Unconscious Perception
We will propose the weird and oxymoronic concept of unconscious perception. A mirrored orb hovering just this side of sense, this strange psychical anomaly means that, on the one side, most of what we perceive, both internally and externally, remains unconscious (we see what we wish to see) and on the reverse, weirdly enough, that which is unconscious may, in fact, be perceived. This screwy vector, revolving on an axis between blindness and insight, is nothing less than a kind of nuclear reactor, that point where our worn-out reality meets the impossible real. Psychoanalysis encounters this strange liminal observer in the figure of the censor, that repressive gatekeeper who remains vigilant between the unconscious and consciousness—keeping out, famously, the intensity of certain feelings you may have for your mother. Does not this figure remain keenly aware of all that it wishes to remain unconscious? So the censor becomes the very essence of unconscious perception; heavily editing perceptions of an unthinkable reality (in order to make it thinkable) but that likewise has a profound perception of the unconscious itself, as it is found both in our most intimate self and in the outside world. Here we see where the unconscious is not only inside and down, as in the old topographical model of depth psychology, but also outside and everywhere, in which case it ceases to be the unconscious at all, and instead is all that we dare not and cannot recognize, but that, considering our current state of affairs, we must recognize; and furthermore, even were it only an “obscure self-perception,” it is probably the only real perception we will ever have (keeping in mind, obviously, that self is other).
Rippled Surface, 1950, MC Escher
