Human Development
Negative intrapsychic forces
Description:
Consciousness is limited in range by inherent genetic or structural factors, but it is also limited by intrapsychic forces some of which may have an acquired nature. In the case of blocked access to the unconscious store of memories, for example, an agency such as repression may come into play. It is sometimes convenient to distinguish what is in the memory in voluntarily recallable form and what is not. The former field is called by some, the pre- or fore-conscious; the latter, the unconscious. Other intrapsychic forces may block access to successive levels of the unconscious. Such levels may include sensory experiences of which there was no conscious awareness when they were stored, and inexplicable contents of the unconscious. The latter include other personalities, uncanny knowledge, psychic powers such as healing, reported former lives, and communications with intelligences other than embodied, human ones. Undoubtedly the privative, or negative, aspect of the blocking intrapsychic forces serves a salutary purpose and is conducive to a rational orientation to the world of everyday experience.