Published Articles
By Dr. William R. Morrow

“Relationship to the Unconscious”

Normally, when I talk to somebody in my office, I look and act like a regular person. You know: respectable, good haircut, and I appear to be carrying on an intelligible conversation. However, there are times when certain situations evoke a retro-temperament, and a different professional stance seizes me. It happens whenever something tells me that the person I am talking with is leaking material from his/her unconscious into the conversation. That is when I transform myself into Sigmund Freud, better to deal with the complex situation. Such was the case of The Man with Unsuitable Walls. Let’s call him “Marshal” (like in the Roman god of war). He was an otherwise successful man who just couldn’t get close in the relationships that mattered most to him. He barely saw that his anger was keeping his wife at bay. As a kid, his unconscious mind had conveniently built him a wall to protect him from rejecting and emotionally absent parents. Fifty years later, the wall was still in place, long after his parents had died. So, you can see, this was one of those times when I had take the fellow on board my psychoanalytic time capsule. He didn’t think he owned an unconscious mind, (he thought he’d left it in Illinois with his first wife) but away we went. Destination: the old family-stories that would reveal where this unneeded wall had originally been constructed. I urged him on towards our objective: “Find the origin of the wall, and you’ll have a broader choice about whether you still want to keep it.” Still, he thought I was digging up garbage that was irrelevant. “Just help me figure out what is going on now! Forget that other stuff” was Marshal’s plea. Yet unbeknownst to him, he had a giant warehouse of information about his patterns of relationship behavior stored in his head. It contained a lot of useful files. Freud was right about the unconscious: He just couldn’t pronounce the English words very well. It’s hard to explain to people like Marshal how those same emotions, that are stirred up in the marital conflict du jour, have been floating around for years. But they have. Every relationship we are in, beginning with our birth, carves a permanent template in this backroom of our mind. It lurks there revved up under full power, suspended in time, quietly judging all present relationships like one of the workers in the citrus harvest who sorts out the big grapefruit from the small ones. Above all, this subliminal selection process seeks relationship familiarity. Why? I don’t know. I guess because it is safer and more comfortable to be with somebody who appears to be similar to what you were used to. This unconscious inner guide is protective, and it won’t alter its selection criteria unless it gets hauled up in front of the Improvement Committee of our conscious mind. And what is familiar is not necessarily what is useful in any present-day relationship. Maybe a certain reaction is useful for surviving the rigors of the past, but, hey, things change! The unconscious mind just hasn’t kept up to date.

________________________________________________