Numerous philosophers throughout time have tried their hand at understanding the human mind, and in the process discern its biases, potentials, and origin. Yet we remain blinded by our fear of exploring the depths within ourselves. We prefer to go through life never quite knowing ourselves, then potentially knowing too much, and not liking what we find.
In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche says: “All psychology so far has got hung up on moral prejudices and fears: it has not dared to descend into the depths.” Nietzsche looked upon our psyche as consisting of multidimensional layers, making an absolute understanding of it close to impossible. The measures so deep and vast, that no matter how you search for its boundaries, you would never find them. Most individuals, fearing the complex depths within, stay inside the confines of their superficial surface layer, “industriously mindful of their common comedy and not at all of themselves.” In a sense, this reluctance towards self-submergence is for good reason. For those who lack the bravery to descent into the inner foundations of their mind could cause temporary, or even permanent, madness. Instead the majority live as if within a bubble, protected by a protective shield named repression.
The original conception of the word was very simple, and lacked the depth it has today. It consisted of hysteria and obsession, both symptoms Freud found within his patients. While under hypnosis his patients were able to recall with “wonderful freshness and full affective tone” the events from which their symptoms arose, while in their daily lives they shunned these thoughts and lost them somewhere in their subconscious. In short, when the memory disappears, the symptoms appear, and vice-versa.
Today we know that such a definition is too simple. The inkling of truth which Freud tried to grasp was that disturbances in consciousness can / do arise out of disturbed life experience. His conclusion, however, did not consider such dimensions as the nature of consciousness and its relation to the material world. What more, he assumed that memory lived in isolation from other mental processes and so operates as an independent force, and in turn produced its effects from the outside, in. A theory which made the materialists squirm.
So, if Freud’s definition of repression is false, what is true? To answer such a question would involve knowing what our consciousness is and how it operates. Which we don’t. Not yet anyway, and not fully. The closest we can get to answering such a question is attempting to find where our defense mechanism derive from. We each possess animal drives which we spend the majority of our lives suppressing. On the contrary, Nietzsche saw these drives as mere facts and meant to be dealt with. He named these urges for sex and aggression, suppressed through archaic morality which viewed them as devilish endeavors, The Beast Within. He argued that it was much better to acknowledge our primitivity and keep our urges under conscious control.
To go back to where we started, such a command over our subconscious involves an exploration within the depths of ourselves, in order to impose order on our psyche and sculpt our being into a harmonious entity. Not to reform ourselves out of nothingness, but to shine light and rearrange the pieces which we already have within. In the process we ought to look at the history from which we came, and will one day fall back into. As Nietzsche said: “Direct self observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: we need history, for the past flows on within us in a hundred waves.” Just as history lives on through myths and traditions, our psyche is also shaped by the past. In order to understand our daily projections, and find sense within our bouts of strong emotion, we have to understand how we function, and adjust the bolts accordingly.
All in all, Nietzsche’s insights are wide and varied, resulting from our need as human-beings, embedded with a consciousness all our own, to dissect ourselves. To listen and adhere to Nietzsche’s psychological claims could mean a life of supreme living, or one of madness. Nietzsche himself took the latter road, falling victim to a mental illness from which he never quite recovered. So take heed, and delve into the depths at your own discretion.
A THOUGHT: Is it really so strange to feel the need to repress our life away? After all, we’re alive only for a brief moment, gravitationally attracted to a ball of rock and water, blazing from within, leisurely making our rounds through an, as far as we know, uninhabited cosmos, within potential multiverses, dimensions our eyes have evolutionarily shunned from view. We are programmed to search for answers, and if God no longer exists, where do we go after we leave?
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