The Sheathed Power

I have always wondered as to whether all of my own emotions, feelings and actions are rational. Sometimes, things are said and done that should not have been, causing a spiral of emotional pain, turmoil and fragmented attention towards the more important things in life. In the media and the news too, we see and hear of many stories where people do something unthinkable in a moment of emotional eruption.

Experts in the study of the mind reckon that there is a powerful force inside us, which can wield enormous power over our thoughts and emotions, and that it goes beyond what we are consciously aware of. Famous scholars of the mind, such as Freud and Jung, have hypothesized about the reality of a conscious and an unconscious mind[i]. One metaphorical model frequently used to describe the dual, yet linked, aspects of the mind in terms of the conscious and the unconscious is that of the iceberg[ii]. 

The portion of the iceberg that is visible over the surface of the water can be symbolically understood as the conscious mind in the metaphor. It is the portion of the mind that we know directly and holds information that is in the range of our immediate awareness. However, below the visible level of the iceberg, lies the bulk of the ice below the surface, invisible to the eye and sheathed in mystery. This part is what Freud referred to as the unconscious[iii]. Jung termed it as the “personal unconscious.”[iv] 

David B. Feldman Ph.D., in a 2017 article in the Psychology Today magazine, observes thus about the unconscious: “It's one of the oldest ideas in psychology. We are said to have an unconscious mind that, despite our best conscious intentions, is the real controlling force in our lives. It leads us to sabotage ourselves, make poor decisions, or be drawn to people who aren't good for us. More optimistically, it uses dreams to send us helpful messages or needed warnings. And it does all of this without our ever knowing.”[v]

If indeed the unconscious is like unto an autonomous psychic entity of its own, imbued with a form of intelligence that we are not aware of, then it is important that we understand the power of its dynamics[vi]. It is often said that lakes that are placid run deep. It appears as if it is up to us to decide whether our own unconscious, the sheathed power within, will act as our friend or foe.

REFERENCES:

[i] https://www.la.utexas.edu/users/bump/Collective%20Unconscious.html

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/supersurvivors/201707/does-the-unconscious-really-exist

[vi] https://aras.org/concordance/content/psychology-unconscious