Two Kinds of Association in Our Conscious and Subconscious Minds

In my 2008 book Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism (86), I wrote:

Freud was the first to identify that humans possess a dynamic, integrating subconscious, the activities of which he called primary process; he called the activities of the conscious mind secondary process. The subconscious is the portion of the mind that we are not aware of, so when asleep all activity of the mind is subconscious; when awake whatever we are not currently focusing on is subconscious. “Dynamic” means continuously active in the sense that our minds are constantly making connections whether we are awake or asleep; if awake, the connections are being made whether we are aware of what is going on in our minds or not. In short, the subconscious can be thought of as a “connection-making machine” (with no concessions to mechanistic materialism intended).

Dreams are the prototype of the subconscious, observed Freud, but dreams are often distorted and illogical (or certainly less logical than the processes of the conscious mind). But, he continued, and insisted throughout his career, every action of our minds has a cause. What is the exact nature of these subconscious mental processes? And what causes the connections that are made?
 
Psychiatrist Eilhard von Domarus (cited in Independent Judgment and Introspection, 89n8), based on his work with schizophrenics, hypothesized that the subconscious, at least in part, and subsequently called the Von Domarus principle, is guided by the formal fallacy in logic called the undistributed middle term. For example, in the syllogism: all dogs are four-legged animals; all cows are four-legged animals; therefore, all dogs are cows, the middle term is the one that appears in each premise but not in the conclusion. Four-legged animals is the middle term that is not distributed, which means that because four-leggedness is in the predicate of both premises neither accounts for all four legged animals. That dogs and cows have four legs does not mean they are otherwise the same.
 
The fallacy is one of overgeneralization—assuming that because two things have one attribute in common, they are overall the same. Young children, until they learn better, make the dogs-and-cows mistake. Members of indigenous tribes (or other adults who are being careless) also make the mistake.
 
And schizophrenics have drawn conclusions like this: The Virgin Mary is a virgin; I am a virgin; therefore I am the Virgin Mary. The predicate term “virgin” is not distributed. Or, they have said: Switzerland loves freedom; I love freedom; therefore I am Switzerland.
 
Silvano Arieti (229-41), agreeing with von Domarus, called the logic of our subconscious primary process “paleologic” and the reasoning of our conscious secondary process “Aristotelian.” The former is paleo because it is old or archaic, predating our educated control of thoughts using Aristotle’s discoveries, especially his three laws of logic. Children have not yet learned the skill of competent reasoning and schizophrenics in their psychotic episodes are living “waking dreams,” having fled reality and being controlled entirely by their subconscious (“flight from the unsatisfying reality” in Freud’s words).
 
Arieti recognized that the errors of schizophrenics are errors of association and generalized them, in somewhat less technical terms than the fallacy of undistributed middle, as the identity of predicates. The schizophrenic, young child, and indigenous person assume that because the predicates in their thoughts are identical, their subjects must overall be the same.*
 
When we are fully conscious, our subconscious is still operating and can make seemingly random associations, but the associations are not totally random. For example, a friend at dinner complains that the food is not well cooked, so I might say, “By association, that reminds me of last week when I was served almost raw chicken,” the predicate being poorly cooked food. And we often experience similar kinds of associations.
 
What determines the selection of predicate, considering that there exists a nearly unlimited field of possible predicates? “Emotional factors,” says Arieti (236). These emotional factors are especially important in understanding schizophrenics, who frequently come up with enormously bizarre connections not unlike those made in dreams. In last month’s post I made passing reference to one’s “private meanings” in understanding the meaning of symbols in dreams. Neither Freud (that I have read so far) nor Arieti use these words, but private meaning is on the Freud Museum’s website. Knowing a person’s emotions and emotional generalizations helps explain seemingly arbitrary associations.**
 
What these associations of the subconscious mind are not are the associations—let me now call them connections—of concept formation, the secondary process of the reasoning mind.
 
We now are talking about two different kinds of association.
 
The conscious mind is able to both connect and keep separate two entities with the same characteristic. The dog has four legs and the cow has four legs, but a cow and a dog are not overall the same. When we form concepts we look for fundamental or essential similarities.
 
Ayn Rand (45-46) gives us the rule of fundamentality to enable us to dismiss four-leggedness as the most essential characteristic of dogs or opposable thumbs, for example, as the essential distinguishing characteristic of human beings. The rule also allows us to dismiss the fact that all humans are capable of building roads, which other animals cannot do, but “building roads” is not the essence of being human. The rule says that the essential distinguishing characteristic of a concept must cause and explain all or most of the other distinguishing characteristics. This gives us the fundamental characteristic(s) and only the capacity to reason meets the rule (and causes and explains the ability to build roads).
 
This process is the operation of Aristotelian logic at its best. The conscious secondary process gives us control, should we choose to exercise it, over the content and processes of our minds.
 
The paleologic of the subconscious mind cannot, and does not, follow the rule of fundamentality. It follows the rule of “identity of predicates.”
 
Having said this, we can to some extent still control our subconscious mind. If we focus and volitionally exercise our conscious Aristotelian logic over time, we can correct the errors of the subconscious.
 
We can also influence the subconscious in problem solving of the creative process. When working on a problem—say, writing an essay—we usually beforehand must do a certain amount of research and thinking about the issue, building up a substantial context for the problem. To sleep on it, a suggestion some of our teachers may have taught us, now allows our associational subconscious to go to work. Sometimes, not always, we may have a solution or part of a solution the next morning.
 
And, occasionally, when I’ve seen a particularly distressful movie, I have been able to tell my subconscious at bedtime, “I don’t want to dream about this,” and often it works.
 
The significance for Freud of primary process in its dream operations, and especially for purposes of psychotherapy, is that the process is essentially the same process operating in the formation of neurotic symptoms, namely condensation and displacement. What seem to be random associations are condensed and displaced emotions with the ideation, the ideas originally associated with the emotions, repressed. And, identity of predicates and overgeneralization are more specific operations in the formation of these symptoms, which will be discussed next month.
 
 
* A valid Aristotelian syllogism, for example, would be: all dogs are four-legged animals; Fido is a dog; therefore, Fido is a four-legged animal. “Dog” is the middle term and is distributed in the first, major premise, because it tells us all dogs are four-legged. Aristotelian logic focuses primarily on the classification of subjects, rejecting the identity of predicates. In this syllogism the subject Fido is a member of the category “dogs” and therefore has four-legs. Arieti (236) is mistaken when he writes, “In Aristotelian thinking only identical subjects are identified.” It is more complicated than that. In the above syllogism, the subject of the conclusion is identified as belonging to the predicate of the major premise.
 
** And by association, “private meanings” reminds me of Alfred Adler’s private logic “to indicate neurotic reasoning, [though his] followers, including [Rudolf] Dreikurs, broadened [the term] to cover thinking patterns of both normal and abnormal psychologies” (Independent Judgment, 65-66n26). Emotion is probably the guiding link in all associations that our conscious or subconscious minds make. (Cf. Freud on wish fulfillment in dreams as discussed in last month’s post.) Subconscious “emotional generalization” is what psychologist Edith Packer has called the effect of repeated, habitual emotional responses to similar persons, objects, or events, formed—by association—without explicit conceptual identification (1, chap. 3; 2).