The Role of Our Unconscious in Love

We will not have understood very much about how love really works so long as we insist, with forgivable reasonableness and hope, that what we principally seek from relationships is to be happy.

To secure a properly rounded sense of what is really at play in love, we need to conceive of our minds as split into two – a conscious and an unconscious part – and limit our more optimistic and coherent expectations to the former.

Consciously, we may well speak of a wish to identify someone we desire and to build a sweet and supportive home with them. Unconsciously, the picture is distinctly more complicated.

The Strange Power of the Unconscious

Though consciousness is where we look out at the world from, it is by far the smaller of the two parts of the mind. We might think of it as a meagre flashlight vainly illuminating a patch of ground here or there in a vast, pitch-dark labyrinth. As much as 95 percent of what goes on in our minds happens far outside our conscious purview. ‘We’ are constantly doing things that ‘we’ aren’t in any way able to account for or speak about: for example, turning lunch’s veal cutlet into amino acids, glucose and adenosine triphosphate; manipulating the pluperfect and the subjunctive in a complaint about a late train; repairing strands of DNA in our sleep; coordinating the gastrocnemius and soleus muscles as we use a ladder to change a lightbulb; and activating the fusiform gyrus in the temporal and occipital lobes to recognise a friend coming towards us down a corridor.

In all these cases, we both know and don’t know. Something in our brains is following a set of principles, but we haven’t been gifted a power to speak about or grasp these in any direct way. There is – for much of the time – a ghost, or at least a very powerful agent we can’t dialogue with, inside our own minds.

When it comes to love, the unconscious is especially active – and determinedly cryptic. It guides us on our first dates, it configures our minds as we prepare for bed, it inspires us to speak – or not – on weekend breaks. And all the while, we have little clue that the unconscious even exists, let alone that it is busy moulding the course of love.

How the Unconscious Shapes Our Relationships

Nevertheless, we have, collectively, over the years, learnt to retrospectively identify a few of its signature moves and methods of interpretation. To summarise a selection of these:

• the unconscious doesn’t appear able or inclined to distinguish between periods of time; it exists in a semi-permanent present dating back to early childhood. It doesn’t differentiate between the world as it was when we were a toddler and as it might be for us today. A three-year-old’s mute rage at an unavailable parent might, through the operations of the unconscious, be blithely re-enacted in the life of a forty-year-old attempting to make a new relationship work.

• the unconscious isn’t overly interested in close distinctions between people. It works on the basis of archetypes that form early in its existence and are then applied liberally when making sense of later arrivals. For its purposes, a wife may silently read simply as ‘mother’, a boyfriend as ‘brother’; and every angry man, with no less mystery than the consolidation of memories in the hippocampus during REM sleep, as ‘daddy’.

• the unconscious settles, early in its existence, on a level of happiness that it associates with stability. Later departures, even in a positive direction, create a paradoxical sense of alarm and initiate invisible processes of homeostatic correction. The calm and supportiveness gifted to us by a new partner may come across as awkward, even extremely threatening, to the unconscious mind, which might then guide us to subtly detonate a fledgling relationship in order to return us to a more habitual state of alienation and sadness. The unconscious likes, and prioritises, what it knows and is used to – even when this happens to be a state of misery, resignation, masochism and despair.

• the unconscious is interested in helping us to re-find, in the present, characters who remind it of challenging parental figures from childhood, perhaps in order to make breakthroughs that were not originally available to it. It will, with uncanny precision, help us to pick out (from among hundreds of candidates) just the sort of person who will, in time, wind up drinking as avidly as our father or being as sarcastic and belittling as our mother. It wants us, in the deepest sense, to keep returning home.

• the unconscious is highly adept at devising strategies that enable a child to survive in a hostile early family environment. It will help a five-year-old to work out that it should be very quiet and meek so as to survive the temper of a parent. It will tell a seven-year-old that it should be antisocial in order to be noticed by distracted caregivers. It will teach a nine-year-old never to share anything about its feelings to a family that doesn’t care. What it isn’t good at doing is realising that times change – and the wisdom of certain strategies along with it. It forgets that emotional withdrawal, passive underconfidence or provocative rebelliousness may not be ideal in a marriage; it can invisibly spoil our chances of ever sustaining a relationship.

• the unconscious is a repository of a rage that periodically needs to discharged, but without too much regard for who or what might originally have caused it. The rage, typically owed to certain people in the past who made it impossible to express because they were too frightening, distracted or fragile, may sit unattended for many decades until opportunities for safe expression arise. For the unconscious, it really doesn’t matter so much whether one is taking revenge on a parent who betrayed and tormented one as a child or a partner who has – in fact – been nothing but kind and supportive since the honeymoon started three days ago. What counts is to drain the tank.

In other words, it is on account of a very curious, very powerful unconscious that we are able to systematically ruin our chances of contentment in love: that we turn against lovers who are kind, blow up relationships that are viable, hunt out partners who will hurt us, fall into depression on the eve of marriages or grow unable to have sex with spouses we love.

How We Can Work Against Our Unconscious

It may sound dispiriting, but hopelessness isn’t called for either. The unconscious, though immensely powerful, is not unstoppable. Our conscious minds, even if they comprise only five percent of our mental capacities, have agency. We have a genuine capacity to work out some of what we are most tempted to do – and to then act otherwise.

We can, in the physical arena, feel a very strong impulse to sneeze – and resist it. We can be certain that a balcony is about to give way – and step onto it anyway. Our inner alarm may do its best to convince us a plane is about to crash – and we can ignore it.

Similarly, in love, we can feel how much a part of us would like to punish a new partner for being kind to us – and nevertheless refuse to undermine them. We can note the pull of mysterious, sadistic lovers who seek to injure and torment us – and tell them we’re busy at the moment. We can know how much happiness scares us – and stay put. We can notice our temptations to rage against an innocent lover – and remain sweet. We can recognise our attachment to guilt, shame and fear – and, after a wobble, keep faith with joy and trust.

We may have no option but to coexist with the unconscious, we would be foolish ever to underestimate its strength, but we can – with sufficient cunning, patience and observant and kind friends – move beyond being merely its slaves or its puppets.