8. Unsatisfied Wishes and Sublimation - Square Circles Publishing

SOURCE 8: THE MIND AT MISCHIEF
[If a man says to himself: “I wish I had a place in
the country!” and does not express himself further
in word or act, we may be quite sure that
unconsciously (that is, with the greater part of his
personality), he does not want a home in the
country. In fact the conscious verbal expression of
this wish is many times, though not always, a direct
indication of the man’s unconscious desire not to
be bothered with suburban or rural ownership. For,
if he really did want it, ideas would continually
occur to him showing him how he could take steps
to get his house (Lay 122-23).]
A great many people are contributing to
their future unhappiness by giving
expression to such statements as “I wish
I had a million dollars,” “I wish I had this,
or that.”
Of course, the degree of mischief depends
upon the seriousness with which the wish
is indulged. The half humorous
expressions of this sort which some
people are in the habit of making need not
disturb the psychologist, but I think if we
allow ourselves to wish for the impossible
we are indirectly contributing to the sum
total of our future psychic conflicts.
I : I N T R O D U C T I O N : S O M E
PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY,
NORMAL OR ABNORMAL (Conklin 3)
Psychoanalysts think of the normal as
well as the abnormal psyche as being
tripartite.
It is composed of that which we know as
conscious,
of what they call the fore-conscious
(occasionally referred to as the preconscious)
and of the unconscious (C 13).
The fore-conscious is supposed to contain
memories which we can voluntarily recall
or which may be easily aroused and also
incompleted trains of thought which have
been interrupted by intrusions from the
environment (C 13).
8:1.7 We must not lose sight of the
theory that the mind is divided into three
phases of consciousness:
8:1.8 1. The conscious—the realm of
conscious awareness.
8:1.9 2. The preconscious (also called
foreconscious)—
the domain of recallable memories—
the domain of the theoretic Freudian
censor.
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