Liquid States of Mind

April 26th, 2006 Fred McVittie

William James (1892) famously uses the term ‘Stream of Consciousness’ to describe the unbroken succession of images which seems to characterize the flowing, river-like experience of wakeful awareness. He also writes of the ‘oceanic’ feelings associated with religious experience (1902), an entailment picked up by Freud (1973) and Clement (1994) and which also figures in first-person accounts of certain varieties of peak experience; a feeling of unbounded unity with the wider cosmos and an apparent dissolution of the boundary between self and world .

These two images, the stream and the ocean, can be seen as complementary features in an ontology, or rather a ‘hydrography’ of consciousness; at one extreme the subject is defined by the path of their individual stream; delineated, bounded, and temporal. At the other extreme the subject dissolves into a larger substrate, an all-encompassing, atemporal ocean. These two terms for particular radically different states of consciousness are entailments of an extended metaphor in which the operation of the mind is compared to the behavior of a liquid.

The metaphor does not just allow for these two entailments, but structures a range of discourses related to consciousness from the fields of psychology, technology and phenomenology. These include Csikszentmihalyi’s notion of flow (1990; 1997) immersion (Grau 2004), thought ripples (Greenfield 2001), and absorption (Gurwitsch 1979).

This deployment of a liquid metaphor in talking of consciousness has a long history and extensive current (sic.) use. Water, particularly, features significantly in many of the world’s religions and in mythological texts as a medium for describing cognitive states or processes which would otherwise be inconceivable, the most familiar of these probably being the Greek legends surrounding Lethe and Mnemosyne, the rivers of forgetting and remembering. Drawing on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Lakoff and Johnson (1999) and others, this metaphor can be shown not to be arbitrary and contingent, but as providing a consistent, coherent structure whereby the abstract notion of consciousness is made conceivable and articulate.

Clement, C. (1994). Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. New York, Harper & Row.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1997). Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York, HarperPerennial.

Freud, S. (1989). Formulations Regarding The Two Principles in Mental Functioning. The Freud Reader. P. Gay. New York, Norton: 301-306.

Grau, O. (2003). Virtual art: from illusion to immersion. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press.

Greenfield, S. A. and T. F. T. Collins (2005). A Neuroscientific Approach to Consciousness. Amsterdam, Elsevier B.V.

Gurwitsch, A. (1979). Human Encounters in the Social World. Pittsburgh, PA, Duquesne University Press.

James, W. (1981). The Principles of Psychology. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

Posted in Clement, Catherine, Conference Abstract, Consciousness, Csikszentmihalyi, Mihalyi, Flow, Freud, Sigmund, Greenfield, Susan, Gurswitch, Aron, James, William, Liquid, Metaphor, Phenomenology, Psychology, Religion | No Comments »

Liquid Love

July 7th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The various states of consciousness alluded to using the metaphor of a liquid are comprehensive and consistent, from the ’stream’ of individual consciousness at one end to the ‘oceanic’ experience of non-individuated ego loss at the other. In between these states a range of states and conditions are similarly articulated using this metaphor, including flow, immersion, absorbtion, etc. These states are not only rational and logical however, but are also heavily informed by, or rather constructed with, emotional content and responses. The ‘oceanic’ feeling identified by William James is a notable example. Initially associated with the overpowering divine adoration of religious experience, this concept was reframed by Freud in terms of that other great first love, a baby’s ecstasy of embrionic and amniotic immersion within the body and the ego of the mother prior to partition, birth, and the individuating rigours of childhood. In both readings, one religious and the other ontogenic, the metaphor of a vast ocean stands in not only for undividedness, but for undivided love. Immersion and dissolution in this ocean is a kind of death, not of the body but of the ego, and we see miniature versions of this death, this dissolution, in the small death of sexual orgasm (in French le petit mort), and in the sacrificial ego loss when we are drowned in romantic love.

Posted in Feeling, Freud, Sigmund, James, William, Liquid, Love, Metaphor | No Comments »

Unconsciousnesses

August 28th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The term unconscious, at least since Freud, has tended to signify a singular part of the mind, almost a second self which is hidden behind the brightly lit facade of conscious thought. This second self is variously represented as benign or malignant, helping us out by providing the Eureka moments of creativity or embarrassing us by slipping obscenities into our dreams and our language. Contemporary brain science, however, tends to model the unconscious differently, regarding the unconscious not as a singular space, agent, or archive, but not as a ‘the’ at all. Rather, it can be said that a wide range of mental processes are simply ‘not conscious’. This might include the various machinations of the Freudian psyche, but would also include numerous other routine processes which are required for the operation and maintenance or the body/person.

Posted in Creativity, Freud, Sigmund, Unconscious | No Comments »