will happen, do you think, if I stop running from the animal?” I replied, “Let’s find out.”
In essence, what happens when Mason stops running is what this chapter is about. Like Mason, many of us have relationships to ourselves that have strong elements of Fear—Fear that pulls us apart and severs our ability to maintain an authentic connection to who we truly are.
Our Two Faces
In 1866, Robert Louis Stevenson published Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It arrived in a society in which science, medicine, reason, and social decorum were preeminent. Growing out of the Scientific Revolution two hundred years earlier, Victorian Europe was thriving in its capacities for industry and enlightenment. The Industrial Revolution was at hand and the systems of class were neatly organizing humanity into manageable boxes. With the benefit of historical hindsight, however, we can see that the publication of Stevenson’s book presaged something meaningful about our culture and our society.
The theme of the story about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has become a form of myth, transcending the limits of the novel and extending into the very fabric of our society. But for those of you who have not read the book, let me offer a brief summary.
Unlike the film, the novel is structured as a mystery. There’s a shabby door situated on an otherwise clean and lively street. There’s an encounter with a brutish man who enters that door. His name is Hyde and, somehow, he seems to have a mysterious power over a respected physician named Dr. Jekyll. There is a murder, and witnesses identify Mr. Hyde. Who is this man and what power does he have over Dr. Jekyll?
With the unfolding of the story, we discover that Dr. Jekyll has found a way to release his “inner man” who longs for pleasure, seeks only to satisfy himself, and feels younger, lighter, and more alive. It is a touching story of a good and devoted doctor who seeks to honor his inner self, but finds that this inner self is capable of inflicting tremendous hurt, and even murder. The story ends with the death of Dr. Jekyll. We are left with the feeling that, if we try to give life to the part of us that we hide from, we will ultimately come to a tragic end.
Reading the story of Dr. Jekyll today makes clear how constricted the Victorian world was. Some have considered the story a clear reference to homosexuality and the need for “bachelors” in Victorian England to hide their desires. For me, however, the book is much broader in its metaphor. It reveals a deep fissure within us, individually and culturally. It is seen in the struggle of good versus evil, noble versus savage, and upper versus lower class. Dr. Jekyll both longs to set his inner self
free and struggles to keep this part of him from destroying everything good he has built. For me, these two movements—the longing to reveal what is hidden, and the fear that “the hidden” will harm us—are what our culture and society grappled with as we moved into the twentieth century.
What Science Gave Shape To
In the years following the publication of Stevenson’s book, and as Europe was struggling with societal upheaval, a strange new ailment began to emerge. Women (and, to a lesser degree, men) were having symptoms of unexplained paralysis, blindness, and obsession. It was called hysteria, from the Greek word for womb.
Some of the brightest medical minds in Europe were working on this problem. Major advances were being made in France through the work of Pierre Janet and Jean-Martin Charcot using hypnosis.63 They theorized that something was going wrong in the relationship between the conscious mind and the non-conscious mind. But it was the young Austrian Sigmund Freud who took this a step further and proposed that sexuality was at the root of the disturbance. And it was Freud who came up with a method to treat it.64
Needless to say, Freud’s theories were met with open skepticism. Here was a Jewish neurologist from Vienna who claimed that the ills of society were a result of our hidden sexual wishes. Not only was there explicit anti-Semitism that he had to overcome, but the zeitgeist of the time fostered a self-serving view of the individual as moral and self-restrained. Freud emerged in a society that was both ready for him and terrified of him.
Victorian society’s fear of inner depravity, so clearly drawn in the characters of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, found a real ally in Freud. Not only did Freud scare the bourgeoisie, he also helped give shape to their fears. Over the course of his work, he became an ally with the societal fearfulness, giving aid to the aspect of society that longed to control what was irrational, depraved, and only precariously in their control. Freud gave Europe “scientific” evidence by positing an unconscious, a place where all that we fear about ourselves resides. And, with his method, he assured society that, if they surrendered to his viewpoint, they would gain both health and protection against the onslaught of their destructive impulses.
About this same time in Switzerland, the young psychiatrist Carl Jung was also making a name for himself by developing scientific evidence for the existence of the unconscious. Although he is perhaps best known for his work on personality types, the collective unconscious, and his spiritual views of the Self, Jung began quite pragmatically to scientifically establish a foundation for the existence of “complexes” that operate outside of our awareness. He did this through word association experiments that tracked the length of time it took for a person to respond to a target word. By analyzing the pattern of responses, Jung was able to determine the nature of what was disturbing the person. Applications of this method found their way into the justice system in Switzerland, with Jung quickly gaining fame through his ability to identify criminality and guilt.
For Jung, however, the importance of his work rested more with the instantiation of the unconscious as an influential partner in our conscious lives. In much the same way that Freud asserted the mysterious symptoms of the hysteric were metaphoric manifestations of an inner relationship to sexuality, so Jung was determining that conscious behavior was a result of inner “unconscious disturbances.” It didn’t take long for them to discover their common ground.
Initially through correspondence, Jung introduced himself to Freud in 1906, and shared some of his writings. Freud responded positively, and soon they became quite close friends and collaborators. Although their relationship only lasted seven years, it altered much of the landscape of Western psychology.65
Freud, the elder of the two, took on a fatherly mentor role, and Jung, through the force of his character, became Freud’s champion, not only in Switzerland, but in Europe and the United States as well. Jung, unlike Freud, was outgoing and energetic. He also helped diffuse the criticism of psychoanalysis as a “Jewish science” via his Christian background and social standing.
Freud made Jung president of the first psychoanalytic association and editor of the first psychoanalytic journal. To say that Freud loved Jung as a son would be an understatement. For a time, Jung basked in the rays of Freud’s brilliance. He was a faithful son who deferred to his father. But soon, like all children, Jung grew up. He had ideas of his own and longed for Freud’s approval. Unfortunately, Freud had little interest in broadening his ideas to include the directions that Jung was exploring. In the correspondence of these two ill-fated friends, we see Freud’s desperate entreaties for Jung to stay close to the theories of sexuality that Freud valued and protected with his life. And, although we can reasonably imagine that Freud tried to appreciate Jung’s ideas, there was something in him that resisted.
Jung perceived a unique value within the unconscious: the strivings of a mind attempting to heal itself. Jung, unlike Freud, worked in a psychiatric hospital. His days were filled, not with the repressed sexuality of the bourgeoisie, but with the seemingly irrational ramblings of patients with dementia praecox, known today as schizophrenia. Jung describes in his autobiography how he began to listen to his patients and wonder whether there was meaning to be found in the paranoia and delusions.66 In that lurid and magical thinking, he found elements of mythology that he believed were part of a collective heritage of human struggle.
Freud eventually rejected Jung’s ideas outright. The pain both men felt from this schism cannot be overstated. For Freud it was a betrayal, and for Jung it was an abandonment. For both it was a rupture that threatened their personal and professional lives. Jung resigned his positions as president of the psychoanalytic association and editor of the journal. In 1913, they exchanged their last letter, which Jung ended with these words, undoubtedly in homage to Hamlet’s death scene: “The rest is silence.”67
Victorian society, as Freud experienced it, suffered due to its repressive relationship to sexuality. In conceptualizing his world in this way, Freud was on reasonably solid ground. Sexuality was certainly repressed in Victorian Europe, and it no doubt was causing physical and psychological problems. But Freud’s reluctance to admit other potential causes of human suffering seems to point to a deeper issue.68
In my view, the split between Freud and Jung represents a broad fissure in Western society that Freud seemed destined to awkwardly mediate on our behalf. In simple terms, the fissure appears to center on our relationship to our own minds—the non-conscious mind—which Freud viewed with suspicion and Jung with hope.69
Today, Freud’s model of the mind has limited influence, or so it seems. Most of us analysts and psychotherapists practicing deep psychotherapeutic work no longer rely on Freud’s model of healing. What was called the “metapsychology” of Freud was debunked and dismantled in the 1980s and 90s.70 His view that sexuality is the root cause of neurosis has certainly faded from prominence. Today, as we have seen in earlier chapters, understandings of attachment, self, emotion, neural functioning, and postmodernism have replaced Freud’s reductive understanding of development and treatment. Unfortunately, however, the rejection of Freud has not changed the underlying Fear that Western society seems to experience around the parts of us that we cannot ever fully know or control. Our fear of ourselves—in particular, our fear of our own mind—is still troubling us and shaping our personal and societal experience.
In recent years, the trend in psychotherapy has shifted to what is generally called cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). This way of working is not heavily dependent upon a model of the mind that includes non-conscious processes or the existence of developmental causes. CBT seeks to remove symptoms by changing conscious thought and behavior. For example, a patient who has a fear of spiders might be asked by a therapist to systematically expose and desensitize themselves with images of spiders and by eventually approaching actual spiders. Although CBT works quite effectively with certain symptoms such as phobias, it is not an approach that
takes into consideration the whole of the person. A CBT therapist and patient are no longer required to look into the dark of the mind for answers; the answers are right there in the spoken words and observed actions. To my thinking, CBT and the general shift in the orientation of psychotherapy are less about the real or perceived advantages of one approach over the other, and more about our fear of something within us that we have been running from since long before CBT, or even Freud.
The Dark in the Mind
As we came to see, our non-conscious minds are doing much more in running our lives than we might like to acknowledge. In his book, The Illusion of Conscious Will, Daniel M. Wegner paints a compelling argument against our supposed position at the helm of our governance.71 One of the important points he begins with is that because it “feels” to us like we are initiating our actions, we take this to be the case. Science, however, paints a different picture. The act of willing something, Wegner reveals, is so fraught with complexities and underlying causes that it is almost impossible to clearly identify what is actually taking place when “we” decide to take action—whether that decision is the primary source of the action or merely the secondary response to an order given by our non-conscious minds. Wegner goes on to posit that, because of this nexus of action and response, our sense of willing our actions is at best something of an illusion. Wegner is not alone in this perspective. Going back to William James, there has been profound questioning of our supremacy in relation to our acts of will. Merlin Donald, the cognitive neuroscientist from Case Western University, expresses it this way:
They have argued that the conscious mind gives us the pleasant illusion of control, while in reality it can do nothing but stare helplessly and stupidly (since it is also inherently shallow) at the game of life as it passes by, because all our important mental games are played entirely unconsciously.72
Clearly, we can see that Donald is in the camp that stresses non-conscious processes. But, as he notes, he is not a hardliner. Even though he does refer to us as “cognitive zombies,”73 he does find value in consciousness. We are not, in his view, merely automatons, but consciousness does create a paradox: it is what we tend to value most and what truly makes us human, but, in point of fact, it is a quite limited function in relation to the whole of our mind. This is what I would like to emphasize. In my view, it is not that consciousness lacks value—it is just infinitesimally small in relation to the vastness of our non-conscious mind.
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