Seriously, the "Unconscious Mind" is a Myth

Modern magicians make extensive use of psychoanalytic terminology. When browsing articles on esotericism one commonly finds references to terms like ego, subconscious, and unconscious as though they represent some kind of bridge between spiritual and scientific understanding. However, the problem with this perspective is that there is nothing scientific about psychoanalysis. The adoption of psychoanalytic concepts in explaining magical ideas does not unify magick and experimental psychology in any way, but instead merely relates one system or esoteric symbolism and terminology to another. Furthermore, modern experimental psychology has uncovered many problems with the psychoanalytic model, and we as magical practitioners would do well to avoid incorporating those erroneous ideas into our practices.

Sigmund Freud developed the classical psychoanalytic model. This model was later refined and revised by Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Reich, and a number of other psychologists who explored variants of the Freudian system. Regardless of the shortcomings of Freud's model, both psychologists and psychiatric patients owe him an enormous debt for his role in completely reforming the treatment of mental illness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Freud's key insight was that it was possible to treat the mentally ill using talk therapy. This insight alone was so significant because of what it replaced. Before Freud psychiatric institutions were more like prisons where patients lived under terrible conditions and were subjected to "treatments" like being sprayed with high-power hoses to "purify" their bodies of imaginary toxins.

When it was first introduced psychoanalysis seemed incredibly effective, and Freud rapidly became a celebrity of his day. In addition to his clinical successes he also published several popular books explaining his theories and models. Many Freudian ideas and terms entered into the popular culture - Freudian slip, Oedipal, repression, complex, defense mechanism, and so forth. Most of these are still with us today. What has only been realized more recently is that Freud's success rate only looked impressive because of how terrible treatments for mental illness were before the advent of talk therapy. Controlled experiments have shown that the success rate for psychoanalysis over the course of one year, an impressive-sounding 70%, is no different than that for "sham therapy" in which a patient meets the same number of times with an untrained person and simply talks with them.

It shouldn't be all that surprising that Freud's model of the mind is inaccurate. It was one of the first models of its kind ever proposed and the science of psychology allows us to continually refine our understanding of the mind. Thus one would expect a more modern model to explain observations better and in a more complete manner. By incorporating ideas from behaviorism and neuroscience, modern cognitive-behavioral therapy is the only form of talk therapy that has ever been capable of exceeding the 70% threshold in controlled experiments, averaging out around 80% or so. This suggests that the cognitive-behavioral model of the mind simply works better than what Freud proposed, and its effectiveness under clinical conditions is quite impressive.

The fundamental weakness of Freud's model is the idea of the unconscious mind and how it supposedly works, and this is an idea that has infected much of magical practice. Freud originally got the idea based on his observations of memory in patients under hypnosis, who seemed to be able to recall all sort of details that they were unable to perceive in their waking state. He concluded that once a memory is stored it must always be present, and that the reason we cannot remember whatever we want is that the active process of repression prevents this from occuring. The problem is the Freud never checked his patients hypnotic recall against factual data. We now know that under hypnosis people can seem to recall small details, but in fact many of these details are made up because the original memory is no longer present. This is the reason that hypnosis is now allowed as evidence in criminal trials - in the 1970's it was tried, but was often found to contradict the facts.

Actually memory and personal identity are much more fluid than we generally believe and much more fluid than the psychoanalytic schools teach. Neuroscientists have discovered that every time we think about a particular memory we rewrite it into the brain. This process changes the memory subtly, which most of us fail to realize. It's like a game of telephone - every time you remember something it's like passing it to the next person in line. Scientists have even had some success with a drug that can erase traumatic memories by exploiting this process. This flies in the face of the Freudian model, in which not thinking about things from your past is pathological because the repression mechanism must hold these memories at bay. In fact, if you just don't think about a memory for a long time it fades, and that's all it does. Furthermore, everything that depends upon the repression mechanism must be similarly rejected. You don't have an unconscious mind with its own desires, personality, and so forth, and there are no hidden thoughts floating around in your mind that need to be "processed" or "defused" or "analyzed." What you think is actually what you think. Full stop.

So how do we then explain actions and feelings that are inappropriate or out of place? Everyone has had the experience of doing something that they immediately regret, a behavior that they know they should never engage in and yet there it is. These things happen because the mind is actually made up of three distinct systems, each of which can operate independently. The first of these is the system that we use for what we normally consider thinking and reasoning. It corresponds to the neocortex and particularly the frontal lobes of the brain. The second is the emotive system that produces our feelings, corresponding to the limbic cortex. The third is the conditioning system, which follows the rules of classical and operant conditioning. Conditioning can happen all over the brain, but complex behaviors often correspond to assimilated patterns that are mostly stored in the cerebellum.

Taken together the thinking and feeling systems are usually what we consider the mind or the personality. Willed behavior generally requires the two to work together, because when they are at odds it is difficult to do anything very effectively. When something is the logical thing to do but still feels wrong on an emotional level, you don't have "mixed emotions" about it - your thinking and feeling systems are at odds. The conditioning system can complicate things further, in that it can prompt the body to repeat behaviors that have been previously reinforced. This happens without any rhyme, reason, or goal. The conditioning system is like a machine - it follows the simple rules laid out by experimental psychologists like Skinner and Watson that apply to everything from sea slugs to humans. The "unconscious motivation" here is simple - the conditioning system wants to be reinforced. People with "addictive personalities" don't have a bunch of unresolved childhood "issues" that explain why they behave the way they do, they simply have conditioning systems that are stronger than usual and more capable of overwhelming the other two systems.

The key to working magick effectively is to get all three systems working together in a coherent fashion. A magician should set up conditioning loops that, for example, relate to the set of symbols with which he or she will be working. When you see red you should think Fire, when you see eight candles you should think Mercury, and so forth. That's what all those correspondences that we spend our time memorizing are for. Similarly, we must honestly feel good about what we are doing when we cast a spell. It's difficult to work magick if you feel guilty or fearful about using it, and this is probably the origin of Peter Carroll's idea of the "psychic censor." There is really no such structure in the mind that is fundamentally opposed to doing magick, but a child told from an early age that he or she would be damned by some deity for working magick will usually have to work at overcoming the emotions that they associate with casting spells in order to make anything work well.

Interestingly enough, the three-system model that neuroscience is currently unraveling maps onto the Tree of Life better than any of the psychoanalytic models. The thinking system corresponds to Hod and therefore Mercury, while The feeling system corresponds to Netzach and therefore Venus. Finally, the conditioning system corresponds to Yesod, the Moon. One of the ideas that I've been thinking about lately is to see if meditations on the paths linking these spheres might produce realizations that would help them work better in concert. So, for example, if you seem to be the sort of person whose thinking and feeling are at odds, you might be able to mediate the problem by meditating upon or working with Peh, the path of Mars, that connects Hod and Netzach. I have yet to do much experimentation along those lines, but it strikes me as potentially promising.