The Mind’s Mind

Persons with a mental disorder, as well as those without a mental illness, will each exhibit conscious and unconscious defense mechanisms. Conscious defense mechanisms are organized by, and act in service of the ego, and seek to preserve the integrity of the persona of the ego. Unconscious defense mechanisms are organized by the unconscious mind – the mind’s mind – and serve the integrity of the whole person.

Rationalizations about the symptoms of a mental illness (for one with a mental illness), or about the vagaries of one’s actions (for one without a mental illness), are a form of conscious defense. Reflect briefly on the excuses you make, and you can see examples of a conscious defense in service of your projected self-image. Some persons with a mental illness will devise alternate explanations for their diagnosis, in ways that help preserve a sense of personal integrity. “I don’t think I have schizophrenia, I am a psychic,” said one female resident at a nursing facility. “I don’t use the word schizophrenia, I think I have time-travel and mind-travel,” said a male resident. “It’s not right to say I have schizophrenia,” said another woman. “I have PTSD because of the things I’ve heard and seen being done by the government and the mafia.”

If the person admits to the disorder of their mind as an illness, it could imply that one cannot fully rely on the mind to be coherent or to make sense, and consequently one might feel like a kaleidoscope of fragments without coherence -and that would be terrifying. The defensive rationalization might even provide an explanation that bestows a special significance to the person – I am gifted, set apart from others, unique; contending with things others know nothing about. Such rationalizations exist in a borderland between the conscious and unconscious mind; they are partly delusion and partly ego repair. Rationalizations are at least partially conceived by the conscious mind, whereas delusions are sensed as received, as incontrovertibly true; they have the authority of otherness.

Delusions, like defensive rationalizations, tend to serve a purpose; yet they may originate from a deeper element of the psyche. Delusions can sometimes offer a glimpse into the working of a broader intelligence in the psyche. Fortunately, for all of us, we are more than the contents of our conscious mind. We each are served by a deeper source of intelligence and creativity; the unconscious mind that envelopes the ego and seeks to broaden its understanding and foster its wholeness.

Manifestations of the individual unconscious can be seen in dreams, and the power of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, as described by Carl Jung, can be observed in large social situations – witness the power of the archetype in the world-wide response to the death of Queen Elizabeth, for example.

Many years ago, I wrote a master’s thesis titled “Dream-Digging: Archeology of the Soul,” in which I excavated down through a stack of journals in which I had been writing my dreams over a 17-year period, examining the appearance and actions of a particular recurring image. As part of my preparation for practicing psychotherapy I had undertaken a two year long Jungian dream analysis. Each week I would type – on a manual typewriter with a sheet of blue carbon paper between two sheets of paper, so that I would have a copy – the dreams I had collected that week in a journal, and would explore their meanings with the analyst.

Noticing the sometimes-ingenious incursions of the unconscious mind into daily life is not limited, though, to dream analysis or to the study of the archetypes. One can notice the protective functioning of the mind's mind, for example, in the tragic consequences of trauma with resulting dissociative features.

Hazel was a 94-year-old lady residing in a nursing facility. She was alert and quite talkative and actively wheeled through the building daily in her wheelchair – and she always wore a red terry cloth bathrobe over her clothes. In childhood, she and her sisters were repeatedly sexually assaulted by their father – who eventually went to prison for his crimes. Hazel had an encapsulated psychosis with delusions involving possible threat from demons. She believed that many years ago demons had entered her childhood bedroom through hidden doors, and she claimed that one time while brushing her hair she saw in the mirror that Satan was in her bedroom doorway. She felt perpetually on guard to notice and defend against any re-occurrence of demon activity.

Through the unconscious and protective functioning of dissociation, she split off awareness of her father sneaking into her room or looming ominously and projected it as having a supernatural source – from which she might thereafter protect herself, if adequately vigilant. Her omnipresent red bathrobe also pointed symbolically as a sort of alarm, a warning about the earlier scene of the crimes.

Lucy was serially raped by her father and uncles over several years in her early adolescence. Lucy described leaving her body and floating at the ceiling and watching what was happening to her body below during assaults. Due to such severe trauma, she subsequently suffered from mental illness and dissociative features. She rarely chose to tell others of her thoughts and feelings because, “they’ll think it’s just all schizophrenic stuff.’ She isolates herself in her room at the nursing facility, wears only hospital gowns, and keeps the curtains drawn around her bed. She complains periodically that something has gone wrong with her mattress, and she needs another one before it makes her ill. Lucy also believes that she was supernaturally ordered by an angel to not wear clothes, and that they would make her ill if she did. Lucy told me that the men who assaulted her were not actually to blame, because they were under the control of an evil spirit who made them do what they did. Again, we see how the symptoms of wearing only nightclothes and the sometimes-sickening mattress point to the earlier scene of the crimes. Her unconscious dissociative and psychiatric symptoms allow her to imagine her persecutors were not responsible for her abuse, and that she might be safe now if she follows restrictive, albeit irrational, parameters. Her goal in psychotherapy is simply to sustain her daily stability, with as little change as possible in her daily routines. Lucy describes living in her own world, which is more satisfying for her, because the outer world had been so painful for her. She views psychotherapy conversations as a kind of visiting at the doors of our different worlds, where she can greet me and offer a report about how she is doing in her world.

The symptoms of mental illness can sometimes seem chaotic, yet while irrational, they can still be filled with meanings, and can point to their origins, and to the unconscious strategies that help sustain a broken psyche. As psychotherapists, we can notice and work with the often-clever manifestations of the mind as we decipher the hieroglyphic language of disordered thinking and acting that has been brought about by trauma, and by the creative efforts of the unconscious to try and manage the destruction.