CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Childeren of Thanatos
“Know Thyself!” is the command Socrates issued to philosophers at the beginning…of all Western philosophy – William Barrett
According to Existential Psychology man is an ontologically divided being. Not only does he possess a divided brain, with left and right hemispheres, but his consciousness and personality are fundamentally polarized.
As we’ve seen, humans function on three levels: personal, social and natural. However, despite his ontological rapport with nature (Umwelt) and other people (Mitwelt), Dasein is as a human being (Eigenwelt) not whole within himself. Having a mind means being able to constantly self-survey. It means that one part of us has the capacity to observe another part, which seems very paradoxical. It tells us that consciousness is not unified. There’s a definite split somewhere.
Not only that, but as Freudians and other psychologists point out, we embody a conscious and unconscious mind.
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung believed it is repressed content from the id or unconscious that primarily disturbs the ego. Repression is one means of preventing subconscious content from entering and disturbing consciousness. Of course, the anxiety-making content remains active beneath the threshold of egoic awareness, causing a mood of discontent and unease. As long as unconscious elements remain taboo and unintegrated, Dasein remains a profoundly divided being. The remedy, say psychologists, is to make unconscious content conscious. However, we wonder if this is achieved under the dictates of the will or not. It doesn’t appear to be so, given that one enters therapy to lie down on a couch, in a half-lit room, with eyes closed. A strange thing to do for the will.
Other examples of existential conflict are also discernible. For example, a person may have ideas about themselves not shared by anyone else. These ideas may be self-effacing and self-condemnatory. In fact, in extreme cases a person may quite literally hate themselves, a condition known as autophobia. Such a person, although admired and even adored by others, may loathe their own being. They are, consequently, in a state not of unity but fragmentation. Their self-sadism or masochism may not be discernible until they begin acting sadistically toward others, as a means of displacement and sign to the world of how they hate themselves.
