A Current Example of the Working of the Unconscious Mind

May 26, 2007 — drsubrotoroy

A Current Example of the Working of the Unconscious Mind

by

Subroto Roy

Sigmund Freud said he did not discover the existence of the unconscious mind in man. However, he certainly did most to comprehend its working. Yesterday I published an article in The Statesman in which I said Indian Independence and Partition came “Forty years later” — and the only date mentioned until that point in the text was of the 1918 Montagu-Chelmsford period.

The page proof had been read and reread by me the previous day, and during the proof-reading I had even asked myself specifically more than once whether the time from 1918 to India’s Independence was forty years and I had replied to myself yes it was. How could such an arithmetical mistake be made?

Students of Freud’s work will appreciate the answer. Unconsciously, I was in fact counting from the Morley-Minto period of 1906-1908 which had been the constitutional precedent for Montagu-Chelmsford. Morley-Minto was mentioned much later in the text. It was indeed forty years between Morley-Minto and Indian Independence in 1947. My unconscious mind had already fixed the starting point as Morley-Minto, so even during the proof-reading process, I repeatedly told my conscious mind that the calculation was correct when in fact it was not.

More about the conscious and unconscious mind and their relationship may be found in the works of the late John Wisdom (1904-1993), especially Proof and Explanation (University Press, 1991).

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