Abstract
The quote above is dated: as I write this, factory workers are likely to feel lucky to be working at all. It well could be, as the country emerges from its current financial distress, factory workers may feel dissatisfied again. But the fact remains that our current states of satisfaction are often creatures of past conditions utterly unbeknownst to us and therefore unconscious.
There is a merciful mechanism in the human mind that prevents one from knowing how unhappy one is. One only realizes it if the unhappiness passes, and then one wonders how on earth one was ever able to stand it. If the factory workers once got out of factory life for six months there would be a revolution such as the world has never seen.
[The poet W.H. Auden (1939)].
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Notes
- 1.
Rather than being pushed by determinant past forces of external conditioning or driven by the unconscious tensions between the psychoanalytic “superego” and “id,” voluntaristc behavior for symbolic interactionists was seated in the self-consciousness involved in taking the role of the other toward one’s own actions. This had a strong teleological character wherein actors’ present behavior is “pulled into being” by their own desired future – that is his or her positive anticipation of the future consummation of the act. In contrast to more prevalent deterministic approaches, the self was no longer rendered epiphenomenal it was in conditioning and earlier psychoanalytic formulations, but is placed on center stage as the key to a model of agency.
- 2.
I am not saying that we should deny the importance of self-consciousness, far from it. I am saying that in 2010 it cannot be considered the whole ball of wax, and symbolic interaction could both enrich and expand itself by addressing the fact of unconscious symbolic and semiotic processes.
- 3.
These findings are reminiscent of Marx’s methodologically questionable “false consciousness.”
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Franks, D.D. (2010). The New Unconscious: Agency and Awareness. In: Neurosociology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5531-9_4
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