ABSTRACT
The coming into being of psychic reality may be understood from the standpoint of a developmental monistic ontology whereby there is a progressive unfolding of desire into an organizing and unifying process system we equate with the unconscious ego as an impersonal executive-synthetic agency. This agency is merely formal, hence it is not a personal agent or subject in any proper sense, which is commonly ascribed to human consciousness or selfhood. The unconscious abyss is initially immersed in its own corporeal sentient embodiment and awakens as appetitive motivational longing, its initial being-in-relation-to-lack. The abyss erupts from its self-enclosed original unity as pulsional desire. Such desirous rupture is in response to feeling its need, urge, or craving to experience and satiate the lack, which takes various initial forms that eventually breach into consciousness as ego proper. Originally, desire takes itself as its initial object through a form of pre-reflective self-consciousness the author refers to as unconscious apperception, the pure experiential self-sense belonging to precognitive unconscious thought. The development of unconscious subjectivity ultimately follows an organic process based on a series of dialectical mediations beginning as unconscious apperception and culminating in self-conscious reflection, the sublated domain of conscious human experience. Yet this initial rudimentary process of desirous rupture and apperception constitutes the birth of the human psyche, for mind is an epigenetic, architectonic self-organizing achievement expressed as a dynamic, self-articulated complex totality or psychic holism.
Unconscious mind is a series of spacings that first instantiate themselves as a multitude of schemata, which are the building blocks of psychic reality. A schema is a desirous-apperceptive-ideational unit of self-experience that is teleologically oriented and dialectically constituted. Schemata may be viewed as microagents with semi-autonomous powers of telic expression that operate as self-states as they create spacings within the unconscious. Schemata may take various forms, from the archaic to the refined, and instantiate themselves as somatic, sensuous, affective, perceptual, and conceptual (symbolic) orders within the psyche, each having their own intrinsic pressures, valences, intensities, intentional and defensive strategies, and unconscious qualia. It is here that the author wishes to offer a potential answer to the mind-body problem.
