Turning Toward the Subconscious

Turning Toward the Subconscious

For the reader, the observer these words need in order to exist. You are the eyes that lift them off the page. Whoever you are, however near or far, thank you for standing at the door with me.

This series is philosophy and testimony. It is not treatment, and it is not a substitute for a professional who can sit across from you. Please let it be a companion to help, never a replacement for it.

Experienced · Observed · Studied

Experienced: lived, and I am the only witness. Observed: watched in others, with their details anonymized or left out. Studied: read in the literature, and cited at the back.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

— C. G. Jung, “The Philosophical Tree”

As we turn the light into the shadows over these next several pieces, we’re going to start unwinding the very fabric of the things that make us hurt in ways we can’t explain.¹ So I need to remind you again: my theories are not, in any way, a replacement for a clinical treatment plan from an actual doctor. I intend to earn my degrees and practice, but that hasn’t happened yet, so this entire series stays filed under philosophy of psychology.

I plan to spend the rest of my life offering deep analysis of Carl Jung’s work as my primary focus. So as I write these pieces, I’ll run parallel to his work in a lot of places, and I’ll cite those places so you can see for yourself that I’m not the only person who has thought this way.

These pieces are a deep dive into the symbols of the subconscious, the effect they have on the individual, and the work of managing the barrier between the “I” and the “Self.” That’s something better explained slowly, so we’re going to turn toward one idea at a time, shine a light into the shadows, and see what wrinkles we can flatten.

I’ll open, as I always do, with the admission that some of my theories rest on the idea of an actual Designer. The “simulation theory,” if you like: that we were made by some … thing. More than that, I hold a firm belief that this Designer is just, and good, and loving. Light, for lack of a better word, if for no other reason than the provision of these symbols that steer the conscious mind from beneath it. These symbols are real in their effects. They surface again and again, across individuals and across cultures, even if “proof,” in the laboratory sense, is the wrong instrument to bring to them (Jung, 1968b; Jung & von Franz, 1964).² How you apply them will always depend on the individual.

The “I” and the Self

Here I should explain the difference between the “I” and the “Self,” for those not yet well versed in Jung. In Jung’s own terms, the ego, the “I,” “forms, as it were, the centre of the field of consciousness” (Jung, 1951/1968a, para. 1). The Self is something much larger: “not only the centre, but also the whole circumference which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness” (Jung, 1968c, para. 44). I want to turn this light on you, the reader, for a moment, in the hope you’ll feel what I mean.

The “I” is the individual. That’s you: the physical vessel wrapped around your thoughts. The “Self,” in the way I use it, is the thoughts themselves, and not only yours, but the whole of every thought that was ever had. The field. The subconscious Self.

A note of honesty, since I’d always rather show you the seam than hide it: that isn’t quite Jung’s own division. For Jung, the ego is the seat of consciousness, not the body, and the Self is the totality that holds consciousness and the unconscious together. I’m bending his terms on purpose here, pinning the “I” to the felt, physical individual and the “Self” to the wider field, because that bend is exactly where his work and my framework meet. Watch for it. The place two systems don’t line up cleanly is usually where the interesting work is.

Jung described carrying two personalities from boyhood. One was an ordinary schoolboy of his own time. The other was, in his words, “an old man who lived in the eighteenth century, wore buckled shoes and a white wig.” He was careful to add that this had nothing to do with a split in the medical sense: “On the contrary, it is played out in every individual” (Jung, 1962/1965, pp. 34, 45).³ I feel like myself, and a much older version of myself. I believe that completely. “We are all one” carries a weight here that has echoed across the whole of recorded history; Jung himself, late in life, reached for the old idea of the unus mundus, the one world underneath the many (Jung, 1970; Meier, 2001).⁴

For me, that one realization snapping into place, while I was reading about the existence of the “field,” the design, is what made me see how much an individual can matter if they learn to manage the wall between the two: the I and the Self. Jung knew this too. He located the real work of healing inside the healer as much as inside the patient: “only what he can put right in himself can he hope to put right in the patient” (Jung, 1966a, para. 239). In his model, healing is a collaboration, the conscious “I” coming into right relationship with the deeper Self.

The mountain

Finding our way to the peak of our own existence is a terrifying climb, and more often than not we come crashing down a different side of the mountain than the one we started on. That’s why the pieces ahead are arranged in a personal order: I lived them all in different seasons of my life, for very different reasons.

I think about a time when I got past depression and suicidal thoughts, only to wake up anxious about the future. I got that expansion back under control, only to be swamped by depression and existential dread all over again.

I believe that particular terror is tied directly to losing hold of the “I” during the realization of the vastly larger, more powerful Self.

Is the Self the Designer? I can’t say for certain. But I can tell you that being made in the image of the Designer is a feeling I can’t fully put into words as I stand at the explanatory gap of my own life (Levine, 1983), and that feeling, too, echoes across many of our oldest texts (King James Bible, 1769/2017, Genesis 1:26–27; Meister Eckhart, 1981; Olivelle, 1996).⁵ It’s almost as if the Self was separated from the Designer at some point, and then spiraled outward, fractalizing into the reality we see today.

One thing I can say: after reading about people who stood at their own explanatory gap the way I describe (Einstein, Sagan, Jung, Feynman, Schrödinger), and then looking back through time at the prophets of recorded history, I found they were very much alike. Few of them claimed certainty either way about a creator. And again and again, in wildly different languages, they testified that we are, somehow, all connected, and that the way to live in that is to love one another.

Therein lies the key. Once a person steps free of their own ego, they stand at the gate of collective human knowledge.

The feeling there is astonishing and terrifying at once; this part I can attest to through meditation. Often this “wealth of knowledge” arrives as something that feels divine, a sense of being chosen for the chance to stand at the gate and see.

Luckily for me, by the time I reached the gate I didn’t have much ego left to shed. Life had stripped me of most joys except my family. But I wasn’t depressed anymore. At the start of my own “awakening,” the biggest hurdle I faced was ADHD, and looking back, I see it now less as a defect than as a kind of drain-stopper holding back all my creativity. I spent so much time reading and not writing, learning and not teaching. And that’s the shadow’s other face: Jung noted that what the ego disowns isn’t only darkness. The shadow “also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses” (Jung, 1951/1968a, para. 423).

But that’s neither here nor there. Plenty of people live with far more severe forms of ADHD, and treatment is always an option when it’s managed well.

So what of being suicidal? When the grip of the ego loosens, when the physical “I” stops feeling like the whole of you, the thought of “leaving” can arrive in a fleeting moment and, just as quickly, be set back down. It is a thought, not an instruction. Naming it plainly (that’s not me) is often enough to let it move on. And if it doesn’t move on, that is exactly what the numbers at the front of this essay are for.

Sometimes you just have to give yourself over to the design to really watch it work. If we are created, then we aren’t perfect; we’re always reaching toward it, always struggling. And “leaving the game early,” so to speak, is certainly not the way to win, if winning is even a thing we can do.

I think we can win. Plenty of people I say that to tell me I’m a bit of a fanatic. I never said it would be easy, and I never said it would happen in our lifetime. It’s going to take every individual within the design turning to face our fellow humans and teaching them how to be happy, how to be kind, how to function in a society that has torn them up at every turn.

Where the shadows come from

Before we go into the dark, I want to show you where I think most of it comes from, because this is the idea the rest of the series is built on, and the one I mean to spend my career proving.

I don’t believe children are born with these weights. I believe they inherit them from us.

Jung believed something very close to this, and he said it more bluntly than I would dare. “What usually has the strongest psychic effect on the child,” he wrote, “is the life which the parents (and ancestors too …) have not lived” (Jung, 1954, para. 87). Not what the parents say. Not even what they do on purpose. What they avoid. The things which have the most powerful effect on children, he wrote elsewhere in the same essay, “do not come from the conscious state of the parents but from their unconscious background” (Jung, 1954, para. 84).

How does it get across? Jung’s answer was that a small child isn’t yet fully separate from the adults around it. The oldest and most effective kind of education, he said, is “education through example,” and it “can proceed wholly unconsciously,” because “the child is psychologically more or less identical with its environment, and especially with its parents.” He borrowed a word for it from the anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl: participation mystique (Jung, 1954, para. 253). The child doesn’t just watch our weather. For a while, the child lives inside it.

The Jungians who came after him built a whole developmental psychology on that ground. Erich Neumann described a “primal relationship” between mother and infant in which the child’s sense of a Self is held, at first, by the mother, until the child can hold it alone (Neumann, 1963/1973).⁶ And modern attachment research, working from a completely different direction, keeps finding the same bridge: across ninety-five samples and nearly five thousand parent–child pairs, a parent’s own inner story of their childhood predicts how securely their baby attaches to them, and the parent’s visible behavior explains only part of the link (Verhage et al., 2016).⁷ The researchers call the unexplained part the transmission gap. I’d call it the subconscious.

I want to be honest about the other side, because a theory that hides its seams isn’t worth defending. Michael Fordham, who founded Jungian child analysis in London, held that a baby arrives with a self of its own already at work, reaching out to the world and taking it back in (Fordham, 1976).⁸ And the twin studies are clear that genes set part of the stage. So here is the version of my theory I’m willing to stand on: a child is born sensitive, more or less, and part of that sensitivity comes down in the blood. That’s still an inheritance from adults. But what that sensitivity becomes depends on what we hand it. Some children, the research says, are so sensitive to their surroundings that they do worse than anyone in a hard home, and better than anyone in a good one (Belsky & Pluess, 2009; Boyce & Ellis, 2005). Same child. Different adults.

That’s why every cover in this series is drawn in crayon. Children draw what they’re living before they have words for it. The educator Rhoda Kellogg, studying a huge collection of children’s drawings from all over the world, found the same shapes coming up again and again on their own: scribbles settling into shapes, shapes combining, and then mandalas, suns, and radiating lines, all before a child ever draws a person (Kellogg, 1969). And when Jung himself hit his own bottom, his way back up was to become a child again. He went down to the lakeshore, gathered stones, and built a little village out of them, the way he had played at building as a boy in his tenth or eleventh year. Later he sketched a small circular drawing in a notebook every morning; those mandalas, he wrote, “were cryptograms concerning the state of the self” (Jung, 1962/1965, p. 196).⁹

So when I ask a child with a crayon to draw depression, or anxiety, or addiction, I’m asking a real question. Who taught them to draw it that way?

The triad

So where does individual mental health fit into all this? I have a very neurodivergent way of thinking here, but there’s a real resemblance between the “triad” in my framework and the way the brain has often been modeled in threes (Cesario et al., 2020; MacLean, 1990).¹⁰ If that resemblance leans even a little toward something true, then we have to consider that there may be an actual “peak” of an individual’s existence.

The idea that this peak is a mere midlife crisis, a thing that can’t be sustained, is, I believe, a myth. I think most people are capable of getting over their hurdles with the right care, treatment, and a splash of hope. Those last two are the hardest ingredients to find in 2026. The list of people waiting to see a therapist is longer than the list of things people are suffering from.

I know it isn’t kind to joke about any of this. But when someone asks me how I made the thoughts stop, sometimes I tell them the truth sideways: “Oh, I didn’t stop them. I’m still 43,748,648th on the waitlist to see somebody. Twenty years in. I’m starting to think the waiting is the treatment.” It’s a joke about the system, never about the person. And for a second I watch them smile. I watch them push the dark to the back of the mind just long enough to see that the Self lives inside all of us: that nobody is alone in these thoughts, no matter how many times they insist they’re “okay.”

Because even the kindest person can carry the darkest thoughts behind an “I’m okay.” Jung had a name for that outward face: the persona, the mask we hold up to the world, which can hide as much as it shows (Jung, 1966b, para. 245).¹¹ (The crisis line, for what it’s worth, actually does pick up. I put the number at the top of this piece for a reason.)

Here is where the true power of the “I” lives. The facing of Intent.

Let me set the technical language aside: the intent of your existence. I believe that if, in the very moment a dark thought arises, you can decide that’s not me, it will leave the conscious mind and return to the subconscious without a fight.

Sometimes it’s as simple as finding patience. In my framework there would be an endless number of faces to that triad’s pyramid, endless edges to fall off once you become unbalanced. Depression and anxiety are the easiest to reach on the way down; deeper falls can end in real instability.

Slide the center of subjective experience a little too far outside the self, and meaning can seem to thin out. Slide it too far inward, and you meet the other failure mode: the “messiah complex,” or treating other people as objects. You’re all impostors. Or what two psychiatrists named the Truman Show delusion, a culturally shaped variant of persecutory and grandiose delusion in which a person becomes convinced their whole life is a staged production (Gold & Gold, 2012).¹² In my terms, it’s an “I” that has mistaken itself for the Self. That’s a misconception I’ll theorize about in later work.

Quiet instructions

Some of this is genuinely complicated, so let me close with something softer and easier to hold.

All of these things standing between you and your happiness, you can think of a little like computer viruses. Some need long-standing programs and professional care to clear out. Others need only the simple recognition that you are the one at the controls.

That pressure you’re feeling? It may not be the pressure of your own existence at all.

Consider, with me, that you don’t quite exist the way you fear you do.

Maybe the pressure is trying to tell you something else entirely.

When I can’t hear someone speaking, I move closer. Change the way you listen to your own thoughts, and maybe you’ll finally catch your own quiet instructions for feeling better.

Maybe not.

But that’s why I’m here: to show you mine, and add them to all the other ways internal peace can be reached. Jung had a name for this posture, too: the wounded healer. “It is his own hurt that gives the measure of his power to heal,” he wrote of the physician. “This, and nothing else, is the meaning of the Greek myth of the wounded physician” (Jung, 1966a, para. 239).¹³ I don’t stand over you. I stand next to you, in the same dark, holding a map that’s only a little older than yours.

The only thing I need you to leave at the door is doubt.

I’m not a doctor. I can’t diagnose you and I can’t prescribe anything. What I can do is give you as many real examples of what I’m talking about as I possibly can, so that the doubt of he doesn’t know washes away in the understanding that an “I” arguing with an “I” will always end that way.

But if you know, if you truly know, the Self, then you already know the degree doesn’t matter. Because knowing is inherent. And every single person within the framework of existence carries their own keys for feeling better, whatever those keys turn out to be.

You’re just going to have to keep reading to learn about mine.

So: onward, into the dark, my friends.

These next pieces may be some of the hardest things I’ve ever written. They may not be easy to read, either.

Stop, if the darkness in my words starts to cloud your vision.

Keep going, if you can, whatever that means for you in this moment.

♥

Notes

1. The epigraph is from Jung’s “The Philosophical Tree,” Jung (1967, para. 335).

2. On archetypes as recurring, cross-cultural patterns rather than empirically “proven” objects.

3. Chapter 2, “School Years,” on personalities No. 1 and No. 2.

4. On the unus mundus, see the chapter “The Conjunction” in Mysterium Coniunctionis, and the Jung–Pauli letters.

5. Genesis 1:26–27, on the imago Dei; the Chāndogya Upaniṣad 6.8.7, “tat tvam asi,” a passage later central to Advaita Vedānta; and Meister Eckhart’s Fünklein, the “spark” of the soul.

6. See chapter 1, “The Primal Relationship of Child to Mother and the First Phases of Child Development.”

7. The link is robust but modest, and smaller than earlier studies suggested.

8. Fordham offered his “primary” self explicitly as an alternative to the idea that the infant begins identified with its mother, which is close to Neumann’s view.

9. Chapter 6, “Confrontation with the Unconscious.”

10. MacLean’s triune brain is the best-known “brain in threes.” Comparative neuroscience now rejects it as a picture of how brains evolved; I use it here only as an organizing analogy within my framework.

11. Jung calls the persona “only a mask of the collective psyche.”

12. It is a symptom of psychosis, not a diagnosis of its own; my use of it here is metaphorical.

13. The myth is Chiron’s, the wounded centaur who taught healing. The shorter line often quoted, “‘Only the wounded physician heals,’” appears, in quotation marks of Jung’s own, in chapter 4 of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, “Psychiatric Activities” (Jung, 1962/1965, p. 134).

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