The Language of the Unconscious

You have probably read it somewhere before: that only a small part of who we are is conscious, while the vast majority is unconscious. The familiar image of the iceberg, of which the largest part lies beneath the water and is not visible. Despite this, the correct word is un-conscious, not sub-conscious.

There is a continuous dance taking place in which material from the unconscious is brought forward and appears in our consciousness, only to eventually sink back into the unconscious again. If we wanted to be continuously conscious of everything, it would be a total overload of information. Imagine being consciously aware, in a single moment, of all the information you have taken in as a human being throughout your entire life. You would become overwhelmed. The system of the conscious and the unconscious is a very useful and intelligent system. It allows us to filter. It allows us to focus today on the tasks that lie before us today, and tomorrow on other things that then ask for our attention.

But sometimes we experience things in our lives that have a major impact on us. We experience something unpleasant, someone hurts us, someone crosses our boundary, or we become ill or lose someone. Sometimes an event is too intense to fully hold in consciousness in the moment it takes place. A part of us goes on autopilot and is therefore guided from the unconscious. However, once the intensity of the event has passed, it is important to allow this material from the unconscious to enter consciousness at some point. This often happens naturally. In a sense, we are given a chance to become conscious after all of how difficult we found something. But we also have to take this opportunity. It is important that we become aware of what the painful experience has done to us in its entirety.

We can infer quite a lot about what is going on in our unconscious from various sources. My favorite sources are: the dream world and the body. Our dreams give us an enormous amount of information, but often not in the way we think they give information. A dream is quite difficult to interpret without a background in symbolism or Jung’s ideas. It is then often interpreted far too simply. In Jungian psychology, for example, people in dreams are understood as inner aspects of yourself. Suppose your father appears in your dream. Then it is important to know: what is your association with father? Suppose the association is “authoritarian.” Then it concerns an inner part of yourself that is authoritarian. If the association is “loving,” then it concerns an inner loving part. And suppose your father drowns in the dream. Then it is useful to know your association with father and your association with drowning. From Jung’s perspective, a collective layer can also be added to the associations with father and drowning. This means an interpretation that applies to many people because collective symbols exist in the deeper layers of the unconscious. Water, for example, is often associated in Jungian symbolism with the great unconscious itself. So suppose that in the dream, father is associated with loving, and there is no further specific personal association with drowning. Then it could well be that your own loving part is sinking too far into the unconscious — “drowning.” That this part of you is asking for your attention and is therefore trying to make this clear to you through the unconscious, through the dream. So that it can enter your consciousness and you can actively begin to work with your own loving part!

The beautiful thing about dreams, and about the body as well, is that things also happen on their own. We do not have to intervene, and yet the unconscious will always try to bring things back into psychological balance. So we do not necessarily have to analyze our dreams or get to know them in the deepest possible way. But it can help when things continue to play out in the unconscious and cause us many unpleasant experiences in daily life. When the unconscious, as it were, keeps pulling at us and keeps nagging at us. When there is truly something that wants to be seen and known by us, something that is moving deep within us. Then it is also much more important to actively work with the psychological charge, to listen to it, redistribute it, and try to resolve the disturbances in the unconscious.

The symbolism of the other great source of the unconscious, the body, secretly appears quite often in our language. To have something on your stomach/liver, to have a lump in your throat, to have a weight on your heart, etc. Headaches can often be translated into pain or heaviness in the area that does all the thinking. Are you thinking a lot? Is the rest of your body participating too? And then there are deeper layers of the body that may be asking for attention. I wrote earlier about the nervous system being programmed in the mother’s womb. Possibly in a way that does not fully align with your authentic self. Reprogramming may be needed there. With the body, too, it is important that we interpret the symbols correctly, so that something can begin to flow psychologically again.

This does not mean, by the way, that physical complaints cannot have a physical cause. But much of our attention already goes there, and we are well trained to look at things in that way. Sometimes it is important that we stop dismissing persistent back pain as “I have a weak back” or “I’ve been sitting too much today.” We should not always look for solutions on a physical level, because sometimes they do not take place solely on a physical level. In the example I give, there is a psychological component hidden within it: what makes you sit so much in a day that you do not listen to your body when it needs you to adopt a different posture? What psychological aspect is at work there?

A field that fits beautifully here is psychosomatics. This field assumes that mind (psyche) and body (soma) are continuously interacting with one another. Importantly, psychosomatics does not say that physical complaints are “all in your head.” The premise is that psychological processes can also manifest physically, just as physical conditions can affect our psyche.

In short, the unconscious speaks in symbols, and it speaks, among other things, through our dreams and our bodies. Not as a demanding voice that must be heard at all costs, but as a source of wisdom and an important guide. It continuously tries to bring whatever is out of balance back into balance. It wants to guide us onto the right path — for us.

The unconscious is a dark place, but not because we should fear it. It is dark because the light of our consciousness does not shine there. A place where things are waiting for us, to be seen, felt, and known. Little by little. So let us be curious about what lives within us. Because precisely there, in whatever presents itself, lies the invitation to get to know ourselves better. An invitation to become who we truly are, at the deepest level…

Haye.