How can knowledge of the unconscious help spiritually?
There are a number of ways in which bringing what is in the unconscious into consciousness can help us – certainly at the surface level clearing out some aspects of the past can help us be less preoccupied in meditation and contemplative prayer.
Here there is a connection with memory. For if God is always present in our lives then God is also present in our memories. As Rowan Williams puts it: ‘God is the agency that gives us back our memories, because God is the ‘presence’ to which all reality is present.’ Often the memories that are revoked also feel very present – we can feel as we felt at the time. Time and space have shifted we are in a sense in the eternal present – the now. One of the reasons that remembering is so important is because once memory is brought into the light and thought about it has less power to affect us without our knowing about it. Freud famously wrote about the return of the repressed looking at how feelings that have been kept out of the conscious mind may return with an unexpected force and in an unexpected way. If we keep things locked down and out of our awareness we are then less than whole or as Williams puts it again, ‘the refusal or denial of memory is … perhaps the deepest diminution of all. If the whole self is the concern and the theatre of God’s saving work, in the past of the self must be included in the scope of this work.’
Many writers have debated on the nature of the self and what the self might mean but all are pretty agreed that it is not a static fixed state but is in itself dynamic and changing according to circumstance. After all the very process of treatment and therapy is about the possibility of change; similarly deepening our spiritual life is about also changing and growing spiritually in our self. There is obviously continuity and that is partly about memory where continuity or my sense of self is seen in the form of my own story and our behaviour, our responses and reactions emerge from our experiences in the past. And of course we are affected by what we know about and by the unconscious – after all we are not just a machine and nor are we always capable of acting in the most rational manner. Our story is both a personal story and the wider story of the society and the culture that we live in and so how we are is affected by the history of others as well as ourselves. If we can remember we can also learn from the past and so we can in some ways transcend old patterns and old ways of behaving of responding.
For often memories lie at the heart of our feelings of pain – perhaps rejection and hurts. They will also include how we have hurt and rejected others. So the very process of remembering can also be an act of redemption done in the presence of God with God ever present in the memories.