Self, Person, World: Interplay of Conscious and Unconscious in Human Life

Self, Person, World presents a synoptic survey of human life in its personal, social, and mythic dimensions, drawing on a wide variety of sources, most notably Freud, Weber, Husserl, and recent work in cognitive and developmental psychology. The book is based on the premise that no major aspect of human life can be understood adequately except in the context of the whole. The central theme running through the work is the pervasive intermingling and interaction between conscious and unconscious levels of thought and awareness. The approach is interdisciplinary and developmental, utilizing an unusual combination of hermeneutical and non-hermeneutical perspectives often considered to be antithetical. After explaining this method, McIntosh traces the growth of human personality and selfhood from the pre-linguistic but congnitively - and emotionally - active infant with an emergent unconscious core self , through the advent of language, initiation into the socially defined lifeworld, and the identity of the conscious self-aware I . Next he describes how people are linked together by largely unconscious identifications that supply the psychological ties holding together all social groups and social organization, which in turn assume a life of their own, evolve, and modify their original unconscious bases. Finally, McIntosh explores the realm of the sacred, which he describes as a kind of shining through of the unconscious into the conscious lifeworld. All societies, including our own supposedly secularized age, are pictured as having mythic foundations.