Recently a new scientific community has formed to study the once taboo subject of consciousness. What is primarily sought in this ‘science of consciousness’, and what is seemingly most elusive, is an understanding of how our phenomenological and psychological experience of mind relates to the biological, chemical and physical nature of our brain and body. A concise relationship between the two often seems impossible from a philosophical standpoint. How can the aggregate activity of a bunch of nerve cells—no matter how large this bunch is or how carefully they are interconnected—give rise to our complex conscious awareness? It may be the case, however, that the enormous and often overlooked complexity of our psychological experience requires our patience at this point. This complexity of psychology will likely meet up with a complexity of similar degree in neurophysiology. And with upward of 1012 neurons to consider, this seems even more likely. Add to that the variety of human language, personality and culture and one may wonder how even that many neurons can respond to such diversity. Progress on the mind-body relationship may only be made when we have sufficiently taken the complexities of both into full account.
David Chalmer’s (1995)* description of what makes consciousness so hard to understand scientifically reflects something very close to what I take to be the common sense understanding of consciousness:
The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing [in the brain], but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel (1974) has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience (p. 201).
There is a sense that while our brains may be doing something, we are also aware directly of what our brains are doing without having to attach electrodes to our skull and monitor changes in microelectric fields. Somehow, when we are asleep and not dreaming, we are not conscious. The brain and body is still alive but not supporting a behavior that will allow most of us an opportunity to recall what it was like to have been asleep on the night in question. It is as if the light switch of consciousness is turned off when we sleep at night and turned on again when we wake in the morning. This appearance and disappearance of consciousness in our lives is one of the central mysteries of human experience. Seen as such a profound mystery, even to today’s scientists and philosophers of consciousness, it is not so surprising that some have argued that the world’s myths contain important insights into the nature of appearing and disappearing consciousness.
Erich Neumann makes just such a claim in his The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949)*. Neumann shows how the stories of gods, goddesses, creatures and human beings represent in collective culture an indirect awareness of an inner development of consciousness in the human psyche. What becomes apparent, according to Neumann, is a surprising bias in the way consciousness is represented in myth, "One thing, paradoxical though it may seem, can be established at once as a basic law: even in women, consciousness has a masculine character" (p. 42). In his view, the world’s myths reflect and represent the development of the conscious ego out of the original state of unconsciousness as the development of a masculine character out of a feminine background.
This interpretation of consciousness as having a masculine character raises a question: Do women experience consciousness in some fundamentally different way than do men? Neumann (1949)* claims, "Man experiences the ‘masculine’ structure of his consciousness as peculiarly his own, and the ‘feminine’ unconscious as something alien to him, whereas woman feels at home in her unconscious and out of her element in consciousness" (p. 125n). This would seem to suggest that women do not identify with their consciousness as closely as men do, yet how can this be? While it is often clear that men and women think or act differently from each other, it is not clear that the character of their awareness should be categorically different. Certainly one man’s pleasure is one woman’s (or man’s for that matter) pain and vice versa, but the fundamental sense of having experience? How can that be different between men and women? How can anyone possibly feel "out of her element in consciousness"? How can we feel estranged in the only context in which we can feel anything at all? With what experience apart from conscious experience can we compare our experience of being conscious? Clearly there seems to be no sensible answer to such a question. Yet it seems, at first, that this is implied in Neumann’s claims regarding the insight of myth into the nature of consciousness.
Neumann does, in fact, attempt to address this paradox, but in order to understand how he does so we must first examine how Neumann understands consciousness in relation to the ego and the psyche. Neumann (1994)* says, "When we speak of consciousness, we mean a consciousness centered in the ego and largely separated from the unconscious, whose archetypally masculine, independent development we have presented elsewhere" (p. 24). To round out this statement and to bring in the ground in which Neumann’s ideas are firmly rooted, it is helpful to examine Jung’s (1921)* definition of consciousness and ego:
CONSCIOUSNESS. By consciousness I understand the relation of psychic contents to the ego (q.v.). Relations to the ego that are not perceived as such are unconscious (q.v.)…. Consciousness is not identical with the psyche (v. Soul), because the psyche represents the totality of all psychic contents, and these are not necessarily all directly connected with the ego, i.e., related to it in such a way that they take on the quality of consciousness (p. 421-2).
EGO. By ego I understand a complex of ideas which constitutes the centre [sic] of my field of consciousness and appears to possess a high degree of continuity and identity…. The ego-complex is as much a content as a condition of consciousness (q.v.), for a psychic element is conscious to me only in so far as it is related to my ego-complex. But inasmuch as the ego is only the centre of my field of consciousness, it is not identical with the totality of my psyche, being merely one complex among other complexes. I therefore distinguish between the ego and the self (q.v.), since the ego is only the subject of my consciousness, while the self is the subject of my total psyche, which also includes the unconscious (p. 425).
There are three important things to notice here. One is that ego and consciousness are two inseparable terms. In fact, Neumann often uses the term ego-consciousness as if each concept were essentially tied to the other. Another is that the ego is seen as the center of consciousness. From this I would assume that it is safe to say that for both men and women one’s sense of subjective existence within the psyche as a whole is based in the center of one’s consciousness. This corresponds with Chalmer’s equation of consciousness with subjective experience. The third thing to notice is that there is a sense that consciousness includes some subset of the total of all possible psychic contents. It is as if the individual human psyche is a vast room or warehouse full of ideas only some of which, however, are visible to the ego. Where the light shines in that vast warehouse, there goes the ego in self-awareness. Where the light does not shine, there is ignorance and mystery, the realm of the unconscious. The variably integrated set of "illuminated" ideas form the complex of one’s consciousness and the space in the warehouse of which one is aware.
Now the problem in Neumann’s understanding of consciousness can be rephrased: if women experience consciousness as something alien to them, then in what context are they aware of this alienation from consciousness? Clearly one’s own ability to be aware cannot itself seem foreign. Do women not have egos? Are women’s egos somehow not the center of their own consciousness? On this point Neumann (1994)* says the following:
When we speak of consciousness, we mean a consciousness centered in the ego and largely separated from the unconscious, whose archetypally masculine, independent development we have presented elsewhere. But [the man’s form of consciousness]…is an extreme case. Beside it we find living transitions between the unconscious and consciousness, such as matriarchal consciousness, especially characteristic for women.
For women, relationship to the whole is normally never replaced completely by conscious relatedness. In addition to identifying her ego with the midpoint of consciousness, woman always experiences the female Self—representing a point of view embracing the totality of the psyche—as powerful and convincing at a feeling level, while the male more fully identifies ego with consciousness, and his awareness of the primal relationship falls largely into the unconscious (p. 24).
Although Neumann repeats, in the first sentence of the above quote, a definition of consciousness and ego conforming to Jung’s, it would seem that in what follows he suggests that the center of consciousness can lie along a continuum between the extreme case of a separate masculine ego and the feminine Self as something of an alter ego located in the center of the psyche as a whole. This suggests that for men and women the ego is something which develops out of the unconscious separating itself from the Self as center of the psyche, but the complex of consciousness exists in the space between the ego and the Self. There is, in this distinction between men’s and women’s consciousness, a discovery of a more complex relationship between the ego and consciousness than Jung’s definitions allow.
This complexity is further revealed by Neumann’s use of the word Self in a way distinct from Jung’s sense of Self as center of the psyche. He labels the initial phase of the development of woman’s consciousness as Self-discovery but says in a footnote, "This Self-discovery must not be confused with the Self-discovery of individuality in the second half of life. Initially it appears to be ego-discovery, but is the first stage of finding one-Self, which, in woman’s individuation, we call attaining one-Self" (p. 7n). It would appear that Neumann wants to invoke a third center of awareness corresponding to a focal point in the psyche perhaps prefiguring the Self but not quite the Self in the Jungian sense. Perhaps, in woman, the ego develops in the unconscious of the woman’s psyche and the effect this has on her conscious Self, which in the man is in the unconscious, is to increase its available libido, to differentiate it in response to the differentiation of the ego. In this way a woman can experience a differentiating growth of consciousness and yet have a profoundly different relationship to the ego. Consciousness, then is not what is alien to women, the ego is.
Alternatively, this explanation could suggest that the ego-Self polarity is somehow reversed for men and women against a universal background of some kind giving one a view of the psyche that the other cannot apprehend. What is the Self for men is the ego for women and vice versa. In this way the definition of ego and consciousness would apply to both men and women, but there would be an acknowledged difference in the background, or unconscious, that distinguishes the character of the consciousness of men and women.
However, there is another difference that must be taken into account that Neumann points out. In the third phase of the development of women’s consciousness according to Neumann, where the masculine principle first forcefully asserts itself—presumably with the concentrated libido available to what would, for the man, be the ego-consciousness that he identifies himself with—Neumann (1994)* states,
Unconscious inner forces and transpersonal contents whose energetic charge greatly exceeds that of woman’s consciousness break into the personality with the emergence of the paternal uroboros. Because the power of the unconscious penetrates and overwhelms, woman experiences it as something Masculine that sweeps her away, seizes and pierces her, and transports her beyond herself (p. 17).
So there is a difference here between the man’s and the woman’s situation. For the man at this stage he must resist the overwhelming force of a feminine unconscious that seeks to pull him back regressively. His resistance is a victory for his conscious development that strengthens his ego-consciousness. However, for the woman, Self-surrender (Neumann, 1994, p. 18-9)* is the way through this developmental drama. Apparently a woman’s ego is not up to the task of conquering this invading force for as Neumann states, "The female ego has the absolute and, in a certain sense, correct conviction that it cannot accomplish this act [of liberation from the invasion of the patriarchal uroboros] by the strength of her ‘own ego’ but is dependent on the help of archetypally masculine power" (p. 27). So there would appear to remain a qualitative difference between the man’s and the woman’s ego that forces one to recognize that there is something more than a simple reversal of the ego-Self polarity in a relatively neutral background.
It would seem that there are two kinds of egos, a male and a female kind. The one with which the man identifies accumulates the greater degree of libido while the one with which the woman identifies has less. In the sense, then, of how much libido they have at their conscious disposal, women are less conscious because their egos are more rooted in unconscious processes than are men’s. That all of this exists on a universal, asexual psychic background becomes apparent when one realizes that the woman’s ego could be seen to correspond with the man’s anima and the man’s ego with the woman’s animus. If so, then it would appear that the ego of a developing human psyche has a choice of two paths, a male and a female one. And, in fact, the unchosen ego center retains a prominent place in the unconscious of the psyche in question, whether male or female.
What determines the direction of this development may be more complex than the fact of the individual’s physical sex. Cultural conditioning may also help to determine this choice. In fact, it may be the case that these two paths of ego development are seen as masculine and feminine largely because of prevalent cultural standards and patterns of behavior. These patterns of behavior may extend backward in an evolutionary sense to our primate and mammalian ‘cousins’ but this does not necessarily absolutely fix the possibilities of our natural, psychological development. If Neumann’s analysis proves to be correct then we may have achieved an objective view on the essential difference between the psychology of men and women. And given such an accomplishment of our collective consciousness, we may expect to develop as a society less polarized in our individual psychologies as we seem to be regarding sexual stereotypes.
In either case, it would seem that consciousness might not have a simple relationship with our bodies. It may arise through a complex relationship with our bodies and brains and even in part through our collective language and culture. Given that in both men and women there exist two psychic centers, one conscious, the other unconscious, it may be the case that the particular development of the individual may have as much to say about how consciousness is embodied as any genetically determined structure does. And if the character of consciousness is not fully determined until after birth and cultural conditioning set in, then consciousness will have a relatively remote relationship to the individual human brain-body for part of what it means to be conscious will be ‘embodied’ in the culture of that individual.
The above psychological analysis suggests that at a very deep level our consciousness takes on one of two forms giving rise to a fundamental difference in consciousness. Our stereotypical sexual differences may have provided us with our first look at just how deep the variety of consciousness runs. Such insights will be necessary as science continues to wonder at how our minds and our bodies are but two sides of the same coin.
Chalmers, D.J. (1995). Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200-219.
Jung, C.G. (1921). Psychological Types Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Neumann, E. (1949). The Origins and History of Consciousness Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Neumann, E. (1994). The Psychological Stages of Woman’s Development. In The Fear of the Feminine (pp. 3-63). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.