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VOJO
THE CARE OF SOULS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
to acknowledge and earnestly deal with hidden motives and
desires or ambitions in the realm of his personal relationships.
Sometimes this situation is revealed to the adviser in spite of
self-deception on the part of the confidant, whose ostensible
motives are to a marked extent different from the real but
concealed driving forces in the depths of his nature. Opposition
of this kind often betrays itself in gestures and actions of which
the person concerned remains completely unaware.
The Problem of the Unconscious
The terms ‘the unconscious’ or ‘the subconscious’ refer to
mental conditions that have assumed a very important role in
the so-called ‘New Psychology’ which, in contrast to the older
psychologies of consciousness, attempts to penetrate into and to
understand the concealed relations and mental activities of
personality. It has therefore been called ‘deep psychology’.
The hypothesis of a subconscious mental life has been
developed for two main reasons: first, the need to find the
causes of certain psychic phenomena the older psychologies
leave unexplained; secondly, the need to explain apparently
irrational phenomena of mental life.
If one observes the activity of the conscious mind, one
becomes aware that unexpected ideas break into and cut across
the train of thought from time to time; that moods change for
no apparent reason, sometimes becoming powerful enough to
direct the individual’s action into new channels; and that the
solution of difficult problems present themselves quite
unexpectedly while one is preoccupied with something else. Many
phenomena of this kind suggest that there is a certain lack
of coherence in conscious mental behaviour. Things seem to
happen for no reason. Ideas and feelings arise as if of their
own volition. There are, however, good reasons for believing
that the apparently haphazard activities of the mind can be
rationally explained in terms of mental operations that are
concealed from consciousness or inaccessible to it.
Many different explanations of these mental phenomena
have been propounded. Psychologists who believe that there is
a mental relation between the conscious and the unconscious
speak of a subconscious mental life. Others seem to favour the
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