to produce any convincing evidence that consciousness is a product of the neurophysiological processes in the brain. They have been able to maintain this conviction only by ignoring, misinterpreting, and even ridiculing a vast body of observations indicating that consciousness can exist and function independently of thebody andof the physical senses. This evidence comes from parapsychology, anthropology, LSD research, experiential psychotherapy, thanatology, and the study of spontaneously occurring holotropic states of consciousness (“spiritual emergencies”). These disciplines have all amassed impressive data demonstrating clearly that human consciousness is capable of functioning in many ways that the brain, as understood by mainstream science, cannot possibly achieve and that consciousness is a primary and further irreducible aspect of existence – an equal partner of matter or possibly superordinated to it. 5.2 New cartography of the human psyche Traditional academic psychiatry and psychology use a model of the human psyche that is limited to postnatal biography and to the individual unconscious described by Sigmund Freud. According to Freud, our psychological history begins after we are born; the newborn is a tabula rasa, a clean slate. Our psychological functioning is determined by an interplay between biological instincts and influences that have shaped our life since we came into this world – the quality of nursing, the nature of toilet training, various psychosexual traumas, development of the superego, our reaction to the Oedipal triangle, and conflicts and traumatic events in later life. According to this point of view, our postnatal personal and interpersonal history determine who we become and how we psychologically function. The Freudian individual unconscious is also essentially a derivative of our postnatal history – a repository of what we have forgotten, rejected as unacceptable, and repressed. This underworld of the psyche (the idas Freud called it), is a realm dominated by primitive instinctual forces. To describe the relationship between the conscious psyche and the unconscious Freud used his famous image of the submerged iceberg. In this simile what had been assumed to be the totality of the psyche was only a small part of it, like the portion of the iceberg showing above the surface of the water. Psychoanalysis discovered that a much larger part of the psyche, comparable to the submerged part of the iceberg, is unconscious and, unbeknownst to us, governs our thought processes and behavior. Later contributions to dynamic psychotherapy added to etiological factors problems in the development of object relationships and interpersonal dynamics in the nuclear family, but shared with Freudian psychoanalysis the exclusive emphasis on postnatal life (Blanck and Blanck 1974, 1979; Sullivan 1953; Satir 1983; Bateson et al. 1956). Who we become and how we psychologically function is determined by what happens to us after we were born. But this model proves to be painfully inadequate when we work with holotropic states of consciousness induced by Spirituality Studies 1 (1) Spring 2015 13 (11)
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