Digestion, pt. 2

Some additional thoughts related to this post:

From Ken Wilber's Spectrum of Consciousness (1977):

Freud built his entire psychoanalytic system around . . . the insight that men and women have needs or motivations of which they are unconscious. Now because these needs or instincts are unconscious, we are not fully aware of them, and thus we can never act upon them to gain satisfaction. In short, humans don't know what they want; their real desires are unconscious and therefore never adequately satisfied. Neuroses and "mental illness" result, just as if you were completely unconscious of your desire to eat, you would never know you were hungry, and consequently you would never eat, which would indeed make you quite ill. Now this is a superlative idea, the essence of which has been confirmed again and again in clinical observations. The problem, however, is that although everybody agrees that humans have unconscious needs, nobody agrees as to what these needs are.

1.  Again, the usefulness of comparing the psychology to physiology--the mechanisms of hunger, in this case. I often think that the typical human situation is that one's physiology operates fairly harmoniously--one's body generally knows how to digest, and one can correctly interpret the body's signals when there is a problem with digestion--but one's psychology lacks this smoothness and integrity. The various forms of psychotherapy can be seen as seeking this wholeness, bringing one's psyche to the same attunement as one's muscular or digestive systems.

2. The importance of interpretation. When my stomach growls and my head feels light, I know that I am hungry. How do I know? I interpret my body's signals accurately. The system works properly--signal leads to correct interpretation leads to corresponding action (feeding myself). The process is more complex with the psyche (as Wilber points out, there are many opinions as to what our needs are), and the wide range of pathologies are often connected with some glitch in the process of interpreting signals from the psyche. Again, the process of projection, as I mentioned briefly here. A feeling of intense envy is the signal, but my interpretation is one of contempt for the people I envy, so the corresponding action is a disdain for those people, and a feeling of dissatisfaction (just as if I were hungry but I chose to go for a walk instead of feeding myself). The envy is unsatisfied, and my contempt remains and worsens, eventually leading to an increasingly negative psychological state.