Unconscious Approaches to World Suicide

Abstract

Any presentation, the title of which begins with the word “unconscious” faces as its first requirement a definition of that term. This, however, poses a problem which, despite a plethora of discourses on the subject, is still almost impossible to solve either semantically or operationally. To begin with, the prefix “Un” denies what follows, much as unreality denotes what is “not real”. But have any two physicists or philosophers* ever agreed as to what is “real”? And can physiologist or psychologist “really” delimit what is “conscious”?** Indeed, in the history of thought, the term Unconscious has had about as many connotations as there were commentators.