by The Unconscious Collective
The Unconscious Collective is a group of ten Duquesne University first year psychology graduate students who have joined together to study and experience "the unconscious", free of constructs or theoretical abstractions. We are clinicians in training, bringing with us influences ranging from psychoanalysis, humanism, existentialism, and phenomenology, to cultural, political, and historical theory. We come from four continents, bear different skin colors, were raised into diverse faiths, and speak different languages as our mother tongues. We have not come together to identify the best theoretical approach for understanding the unconscious, or to synthesize a bridge across the diverse theories that inspire us. Rather, we cultivate the diversity of our backgrounds in order to enrich our exploration of the phenomenon that most intrigues us: the ineffable mystery which is the unconscious.
In this short piece, we would like to introduce people to our questions and method of investigation. Our purpose is to inspire other training therapists to hold similar events and reflect on their experiences in ways that will deepen psychological praxis, as well as engender personal insight.
Our Questions
The Collective is inspired by an unanswerable question, and the auxiliary questions that arise in its wake: What is the unconscious? Where is it? How do we access it? How does a personal unconscious interact, meld, or symbiotically thrive in groups? What is the relationship between the unconscious undercurrents of our shared, historically situated world, and the personal forces that influence us without our awareness?
As psychologists in training, we must struggle with these questions, for at their heart lie our understandings of meaning, freedom, and change. Graduate training offers many theoretical accounts of the unconscious in its vicissitudes. However, unconscious phenomena, such as "transference" and "projection," are characterized by our inability to recognize them as they occur. This is why it is so difficult to access the unconscious directly; it is strongest when we are least aware of it. And without this access, it is impossible to critically assess the theories and constructs we are expected to utilize in our clinical practice.
The unconscious cannot and should not be taken on faith. If we are to work with our clientsí struggles, it is not sufficient to understand how past scholars would recognize certain actions or utterances as indications of unconscious phenomena. Once we recognize the historical emergence of the unconscious in the discourse of human thought, we need to turn to our own experience to assess its use-value. We must come to see what the unconscious means underneath the constructs, free of the therapeutic power structure, and without the theoretical superstructure that academic study demands.
To this end, we inaugurated the Unconscious Collective: a group of clinicians in training that meets regularly for activities designed to illuminate the unconscious. Inspired by the power of projective tests, such as the Thematic Apperception Test, we decided that the Unconscious Collective would be an aesthetic group. Though Freud lived and died a scientist, his ideas have always been widely discussed and embraced by artists. This is not surprising, for every creative gesture is obligated, constrained, inspired, and ignited by unconscious sources.
Our Method
Below is a short description of the three events the Unconscious Collective has held. As with all human phenomena, each of the group members had a different experience, even though the events were all the same. It is in this difference, this personal feeling in regards to an event, where we come to experience the unconscious.
In the first meeting of the Collective, members were asked to sit in a circle and put on a blindfold. A lump of clay and a can of water were then placed in front of each person. The group was instructed to mold the clay into whatever they wished, while Air's "10,000 Hz Legend" album played quietly in the background. For fifteen minutes the members worked in relative silence, playing with the clay and crafting whatever came to mind.
When the blindfolds were removed, we discussed our experiences of the activity itself, including what it felt like to create, view, and reveal something of ourselves in this manner. Seemingly innocent clay toys turned out to hold much cathartic energy, and revealed to us how much is at stake in even the most trivial choices.
In the second meeting, members were randomly assigned a partner in the Collective. Each member was given a canvas board, and each pair was given three tubes of acrylic paint: red, blue, and yellow. The instructions were to collaboratively create a painting, either keeping the canvases separate or taping them together in any configuration. The only conditions were that each member must contribute to his or her partnerís canvas at some point, and that no verbal communication was allowed.
Upon reviewing the finished paintings, one could argue that we were looking at the phenomenon of collaborative unconscious. For, it was clear that (1) each painting was wholly different from every other, and yet (2) each painting was something that each partner could only have accomplished as a pair. Each painting was more than the sum of the individual contributions of the two painters. We looked at each painting, discussing its unique style, character, and content. We reflected upon the experience of creating silently with another person. Finally, we explored some of the unspoken interpersonal dynamics that the activity brought to light.
For a course assignment, one of our members gave the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) to Pittsburgh sound artist Zak Zibrat. Zibrat was amazed at how powerfully the TAT was able to ignite unconscious connections, and began experimenting with an auditory projective instrument. The result was the Thematic Auditory Apperception Test (TAAT), which we used in our third meeting. The TAAT is a collection of six garbled conversations which the participants were asked to elucidate by telling the assessor (1) who the characters in the conversation were, (2) what the characters were thinking, feeling, and saying, (3) what led up to the conversation, and (4) what would happen next. Each group member was interviewed separately, with his or her descriptions recorded onto minidisk. After each member had described several conversations, we listened to the responses as a group.
The choices that each individual made, in transforming the content-less conversations into full-scale dramas, were testament to the specific ways that each of us makes meaning of the world. In discussing the interpretations, we found that others could see us in our stories. Without realizing what we were doing, we had described our histories, desires, and struggles, through the voices of imaginary characters.
For those interested in reading our individual reflections in more detail, please email us at criticalpsychology@yahoo.com. We also encourage therapists in training and those interested in the unconscious to consider holding similar events. The fruits of these experiential explorations will inspire new questions about the unconscious, profoundly affecting both therapeutic skills and theoretical reflection.
|
