The Unconscious
Freud, Jung and the Tantra
The unconscious is, without question, one of the most significant “discoveries” of Western thought. Freud, in the cold heart of a Hegelianizing Europe, brought to light the fact that the conscious mind and life are themselves determined by agencies—purely mental indeed, yet of which one remains unaware. Of course, it is not as though before Freud no one had ever suspected this; what he accomplished was a systematic analysis of how the unconscious, insofar as he himself believed he understood it, operates.
Freud’s major work, to which he devoted his entire life, is The Interpretation of Dreams. In it, he not only provides frameworks for the explanation of dreams, but shows how both dreams and waking life are largely determined by the unconscious.
For those who have no time to read this important text, it may be summed up as follows: for Freud, every dream is the fulfillment of a wish. Even when it takes the form of a nightmare or a sorrowful dream, it is still the realization of a desire. If one finds it difficult to understand how dreaming of the death of a loved one—or of any other tragedy—could amount to the affirmation of a will, the explanation is that within the unconscious lie buried thoughts that once arose, who knows when, concerning precisely what is dreamt: perhaps as children we became angry with a parent for some trivial reason, and that thought, perhaps lasting only a few minutes, crystallized and was repressed—buried in the unconscious—only to surface unexpectedly after many years.
A second crucial element in the understanding of dreams is what Freud calls the mask: one may be in love with a certain person, yet dream of kissing another. It is the unconscious that, for various reasons, performs this substitution.
The truly decisive point, however, in understanding Freud is that these discoveries about dreams are also operative during waking life. They generate relational difficulties—if not outright mental disorders—the cause of which, being repressed within the unconscious, can be removed only by bringing it to light.
Thus The Interpretation of Dreams is not an end in itself, but a tool through which one seeks to identify the repressed thought that distorts ordinary life; once identified, it is grasped and, by being named, is incinerated—and this is what Freud calls transference.
The unconscious, then, acts indirectly, almost continually throughout one’s days—without the slightest awareness of it, and usually without causing any disturbance. Yet at times, repressed thoughts can give rise to disorders, and psychoanalysis sets out precisely to heal the ailments generated by the unconscious.
Freud also identified the very source of unconscious desire: impulses of a sexual nature, which in life are of course controlled and at times sublimated, yet remain what they are. He scandalized nineteenth-century Vienna by asserting that the life of every individual is governed by sexual drives, and that this is so from the very earliest years—the famous Oedipus complex meaning that the child tends to love and desire the mother and to hate the father out of jealousy (Freudian psychoanalysis is wholly androcentric: to account for women, Freud devised what was later called the Electra complex, merely revealing the arbitrariness of his approach). The Freudian libido is exactly this: a psychic energy of fundamentally sexual character.
In this way Freud founded psychoanalysis, the medical science that helps the patient free himself from unconscious drives that impair his life.
Psychology—or rather, the various schools of psychology—operate by contrast on the conscious level: some focusing on motivation and rational explanation, others on what might be termed the subliminal plane (as in Gestalt psychology).
Even today, psychoanalysis—greatly expanded over two centuries beyond Freud’s original scheme, and diversified into many schools and orientations—is regarded by some as little more than a palliative than a science. Others, on the contrary, venerate it as a universal remedy for the human condition. Among these are the French philosophers of the twentieth century who carried psychoanalysis from the medical field into the existential one, claiming that even our very understanding of reality is, in its deepest layers, shaped by forces arising directly from the unconscious.
There are still followers of this view, though such thinkers seem unaware that their enthusiasm merely hides the dust under the carpet. For if it is true—as it certainly is—that in many clinical cases psychoanalysis is not only useful but necessary to remove obstacles of the psyche, it is equally true that to ground the explanation of the human mind in a sphere declared both unknown and unknowable is not only circular, but a circle consciously founded on the unknowable itself—not to mention the far deeper truth that the nature of mind is something altogether other than the mere sum of conscious and unconscious.
The most reasonable way to understand psychoanalysis—especially in its Freudian-Lacanian form—is to regard it as an effective remedy for certain disorders, but nothing more. To extend it to the explanation of individual behavior, and even more so to the meaning of human existence, is a mere arbitrary excess that serves only the scholar’s own illusion of omnipotence. In short, to apply psychoanalysis beyond the cases in which it can truly heal is like taking medicine for the flu when one does not have the flu. Many eminent psychoanalysts have expressed this view, beginning with E. Fachinelli.
Different from the Freudian schools of psychoanalysis is that of C. G. Jung.
Jung had been Freud’s assistant, and broke away from his master because Freud centered his entire conception of the unconscious on sexual libido. For Jung, psychic energy is not only sexual but has a much wider range, encompassing emotional, intellectual, and spiritual impulses—the desire for knowledge, for instance, or enthusiasm itself (though in truth, this difference between Freud and Jung may be more nominal than real).
According to Jung, other dimensions of the unconscious determine conscious life, in particular the collective unconscious. This notion verges on magic, for it presupposes the existence of psychic contents—the archetypes of the collective unconscious—deposited within the psyche of every human being and inherited from the very evolution of humankind on Earth. Closely linked to this is Jung’s idea of synchronicity, a relation between simultaneous events that is not a relation of causality: a coincidence occurring neither by chance nor by causal intent, but as the manifestation of connections that can only be called magical.
These, of course, are only some aspects of Jungian psychoanalysis, which also includes moments that are far more rationalistic and properly analytic in its examination of the psyche.
Jung also devoted studies and seminars to Kundalini Yoga and to alchemy, yet he reduced these phenomena to the rationalistic psychic laws he had formulated, interpreting them solely on the prejudicial basis of how he believed the mind to function—evidently ignoring altogether what yogin and alchemists themselves declare.
Freud and Jung therefore had the mental power to analyze the deeper states of their own minds and to formulate what they had discovered as laws that were later verified, at least in part, in the cure of patients.
Turning to the Indian subcontinent, one may be surprised to find that the great modern yogin and realized masters sometimes mention Freud and Jung: Sri Aurobindo, who in fact devotes many of his letters to the theme of the unconscious, Swami Satyananda, and more than a few Tibetan lama and geshe. All of them, one soon discovers, say essentially the same thing: Freud and Jung merely scratched the surface of one—the closest—of the many bodies that, in addition to the conscious mind, make up the human being.
In the Tantra—which embody the esoteric science of the East—several “bodies” are described, the kāya: bodies of energy unknown to, or misunderstood by, Western science. The yogi is one who, transcending ordinary consciousness, comes into direct relation with these bodies. The kāya most easily reached is that which includes the unconscious impulses themselves; in other words, the yogi’s first real steps consist precisely in mastering the unconscious—and it must be stressed: not through logical “analysis,” as if it were something external to the I, but by shaping it as part of one’s true self. (This, one could say, is also the source of what Freud and Jung called transference—although, compared with the powers of yoga, it remains a very small thing.)
For the yogin, then, Western psychoanalysis has merely perceived the kāya of the vital plane—as Sri Aurobindo calls it—and studied it in an abstract, conceptual and purely rationalistic manner.
This is true above all for Freud, but it also applies to Jung, for his “magic” is still regarded as something external to the psyche. Yet Jung stands somewhat closer to the yogas than Freud does: synchronicity, archetypes, and the magical correspond closely to certain aspects of yoga.
The difference, however—an abyssal one—is that Jung conceives these dimensions as phenomena that can be understood by the waking, conscious mind. He does not live them, but rather knows them, whereas the realizations of yoga are sat–chit–ānanda—being, consciousness, and bliss.
For Jung, magic is a real sphere, but one that lies outside the mind: the mind may relate to it, but never coincide with it. For the yogin, on the other hand, the mind itself is a magical illusion, since the true reality of each being—the ātman—is the very source of magic.
Jung did, in fact, gain access to higher states of consciousness, as attested by the Red Book, but he did not truly understand them. He did not live them; he endured them, and made the mistake of trying to comprehend them with the rational mind—unaware that the rational, ordinary mind is precisely what prevents one from living within magic itself.
Returning to the theme of the unconscious as understood in the East, one must take a step back.
The Tantra embody the Royal Path, alongside the Path of the Sūtra.
The Path of the Sūtra is that of renunciation and mortification, leading to results only after countless aeons; it is precisely the path of abstaining from the satisfaction of the libido.
The Tantric path, on the contrary, is the path of the realization of the libido—a realization that is neither crude indulgence nor sterile sublimation.
It is the way that can lead to liberation within a single lifetime, though it is perilous and demanding.
The Tantric path is the destruction and subsequent transcendence of the ego through the action of higher energies—one of which is precisely the energy of the unconscious, known in the West as libido. (Then there are the supreme yogas, where nothing remains that can be compared to what Westerners call libido: for instance, in Tibetan Buddhism, to the anuyoga, which is tantric, succeeds the atiyoga, the primordial yoga.)
For this reason, the yogin say that psychoanalysis—and even more so the various schools of psychology—is nothing more than notional knowledge, partial and superficial. Psychoanalysis knows only the kāya to which the unconscious belongs, and even of that it knows only the surface, for it posits the energy of the unconscious as something separate from the nature of mind itself, as if it acted upon the mind from without.
And this is because—implicit in what has already been said, yet worth stating clearly—in Western thought the mind has always been understood as nothing other than the waking, conscious mind, that is, the I: at most accompanied by an unconscious that prods or disturbs it. For the West there is the I (believed to coincide with the conscious mind) and there is the unconscious, conceived as two distinct entities.
For the yoga, by contrast, the I is an illusion, and even the unconscious is not an entity but a modality of mind—one among many. In other words, the yogin are conscious of not being the I; they are conscious also of what Westerners call the unconscious, and of much more beyond that. Yet this state is not “ordinary consciousness” but an over-conscious state, described by the various traditions as non-self, ātman, rigpa, or the nature of mind: the pure and stainless ground of each human being’s real existence.
The same Kundalinī, so often rendered in fantastic colors, is merely a means of reaching this state. It is not libido, still less sexual libido, but an energy belonging to a kāya higher than that of the unconscious.
The Tantra, moreover, do not simply “explain” how the mind works—for in Tantra, mere conceptual knowledge holds no value. Their purpose is rather to make one become higher states of consciousness: states that are neither merely psychological nor existential, but wholly different, unsuspected modes of being. (This truth has been upheld for millennia in India; Western thought, of course, often mocks it—though to truly know how things stand, one would have to be a yogin.)
In psychoanalysis, the patient recounts memories and thoughts almost unconsciously—he speaks; the analyst listens (Lacan, for instance, would often remain silent); and if all goes well, transference occurs—the release from a certain blockage. Yet neither the patient nor the analyst truly encounter the unconscious: the one expresses it without knowing, the other hears it (so they in fact remain external to its direct experience).
The yogin, by contrast, works directly upon his own unconscious—and can do so precisely because he also is the unconscious as well.
Freud and Jung, then, may be seen as two misunderstood geniuses—misunderstood above all because they never truly understood themselves. They glimpsed profound realities, but only in part.
And the very term psychoanalysis reveals its inner contradiction: it seeks to analyze what it places outside the source of analysis itself—the rational, conscious mind. (Analysis, literally “dissolution,” is, after all, Aristotle’s word for logical reasoning.)
Through analysis, the rational mind creates entities; and unless one recognizes that such entities are always mere abstractions of reason, one remains caught in the vicious circle of representation.
The yoga, and above all the Tantra, by contrast, aim not to analyze but to 'be' (as is evident in Tantra, this yogic 'being', and 'becoming', is entirely distinct from the abstract philosophical concept of 'Being' and 'becoming' conceivable within Western thought and mind, just as the 'I' of Western thought and mind is for Tantra simply the basic illusion that must be set aside). The yoga aims to make one 'become' (that is to say: rediscover one has always been) higher states of consciousness.
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