Conscious beliefs influence unconscious processes that create personal reality. Although Freud tended to see the (repressed) unconscious portions of the self as the point of origin for most psychological disturbances and physical disorders, transpersonal psychologists have move beyond such a formulation while retaining Freud’s important concept of ego. As later ego psychologists and cognitive psychologists have observed, conscious beliefs play an important role influencing subconscious processes that create personal experience of health and illness. . The body and the subconscious mind exist with the ego’s beliefs to contend with.
The body and the subconscious mind rely upon the ego’s interpretation of events. Our conscious mind directs our attention toward sensations that occur in three-dimensional space and time, interprets those sensations into perceptions, organizing those perceptions into concepts, categories, and schemas that provide interpretations that give meaning to those perceptions. The subconscious mind and body depends upon those interpretations. The subconscious mind and the cells that compose our bodies do not try to make sense of the philosophical and religious beliefs that pervade the social, cultural, political human world. They rely upon the interpretation of the ego and its conscious mind. These interpretations, in turn, produce the inner environment of thoughts and concepts to which our subconscious mind and body responds. It is not the unconscious portions of the self, in other words, that are the cause of psychological or biological disorders, but the personality’s consciously available, though currently subconscious, beliefs about the nature of the self, body, time, world, and others that are responsible for “setting the stage” so to speak, for the occurrence of symptoms. The quality of our mental and physical health is then formed through the subjective realities and energies of our cognitive constructs and the emotions that those constructs generate.
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6. The “lands of the psyche”
Lands of the psyche. Freud was arguably the first developmental psychologist. He described the structure of the human psyche as consisting of several layers, analogous to the levels that geologists and archeologists reveal by digging into the Earth’s history, stratum by stratum. Just as the earth has a structure so does the “inner planet” of the human psyche.
Psychic politics. Transpersonal writer and mystic Jane Roberts (1976, 1977a, 1979b) develops this metaphor of “lands of the psyche” further. Just as exterior physical continents, islands, mountains, and seas emerge from the inner structure of the earth, so do various psychological regions take various shapes as they rise from an even greater invisible source that is within psyche itself. As the earth is composed of many environments, so is the psyche composed of preconscious, conscious, and superconscious environments. As we physically dwell in a particular town or city, so do we presently “live” in one small psychological area called the “ego” that we identify as our home, as our “I.” As different countries follow different kinds of constitutions and different geographical area follow various local laws, in the same manner, different portions of the psyche exist within their own local “laws” and have different kinds of “government” - different “psychic politics” so to speak (Roberts, 1976). Each portion of the psyche possesses its own characteristic geography, its own customs and languages that travelers need to be aware of in their inner journeys through the lands of the psyche. This metaphor is a powerful heuristic device to help us understand the true complexity of the “unknown” reality of the human psyche (Roberts, 1977a, 1979b).
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