The Structure of the Personality
Structure of personality: Its human expression. Freud divided the psyche into the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Jung divided the psyche into conscious, personal unconscious, and collective unconscious. Assagioli (1991, chap. 1) in a basic “map of the person” that he published in the 1930’s represented his conception of the constitution of the human psyche and its differentiation into the following seven regions:
(1) Field of consciousness
(2) Conscious self or phenomenal “I”
(3) Middle unconscious
(4) Lower unconscious
(5) Higher unconscious or superconscious
(6) Collective unconscious
(7) Higher (transpersonal) self
The personality is action in form. All boundaries separating the various regions are thin and flexible, changeable and permeable, and distinguished only in thought, not in practice. In actual reality, all regions are interpenetrating, overlapping, dynamic, and more like rooms connected by corridors than separate levels or stages. “There is movement between [all aspects of the person]…they can affect one another. And of course the different proportions change within a lifetime, particularly in a person concerned with spiritual growth and awareness” (Hardy, 1987, p. 23).
1. The Field of Consciousness
The Field of Consciousness is the interior mental space that comprises immediate awareness and what cognitive psychologists call the “span of apprehension.” The field of consciousness comprises the ongoing stream of waking awareness and its various contents: daydreams, fantasies, images, sensations, desires, impulses, memories, ideas and emotions that are observed and witnessed, analyzed and reflected upon, verbalized and judged. It is the changing contents of our consciousness - the seen, the imagined, the sensed, the desired, the remembered, the felt, and the thought. It is the zone of awareness within which we live our waking lives and the work-a-day world of everyday reality. It is the cognitional area in which the operations of working memory occur. This is the region of the conscious personality, and is that portion of the whole psyche with which mainstream conventional cognitive psychology deals.
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Unconscious
1. Field of
Consciousness
2. “I”
6. The Collective Unconscious
A personality without a psyche. For unreflective individuals, the “field of consciousness” may be the only region of their psyche that they recognize, acknowledge, or accept, because they have not looked for its other aspects in themselves, having been taught to pay almost exclusive attention to their exterior environment and behavior, or taught that other aspects of their psyche are unreal and therefore do not really exist. Structuring their perceptions so that only the topmost surfaces of events are seen and organizing their lives according to that exterior pattern of events, much of their inner life thus escapes them. As a result of such a “prejudiced perception” (Jane Roberts’s phrase) brought on by years of cultural conditioning and socialization, individuals come to view themselves as mainly products of biological and environmental influences, and at the mercy of exterior events and outer forces that they do not understand and cannot control.
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This part of the personality [the field of consciousness] could easily, without reflection, be regarded as the whole, because it is most accessible to us. But the development of depth psychology in this [twentieth] century has made it clearer and clearer that consciousness is only a small part of the whole. There has been an acknowledgement throughout human history that awareness beyond the conscious is possible for the individual human being, through dreams, religious experience and creativity of every kind; this is where the field of consciousness relates to unconscious material. (Hardy, 1987, p. 24)
2. Conscious Self or phenomenal “I”
The conscious self or phenomenal “I” is the “still point” at the center of the field of consciousness that we identify as our self. Your usual conscious “egoic” self is that specialized portion of your overall identity that is alert and precisely focused in the moment, whose physical brain and senses are bound to sensation and perception of sound and touch, odors and tastes. It is the self that lives the life of the body. It is the self that looks outward. It is the self that we call egotistically aware and who has the sensations, thoughts, feelings, and memories. ). It is the personal, egoic self who is alive within the scheme of the seasons, aware within the designs of time, and caught transfixed in moments of brilliant awareness in the three-dimensional world of space and time.
It is that portion of the field of consciousness that separates and differentiates itself from its own actions to form an experiencing “center” which then stands apart from its own actions and perceives them as “contents” separate from itself (Roberts, 1970). The conscious “I” is the seer, the imager, the thinker, and the witness of the changing contents flowing along within the field (or stream) of consciousness. The “I” and the contents of the field of consciousness (sensations, images, ideas, feelings, etc.) are two different things. You have thoughts; you are not your thoughts; you have emotions; you are not your emotions.
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This ‘I’ is our personal center of awareness. It is that small portion of our identity that we ordinarily identify with and call our “self.” Freud called it the “ego.” It is generally submerged in the ceaseless flow of cognitional contents with which we continually identify but emerges during most meditative practices when we attempt to observe ourselves, emerging as the self who witnesses and holds in view the unceasing flow of contents in our field of awareness.
The conscious self is generally not only submerged in the ceaseless flow of psychological contents but seems to disappear altogether when we fall asleep, when we faint, when we are under the effect of an anesthetic or narcotic, or in a state of hypnosis. And when we awake the self mysteriously re-appears, we do not know how or whence – a fact which, if closely examined, is truly baffling and disturbing. This leads us to assume that the re-appearance of the conscious self or ego is due to the existence of a permanent center, of a true Self situated beyond or “above” it. (Assagioli, 1991, p. 18)
It is through and beyond the conscious, personal “I” (trans-personal) that the “Higher Self” is to be reached. The “I” is the link between the present-oriented, immediate, vivid, direct field of consciousness and the larger potential of the inner, Higher Self and the collective unconscious. The self at the ego level of the personality
is a reflection of the Higher Self or the Transpersonal Self…It reflects, however, palely, the same qualities as its source. If you look at the reflection of the sun on a mirror, or on water, you see the light and quality of the sun, infinitesimal, but still the quality of the sun. So that explains why even at the personality’s level the self is stable, sure and indestructible. (Assagioli, quoted in Hardy, 1987, p. 30)
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