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The Unconscious Mind
Published in David E. H. Jones, Why Are We Conscious?, 2017
Some animals may have unconscious minds: an idea that has been put forward and developed by Trivers34. He has suggested that it is inherently deceptive, and holds truths that the conscious mind needs to lie about. I like the idea, and discuss unconscious deceitfulness later in this chapter. Some psychiatrists hold that occasionally a bit of the human unconscious mind gets so far into the conscious mind of an individual as actually to be uttered. When such a damaging contradiction occurs, it is often called a ‘Freudian slip’. I have claimed elsewhere21 that the unconscious human mind is often kept active by playing with the ideas, troubles, and contradictions that get down to it, and that just as the grit in an oyster occasionally creates a pearl, so some the brilliant and novel ideas that sometimes just ‘pop up’ in the human mind were built there by the unconscious (I mention this claim later in the chapter). The psychiatrist Carl Jung, in his own musings on the unconscious mind, proposed a human ‘collective unconscious’, which may be an extension of the ‘great memory’ imagined by the poet William Yeats. Jung proposed that all human beings are joined in some way to a collective unconscious mind. He put the idea forward in about 1916, and seems to have based it on the striking consistency in which certain symbols and images, which he called ‘archetypes’, occur in folklore, fairy tales, dreams and delusions. This idea supports the notion that all human beings have fairly similar minds, but it seems not to imply any connection between living ones. The idea of a human ‘collective unconscious’ may be supported by the rare human experience of telepathy (Chapter 8). If one assumes that telepathy is a process conducted by the unconscious mind, which occasionally transmits information to other human beings, then we may indeed all be linked by Jung’s collective unconscious. Jung himself seems not to have taken his notion further. Thus I have heard of two people who claim to have had the same dream, but Jung, who often analyzed dreams, seems never to have suggested that the dream of a client came from someone else, and gave insight into that someone else. However, it is possible that the collective unconscious, like human telepathic power and our neglected sense of smell, is a vestigial relic of some former animal ability. Rupert Sheldrake has even proposed that pet animals may communicate telepathically with their human owners (Chapter 8). The collective unconscious also fits my own speculation that some of our mental information is held in non-material form in the unknown world outside our diving bell, and can be sometimes be transmitted to other minds. It can even be somehow stored in that world (Chapter 7) so that it is available to others after the death of the owner.
Revival of the Fundamental Anthropological Situation: Supervision, Intromission, Trans*, and the Sexual1
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2022
In hindsight, I believe that the hypothesis of Mr. J.’s transphobic countertransference does not entirely explain what happened. Reexamining my notes, I realized that this was my third session with Mr. J. in which I recounted my third encounter with James. What is the significance of this thirdness? The content of James’s session is quite evocative. The patient made a plea against his father, who had long avoided using gender pronouns in referring to James. As a teenager, he also recalled that before disclosing his transness to those close to him, he avoided gendering himself by using neutral formulas that foreshadowed his father’s gender-neutral language. Let me also mention a revealing Freudian slip that I made, which suggested my identification with James. When he said that he only knew my first name, I was surprised to hear myself utter “So you don’t think that I have a gender?” (instead of “So you don’t think that I have a surname?”). Further, my notes for Mr. J. included the word “normative,” while Mr. J. defined James as a “normopath.” Do these elements not suggest some overlap among all parties: patient, therapist, and supervisor?
Richmond Barthé: Black Homoeroticism and the Raptures of the Hermaphroditic Body
Published in Journal of Homosexuality, 2019
The sculpture just referred to as Dark Rapture is not the only one in the Barthésian corpus to which that caption has been assigned. In the catalogue of Barthé’s 1942 exhibition in Chicago, the statue generally known as Boy With a Flute, 1940 (Lewis, 2009, p. 189; Vendryes, 2008, p. 118) was mistakenly listed as Dark Rapture. According to Margaret Rose Vendryes, Boy was given that wrong caption due to “a Freudian slip in print” (Vendryes, 2008, p. 119) that associated the sculpture with a picture in a book issued in 1939 under the title Dark Rapture: The Sex-Life of the African Negro.32 This book was actually the second English translation of a German-written volume titled Neger-Eros (1928), by Swedish-Austrian anthropologist Felix Bryk (1882–1957).33 While Vendryes discussed at length the possible connection between Bryk’s book and the erroneous caption attributed to Boy With a Flute, she made no mention of the existence of the sculpture, which Samella Lewis featured in her volume as “Dark Rapture, 1938/Bronze, 30´´” (Lewis, 2009, p. 187). Although Lewis thankfully brought a full-page picture of the actual Dark Rapture, she did not discuss the rather strange coincidence that its caption—if the chronology is correct34—predates by a year the title under which Bryk’s volume was published in 1939. Irrespective of how the issue of temporal precedence is resolved, it is worth noting that Bryk’s book conveyed views that are clearly at odds with Barthé’s core anthropological and ontological premises. While approvingly citing a contemporary European author who stated that “there are in Africa no other savages than those who have come from Europe” (Bryk, 1939, p. 28), Bryk made general assessments that reflect his own derogatory attitude toward African culture. A salient case in point is his assertion that “[t]he Negro’s pantheistic conception of nature draws no sharp line of demarcation between man and animal, and sees no important difference between them” (Bryk, 1939, p. 153; italics in original). As an advocator of Christian theism, Bryk not only postulated a clear-cut separation between God and nature but argued in favor of maintaining what he believed to be the revealed order of Creation, especially as regards sexuality. Thus, assuming the trans-cultural, universal validity of the man/woman hiatus, Bryk went on to declare: Woman is forever woman, and man everywhere man; independently of race or color of skin—white, black, yellow, or copper-red; whether ugly or beautiful; despite youth or age; beyond good and evil. (Bryk, 1939, p. 27)