Lecture on influential conceptions of consciousness in psychology, social psychology and sociology and their relationship to ideas about identity and self.

1. INDIVIDUAL MIND AND SOCIETY
Lecture Number 6: Consciousness, Identity and Self
Lecturer: Dr Chris Till
Email: c.h.till@leeds.ac.uk
―O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and
count myself a king of infinite space—were it not
that I have bad dreams‖
William Shakespeare Hamlet

2.  Consciousness
 Awareness, subjectivity, thinking, feeling, a sense of self
 Eg, critical self-reflection, comparing oneself to others,
thought and reflection of which we are aware
 Unconscious
 Aspects and processed of the mind which are not
available to consciousness
 Eg, dreams, habitual though patterns, memories which
have been forgotten

3. ―Unlike other animals, we not only know; we know
that we know. We are aware of being
aware, conscious of ‗having‘ consciousness, of
being conscious. Our knowledge is itself an object
of knowledge: we can gaze at our thoughts ‗the
same way‘ we look at our hands or feet and at the
‗things‘ which surround our bodies not being part of
them‖
Zygmunt Bauman Mortality, Immortality and Other
Life Strategies

4. ―Self-awareness, reason, and imagination have
disrupted the ‗harmony‘ that characterizes animal
existence. Their emergence has made man into an
anomaly, the freak of the universe. He is part of
nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to
change them, yet he transcends nature; he is set
apart while being a part; he is homeless, yet
chained to the home he shares with all
creatures…Being aware of himself, he realizes his
powerlessness and the limitations of his existence‖
Erich Fromm The Anatomy of Human
Destructiveness

5. WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
 Descartes
 Cogito ergo sum
 Evidence of senses could be misleading but the fact that I am
thinking and doubting must be evidence that my
consciousness exists
 Individual thought and consciousness came to be seen as
central, essential and fundamental
 ―I thereby concluded that I was a substance, of which the
whole essence or nature consists in thinking, and which, in
order to exist, needs no place and depends on no material
thing‖
 See Discourse on Method and Burkitt Social Selves, chapter
1.
 Nietzsche
 ―I think‖ assumes:
 An ―I‖, an ―I‖ that can be the cause of something, a
relationship between cause and effect, ―thinking‖
 See Beyond Good and Evil Chapter 1, aphorism 16.

6. THE INTERNAL WORLD
 Every instinct which does not vent itself externally
turns inwards—this is what I call the internalization
of man: it is at this point that what is later called the
‗soul‘ first develops in man. The whole inner world,
originally stretched thinly as between two
membranes, has been extended and expanded,
has acquired depth, breadth, and height in
proportion as the external venting of human
instincts has been inhibited. (Nietzsche 2008: 65).

7. CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS

8. Freud to Jung
on arriving in
New York:
―They don't
realize we're
bringing them
the plague‖
See Jacques-Alain
Miller
―The Desire of
Lacan and his
complex relation to
Freud‖

9. THE UNCONSCIOUS
 Human beings driven by animal instincts still
existing in the unconscious mind
 Instincts are transformed by society through
repression and sublimation forming the conscious
mind
From “pleasure principle” To “reality principle”
Immediate satisfaction Delayed satisfaction
Pleasure Restraint of pleasure
Joy (play) Toil (work)
Receptiveness Productiveness
Absence of repression Security
Table adapted from Marcuse, H. (1969) Eros and
Civilization. London: Sphere.

10. CONSCIOUSNESS
 Child has no perception of separation between internal world
of mind and external world.
 Awareness of separation develops from obstacles placed in
the way of attainment of pleasure.
 Ego becomes disengaged from mass of sensations in external
world
 Gain sense of self and develop ―reality principle‖
 ―An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego
from the external world as the source of the sensations
flowing in upon him‖ 14
 ―Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue
of a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—feeling
which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego
and the world about it‖ 15
 See Civilization and its Discontents (particularly chapter 1)

11. THE STRUCTURE OF THE MIND
 Id
 Major part of the
unconscious, disorganized, irrational.
 Ego
 coherent organization of mental
processes, barrier between conscious
and unconscious. Consistent with
reason and common sense
 Ego-ideal
 How we would like to be
 Super-ego
 Largely
unconscious, conscience, contains
ego ideal, produces guilt, aligned with
parents, teachers, etc.
 See Freud‘s essays
‗Repression‘, ‗The Unconscious‘ and
‗The Ego and Id‘

12. CONSCIOUSNESS IN SOCIOLOGY

13. ELIAS
 Built sociogenetic approach onto Freud‘s
psychogenetic approach
 Develop sense of self and individuality through
internalization of social constraints
 Manners and etiquette become more stringent over
history
 Social stability enabled people to look into their
inner world – ―internal pacification‖
 ―Court Society‖ promoted
 Self-reflection
 ―Objective‖ attitude towards self
 Seeing self as ―one among many‖

14. ELIAS
 Less complex societies, more direct connection between
individual and environment, everything seems to be
directly related to feeling, more ―involved‖
 More complex societies we increasingly ―conceal our
passions‖ and ―act against our feelings‖. See ourselves
as one among others, more ―detached‖.
 Development of consciousness and repression of
unconscious necessary for development of rationality
 Greater detachment enabled development of
rationality, empiricism and science
 See Elias‘ The Civilizing Process (handout) and
Involvement and Detachment

15. GEORGE HERBERT MEAD
 ―I‖
 Response of the organism to attitudes of others
 ―Me‖
 Organized set of attitudes of others which one assumes
 Consciousness requires organized sense of self, an
object that can be reflected upon
 ―…it is due to the individual‘s ability to take the
attitudes of […] others in so far as they can be
organized that he gets self-consciousness. The
taking of all those organized sets of attitudes gives
him his ―me‖ ‖
 See G.H. Mead Mind Self and Society.

16. THE CONSCIOUS AND THE
UNCONSCIOUS IN SOCIETY
Race, art and politics

17. RACE AND DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS
 W.E.B. Du Bois
 Double consciousness
 American and ―Negro‖
 Black people in America are
 ―…born with a veil, and gifted with second sight‖
 ―One ever feels his twoness, - an American, a
Negro two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled
strivings‖
 See W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk and
Paul Gilroy The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness.

18. ANDREBRETON
―Under the
pretense of
civilization
and
progress, w
e have
managed to
banish from
the mind
everything
that may
rightly or
wrongly be
termed
superstition,
or fancy;
forbidden is
any kind of
search for
truth which
is not in
conformanc
e with
accepted
practices‖

19. SURREALISM AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
 Revolution of the mind
 Unlock the unconscious through drawing on
imagery of dreams
 Sought to remove barriers from unconscious
 ―The imagination is perhaps on the point of
reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights. If the
depths of our mind contain within it strange forces
capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of
waging a victorious battle against them, there is
every reason to seize them -- first to seize them,
then, if need be, to submit them to the control of our
reason‖.
 See Andre Breton Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)

20. POLITICS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
 Conservative - Philip Rieff
 Repression of instinctual drives by society produced
dissatisfaction, suffering and neurosis.
 3 ideals dominated Western culture all ―commitment‖
based
 Political Man
 Economic Man
 Religious man
 Freud provides new ―psychological man‖
 Consolation based on release of instinctual drives and
private well-being rather than commitment to a cause.
 See Gabriel Freud and Society

21. POLITICS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
 Marcuse synthesised Freud and Marx
 Self-realization through satisfaction of individual desires
damages critical capacity producing ―One Dimensional
Man‖
 Marx‘s concept of man was one who needs the world
and whose passions lie in potential to collectively
achieve goals.
 ―No longer used as a full-time instrument of labour, the
body would be resexualized….The body in its entirety
would become an object of cathexis, a thing to be
enjoyed – an instrument of pleasure‖ Marcuse
 See Herbert Marcuse Eros and Civilization and One
Dimensional Man

22. SUMMARY
 Consciousness produced through self-
awareness, taking oneself as an object
 Separation between conscious and unconscious
produced through internalization of social norms
 Conscious and unconscious often in conflict
 Consciousness developed historically through
increasingly stringent social constraints
 Theories of consciousness and unconscious
influenced politics on the left and right

23. TUTORIAL READINGS
 Freud, S. (2004 [1930]) Civilization and its Discontents.
London: Penguin. Chapter 1:
 http://www.archive.org/details/CivilizationAndItsDisconte
nts
 Marcuse, H. (1969) Eros and Civilization. London:
Sphere. Chapter 1:
 http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/work
s/eros-civilisation/ch01.htm
 Elias, N (2000) The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and
Psychogenetic Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell
(Volume II, Part 4, V: ‗The Muting of Drives:
Psychologization and Rationalization‘)
 See photocopy

24. TUTORIAL QUESTIONS
1. What is the relationship between consciousness, the
unconscious and repression? To what extent do you
agree that repression is a necessary part of society?
2. How does Elias develop Freud‘s understanding of
consciousness?
3. How is the notion of rationality related to
consciousness in the work of Freud and Elias?
4. ―Self-awareness, reason, and imagination have
disrupted the ‗harmony‘ that characterizes animal
existence. Their emergence has made man into an
anomaly, the freak of the universe‖ (Fromm, The
Anatomy of Human Destructiveness). To what extent
do you agree with this quotation?