CHAPTER
‘The power of the unconscious’ is a common phrase reflecting the popular notion
that our minds are divided in two. Not only do we instinctively separate mind from
body, we split mind itself into parts. Amazing powers are sometimes attributed
to ‘the unconscious’, while the conscious mind is derided as more rational and
restricted. We may be urged to unleash our unconscious potential or listen to
what bubbles up from the depths of our unconscious minds. The opposite hap-
pens too: we may feel that what makes us human is our ability to overrule our
animal instincts with reason, or not to let our emotions get the better of us.
The distinction between conscious and unconscious is often likened to that
between mind and body: we tend to talk about conscious processes, into which
we feel we have full insight, as mental ones (‘I’ve given this a lot of thought’, ‘I
know that this is a bad move’) and about unconscious processes, which remain
opaque to us, as embodied (‘I have a gut feeling about this’, ‘He makes my skin
crawl’, ‘The whole idea just feels wrong’).The idea that the mind is divided into parts can be traced back as far as early
Hindu texts or ancient Egyptian beliefs about sleep and dreams, and to Plato, who
gave the soul three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite, all with their own goals
and abilities (Frankish and Evans, 2009). The idea appears again in eighteenth-
century Western philosophy, in Western literature, for example in Shakespeare
and Coleridge, and in early twentieth-century psychoanalysis. Typically, the ‘high-
est’ faculty (e.g. reason) is thought of as separate from the body, while instinct is
understood as a base, bodily function which connects us with other animals.Conscious and unconscious