I’ve Lost My Subconscious Mind

Oddly enough, the concept that we have a subconscious mind is a construct that only appears in Western culture, and is completely ignored by the rest of the world. Yet, it is an a priori concept that is taken without questioning by psychologists, the medical establishment, and most of pop culture. Yet, now that we are trying to replicate the human mind through the field of Artificial Intelligence, neuroscientists and computer sciences are completing their tasks without ever addressing the myth of a human subconsciousness.

Questioning cultural myths can lead to death threats.

As soon as I started questioning the existence of a subconscious mind, it wasn’t long before I received my first death threat, which was surprisingly from a psychologist in the United Kingdom. When you rock the boat, expect a violent reaction. Much of modern psychological theory from Freud on has been based upon understanding all of the intricacies of the subconscious mind (the original term among Freud and his followers was “unconscious,” which may imply that part of the human psyche was unaware. The term “subconscious” quickly replaced it).

To challenge this concept, it appeared that I was challenging the legitimacy of several professions and even staid international organizations and associations. Perhaps I was—even though that was not my intent. It was almost like I was declaring that the world is not the center of the universe, or that the world is not flat. Preposterous!!! My goal was to understand the human condition, while applying lessons learned from contemporary science, and especially recent neurological breakthroughs.

How I Came About This Conclusion

Several years after I had been practicing clinical hypnotherapy, and had joined or been certified by a variety of international organizations, I decided to pursue a Doctor of Clinical Hypnotherapy, and then later a PhD in Clinical Hypnotherapy. Early on during my initial hypnotherapy training, I had been taught that my role was to help people reprogram (to use a more modern concept) their wondrous and seemingly unlimited subconscious mind. Indeed, that seemed to be the fundamental basis of the field. However, when I began working on my PhD dissertation, which required everything to be exhaustively cited and analyzed, I started digging into the origin of the term “subconscious.” I was disturbed to find that no reliable scientific citation existed. It appears that the concept was little more than a ubiquitous assumption blindly accepted in Western culture and outdated by at least a century.

The Origin of the Subconscious Mind Myth

The source of the subconscious mind as a concept did not come from science. Rather, it came from the world of philosophy—in the late Eighteenth Century, from Fredrich Shiller, a German Idealist philosopher, who incidentally was friends with Goethe and Hegel. Shiller wrote in a pamphlet that there had to be some form of consciousness other than that which was associated with human awareness. That concept was expounded upon by Sigmund Freud, the Austrian neurologist, about a hundred years later. As I pointed out earlier, Freud coined the term “unconscious,” which has been more acceptably been rephrased as “subconscious.”

Idealism vs. Science

The hypocrisy of using the subconscious mind concept in psychology, which considers itself the “science of the mind,” is that it is not a scientific concept. In addition to claiming its philosophical roots, it is important to realize that it came from a tradition called “idealism,” which is the epistemological (i.e. how we know things) concept involved with using mental constructs to understand reality. This is completely contrary to the epistemological tradition of science, which is based upon empirical observation and rational hypotheses.

If not a subconscious mind, what do we have?

Shiller was correct that there must be something other than a conscious awareness—a concept that is better called an “aggregate awareness.” To understand what is really happening, think of the human body in four levels: genes, cells, organs, and the aggregate human body. All four levels have awareness of its environment and will react. (Actually, the ability to be aware and react is the definition of intelligence.) Genes react and can be modified based upon the environment that they are in. This concept is called epigenetics, which is an emerging field of science. The 37.2 trillion cells that make up our body—to include the 100 billion that make up our brains—also are aware and react. When they are organized into various functions such as our brain, our skin, or stomach, etc., they likewise are aware of their environment and react. We call these collectives, organs.

My problem is that rather than a dichotomy of a consciousness and a subconsciousness, in reality we are a complex system of multiple and multilayered intelligent entities. Each individual component is intelligent. And when aggregated into systems or subsystems, such as organs or the complete aggregate, if they function harmoniously, we are healthy. If not, we have illnesses.

Why This Is Important

By such an understanding, the human condition—which can be extended to explain the functioning of households, organizations/associations, communities, states, and nations—we can start mimicking nature in the form of advances such as Artificial Intelligence. In fact, one of the earliest applications of this concept was by the inventor Raymond Kurzweil, who used his pattern theory to develop speech-to-text programs. Most recently, these ideas have been demonstrated in data analysis that has been used by companies such as Paypal to detect fraud, in “big data” projects, and in robots, which are recently being increasingly used to evaluate situations and make appropriate decisions. Again, Artificial Intelligence, which is supposed to be a model of human intelligence, is based upon the realization that the human condition is a complex system of multi-layered intelligences, rather than one conscious and one subconscious.

As a clinical hypnotherapist, who was more concerned about mental and physical health, as well as human performance, this more modern and up-to-date theory opened new possibilities. By understanding that an intelligent component in a pattern of interrelated intelligences may be the one that needed to be addressed, I would focus on what changes needed to be made. That led to an entirely different approach to working with people with medical, mental health, or performance challenges.

These videos illustrate how prevalent and outdated the subconscious mind myth is in Western civilization.