Inspiration - That touch of madness within us

2025-08-04

Despite the injunction “Γνῶθι σεαυτόν” (“Gnôthi seauton”, in English “Know yourself”) inscribed on the temple at Delphi, if there is one being that is difficult to understand and to define, it is man.^[1] In the 17th century, Descartes questioned himself about his beingness: “Am I not that very being who now doubts of almost everything; who, for all that, understands and conceives certain things; who affirms one alone as true, and denies the others; who desires to know more of them, and does not wish to be deceived; who imagines many things, sometimes even despite his will; and is likewise percipient of many, as if through the medium of the senses.”^[2] However, Descartes starts from the idea held by his contemporaries that man, as a divine creature, can be understood. That no part of him escapes his reason—except passion, against which we must equip ourselves to resist.

All this changed in the 19th century with the discovery of the unconscious mind, that part of the mind that escapes human reason, thanks in part to the work of Sigmund Freud, who responded to those who challenged the hypothesis of an unconscious mind: “… [the] assumption of the unconscious is necessary and legitimate, and […] we possess manifold proofs of the existence of the unconscious […] both in healthy and in sick persons mental acts are often in process which can be explained only by presupposing other acts, of which consciousness yields no evidence. […] our most intimate daily experience introduces us to sudden ideas of the source of which we are ignorant, and to results of mentation arrived at we know not how.”^[3]

The difficulty lies in not making this unconscious mind a separate part of our being, a kind of hidden god or monster that guides us instead of our reason. This is what the philosopher Alain, for example, fears: “Ajax, in the Iliad, says to himself: ‚My legs are getting myself along! Surely a god is guiding me!‘ If I do not believe in such a god, then I must believe in a monster hidden within me. In fact, man becomes accustomed to having a body and instincts. The psychiatrist thwarts this lucky disposition; he invents the monster; he reveals it to the one who is possessed by it. The famous Freudianism is an art of inventing a fearsome animal in every man, based on quite ordinary signs; …”^[4]

How, then, can we understand this unconscious mind, which is both a part of ourselves and, at the same time, something else? In his bestseller Dianetics, the American philosopher L. Ron Hubbard demonstrates that the human mind has two parts: one that is active when man is conscious, and another part, a more primitive one, that is activated during moments of pain, unconsciousness, or extreme stress for survival: “The source of aberration has been found to be the hitherto unsuspected sub-mind which, complete with its own recordings, underlies what Man understands to be his “conscious” mind. The concept of the unconscious mind is replaced in Dianetics by the discovery that the “unconscious” mind is the only mind which is always conscious. In Dianetics this sub-mind is called the reactive mind. A holdover from an earlier step in Man’s evolution, the reactive mind possesses vigor and command power on a cellular level. It does not “remember”: it records and uses the recordings only to produce action. It does not “think”: it selects recordings and impinges them upon the “conscious” mind and the body without the knowledge or consent of the individual. The only information the individual has of such action is his occasional perception that he is not acting rationally about one thing or another and cannot understand why.”^[5]

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