The Unconscious in Modernism
No, not what happens when you bonk your head on a brick wall. We're talking Freud's idea about the stormy seas of desire and animal need that are crashing about in the back of your mind right now. Wow. Just writing that makes up realize we want a chocolate-covered cheeseburger, with a side of fist fighting. How's that for animal instincts?
Sigmund Freud was kind of a big deal. And he knew it, too. Though strictly speaking, he wasn't the first or only psychologist of his time, he single-handedly founded psychoanalysis, and in the process changed the way we think and write. Dang, Freud.
One of Freud's most important theories was that the mind is divided into three parts:
- ego, or conscious mind;
- superego, the in-house censor that cuts out all the nasty bits from dreams and thoughts so they won't offend the delicate sensibilities of the ego; and
- id, the wild unconscious mind where primitive drives and instincts rule.
Sounds like it's pretty crowded in your skull, doesn't it?
Freud believed that the development of an individual human being tells us about the overall development of the entire human race. Freud thought that human beings had become civilized by repressing primitive drives.
He also wanted to understand why people act and think as they do, so he thought that the main task was to decode the language of dreams, where the id speaks most freely. But that isn't so simple, because dream language is not based on logic. Maybe that's why people don't make much sense in the morning before they've had their first cup of coffee.
His ideas greatly influenced artists and writers who emphasized the life of the mind over the everyday existence of human beings in the world. That's one reason that the Modernists can be so dang difficult to decipher… although, compared to deciphering dreams, even Mrs. Dalloway is easy-peasy.
Chew On This
Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness contains Kurtz's famous last words: "The horror, the horror!" What are you talking about, Kurtz? The horror of what, exactly? Conrad's not going to tell you, because he knows you can fill in the blank by referring to the storehouse of fears locked in your unconscious.
In Kafka's novel The Trial the narrator K has been charged with a crime, but no one will tell him what it is. Kafka—who was generally acknowledged to have been a pretty miserable guy—is letting the reader fill in the blank with whatever they think their own personal most despicable deed was. And chances are that deed is coming straight from the unconscious.