behind the scenes

Jung's ideas about 'the shadow' are really interesting. We repress what we deem unacceptable, so it becomes sublimated into our unconscious mind, and from there it influences our conscious thoughts and behaviour. Freud saw this sublimation as being very healthy. It was the conversion of depraved and socially unacceptable impulses into acceptable and productive behaviour. So, repression of those impulses is healthy and good. Jung disagreed. He thought that one of the keys to positive change and growth lay in understanding our 'shadow' - becoming conscious of that which we have repressed, and thereby defusing its influence over us. 

Harold Bloom wrote about the role of repression in literature. In The Anxiety of Influence he wrote that ‘Every forgotten precursor becomes a giant of the imagination.' (page 107) In Bloom's world, nothing is original - all texts are wilful misinterpretations of other texts. But writers repress that knowledge because they can't handle it. Then, because that knowledge is repressed, it has even more of an influence over them. That's not a bad thing though. Bloom writes in A Map of Misreading (1975) that, 'The glory of repression, poetically speaking, is that memory and desire, driven down, have no place to go in language except up onto the heights of sublimity, the ego’s exultation in its own operations.' (page 100) 

So much goes on in our minds that we have no conscious awareness of and the subconscious mind works very differently from the conscious mind. We're kind of separated from the subconscious but it is intimately involved with our lives. But what actually is the subconscious and what can we know about it? Modern psychologists and other experts don't seem to say much about the subconscious. Actually I did a search and I found some books about the subconscious mind. There's a whole list on Goodreads just about the subconscious mind: here. There are some interesting books on the list, but I think they cast the net a bit wide...like, there are a lot of self-help books on the list. I'm glad the list is broad though because I found some books that I like. 

I'm not going to buy any books right now though. I have enough books already, and I have a lot of good ones. I even have some of the best books about the subject of the subconscious mind, including, The Essentials of Psycho-Analysis by Freud (paperback), and Psychology and Alchemy by Jung (pdf).