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We are then no longer able to use much of the wisdom and power of the unconscious.
These esoteric symbols put the whole problem back into a foreign language again—and that is another way, perhaps the typically modern way, of surrendering our sovereignty over the unconscious aspects of ourselves.
As though we were saying, the authorities and those who know the magic answers can understand our dreams, but we cannot ourselves!
Dreams are expressions not only of conflicts and repressed desires, but also of previous knowledge that one has learned, possibly many years before, and thinks he has forgotten.
Becoming a person means this heightened awareness, this heightened experience of “I-ness,” this experience that it is I, the acting one, who is the subject of what is occurring.
This view of what it means to become a person, in conclusion, saves us from two errors. The first is passivism*—letting the deterministic forces in one’s experience take the place of self-awareness.
that the over-all purpose of Freud’s exploration of the unconscious forces was to help people bring these forces into consciousness.
become aware of the unconscious tendencies which have tended to push the self around like mutinous sailors who have seized power below the deck of the ship;
Hence the emphasis in this chapter on the heightened awareness of one’s self, and the warning against passivism,
activism—that is, using activity as a substitute for awareness. By activism we mean the tendency, so common in this country, to assume that the more one is acting, the more one is alive.
“the active I” in this book, we have not meant busyness or merely doing things.
They get a pseudo and temporary sense of aliveness by being in a hurry, as though something is going on if they are but moving, and as though being busy is a proof of one’s importance.
“Methinks he seemed busier than he was.”
Our emphasis on self-awareness certainly includes acting as an expression of the alive, integrated self, but it is the opposite to activism—the opposite, that is, to acting as an escape from self-awareness.
“To be idle,” Robert Louis Stevenson accurately wrote, “requires a strong sense of personal identity.”
the arts of contemplation and meditation for example,
It brings a new appreciation for being something rather than merely doing something.
work for us mod...
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will not be an escape from ourselves or a way of trying to prove our worth, but a creative expression of the spontaneous powers of the person who has consciously affirmed h...
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BUT is noT the path to self-awareness fraught with more vicissitudes, more peaks and precipices of difficulty and conflict than implied in the foregoing chapter? True; and we now turn to the more dynamic aspects of becoming a person.
achieving consciousness of self involves struggle and conflict. They find that becoming persons requires not only learning to feel, to experience and to want, as we pointed out in the preceding chapter, but to fight against what prevents them from feeling and wanting.
