A word at their graves with Freud, Jung and Buber

A Word with Sigmund Freud

I take you to task, Sigmund Freud and reject your definitions of the conscious, the unconscious and the pre-conscious mind!

Where does the area of the mind fit in, which may be monitored by the conscious, but which does not accord with your definition of the pre-conscious — the area, some say, which is “used” to inspire the human?

I refer to the area where thoughts and visual hallucinations emerge and which, monitored by the conscious mind, progress, or stop right there in the case of hallucinations, from being unarticulated thoughts, and visions, to the conscious mind where they can be articulated or, exclusively n the case of hallucinations, blocked.

A Word with Carl Jung

So you were a close colleague and collaborator of Sigmund Freud? So you broke with him because you disagreed about several of his statements, most fundamentally with his definition of the unconscious?

Even so, I take you, too, to task, for you made no allowance for the possibility of God’s agency where inspiring thought in itself was concerned.

You introduced the new idea of collective consciousness, but told Martin Buber that God was only an archetype there, not a pre-existing, active agent: you asked him, Buber – and very abruptly, if I may say so – when he would get it into his head that God was only an archetype in the collective consciousness.

And you believed in God!

So to what area of the mind would you have ascribed the sudden formation of “unblockable”, unarticulated and inspired, thoughts and “blockable”, unarticulated visual hallucinations – if, indeed, there is only one area? Would you not agree that at least the thoughts, inspired and inspiring, could be produced by Buber’s Thou?

My Lonely Path

Why! I am left to my own resources here and find that I must describe this area as the overlap of the penumbras of both the unconscious and conscious mind, as defined by Freud.

A Word with Martin Buber

Were you, Martin Buber, still alive where would you place the Thou – which, you assert, is, to paraphrase, to be found in the pregnant womb, in the human when he or she is born and as he or she grows up – the Thou here alluding to God? Is the Thou to be found in the Freud-defined unconscious mind, in the Jung-defined collective consciousness, in the pre-conscious or in the overlap area(s) of the conscious and unconscious penumbras?