The Unconscious in the Self

The exercise of leadership, whether in governance, business, or religious institutions, is complex and risky because of the complexity of the following: the context, the self of the leader, and the relationship of leaders and followers (Karel San Juan, 2009).

A major aspect of the complexity of the self is the influence of unconscious desires, which though integral to the personality of every human agent, will rarely bear direct influence on the person’s behavior in everyday routines.  Unconscious desires may directly influence behavior in critical situations, which are circumstances or “situations that threaten or destroy the certitudes of institutionalized routines” (Anthony Giddens, Constitution of Society).

Unconscious desires constitute much, but not all, of the unacknowledged conditions of interaction, including the everyday routine.  These desires are fundamentally infantile organic wants.  Through the socialization process initiated by the parents or guardians, most infants learn to relate these wants to the expectations of others and thereby learn to “manage” these wants.  Giddens writes:

“Given that the modes of management of organic wants represent the first, and in an important sense the most all-embracing accommodation which the child makes to the world, it seems legitimate to suppose that a “basic security system” – that is, a primitive level of management of tensions rooted in organic needs – remains central to later personality development; and given that these processes occur first before the child acquires the linguistic skills necessary to monitor its learning consciously…

“they lie ‘below’ the threshold of those aspects of conduct that, learned later and in conjunction with the reflexive monitoring of such learning, are easily verbalized – thus ‘made conscious’ – by the older child or adult.” (Giddens, New Rules)

In a critical situation, the unconscious of a leader or a major participant can contribute directly to the production of unintended consequences of action.  An example is the case of somebody who is depressed because of the loss of a beloved person either by death or estrangement.  If the depression becomes protracted, the agent or leader can become more withdrawn or more demanding in his/her dealings with others (Giddens, Studies in Social and Political Theory). 

Further withdrawal or increased hostility represents an indirect and disorientated appeal for attention, love or forgiveness; this ambivalent behavior, however, can produce an effect that the depressed agent or leader does not really want: followers, relatives, acquaintances, or the estranged beloved might avoid the depressed person increasingly.  A continuing deterioration of their interaction increases the possibility of suicidal behavior on the part of the depressed.

The ambivalent behavior of the depressed agent is sustained by ambivalent memory-flashes about the beloved.  Facts and fancies of instances of having been snubbed, neglected, or offended by the beloved are recalled, which bring hostile feelings, which then are repressed.  These repressed feelings evoke the deep foreboding that one has actually been abandoned by the absent beloved.

The depressed agent carries a self-absorbing sense of guilt which twists the hostile feelings about the beloved into a pervading hostility to the self.  This shadowy hostility is self-punitive, punitive toward others, or both.  Thus, the agent becomes withdrawn, and can become hostile even toward friends.

The foreboding that one has been abandoned is influenced directly by infantile memory-flashes of those instances when the infant sensed that the nurturing object was absent.  In those moments, the infant feared that the absence was permanent and that the nurturer or guardian had abandoned it.

Good socialization or child-rearing accustoms an infant not only to the temporary absences of a guardian but also to the deferments of some organic pleasures to later moments.  The well-socialized child has learned that, first, a period of absence does not necessarily mean abandonment, and second, a deferment of pleasure can anticipate or bring more satisfaction.

Every well-socialized person, however, still retains unconscious, and thus non-reflexive and non-discursive, infantile pleasures and fears in the deepest recesses of the personality.  In a critical situation, these unacknowledged pleasures and fears can condition directly the action of a person.

Another example of how unconscious conditions can contribute to the production of unintended consequences is the case of an infantry company whose esprit de corps revolves on their devotion to the captain or commander.  In a critical situation like a battle, a strong-willed and admired captain can keep a company united and co-operative no matter how bad the battle is becoming.

In the minds of many of these infantrymen, the figure of their captain is colored by childhood feelings about their fathers or guardians.  Encouraged by emotive flashes of the charmed and contented dependence of childhood, they can immediately submit to the difficult tactical decisions of their captain.  Yet the more fervent their devotion to the captain, the stronger is the possibility that his sudden death in battle will trigger infantile panic and even desertion among his infantrymen.

Reflexive agency has boundaries: the unconscious and the unacknowledged conditions and the unintended consequences of action and interaction.  Leaders and their followers do make history, but especially in critical situations, the influence of the unconscious becomes strong and less indirect.  In such situations, what may appear already to be the most logical option may not likely be the option most existentially attractive to the leader(s).  To accept the existence of the unconscious implies that, in critical situations, observers and analysts have to be wary of overconfidence in the human capacity for critical reason and rational action.

Shared Mission in Prophetic, Kingly & Priestly Service

In the field of Catholic education, there is great necessity and opportunity to deepen the sense of shared mission especially among the lay, religious, and clerical educators.  For their “shared mission” as “builders of communion,” all educators in Catholic schools ought to undergo “shared formation” (Congregation for Catholic Education [2007]).

In shared formation, “the lay faithful themselves can and should help priests and religious in the course of their spiritual and pastoral journey” (Vocation and Mission of the Lay Faithful 61).  “Communion and mutuality in the Church are never one-way streets” (CICLSAL [2002],“Starting Afresh from Christ,” 31). 

Wise pastors and religious seek and welcome relevant feedback from lay persons as regards the outcomes of pastoral programs, the quality of the preaching and worship activities, and the personal conduct of pastoral agents.

The formation of the laity is a requirement for the work of evangelization by both the younger and older churches:

“The Gospel cannot become deeply rooted in the mentality, life and work of a people without the active presence of lay people.  Thus, from the foundation of a church very special care must be taken to form a mature Christian laity.” (Church’s Missionary Activity 21)

The catechetical and theological formation of the laity strengthens the prophetic ministry of the whole Church and helps the laity to proclaim in word and deed the Gospel in day-to-day life and in particular contexts.  Lay persons as catechists, Catholic school teachers, married theologians, and faith-inspired politicians and public servants have many opportunities to exercise their prophetic ministry.

Church leaders can strengthen the prophetic ministry of the laity in the following ways:

1. Support the theological education of lay people.

2. Include lay (single and married) theologians in seminaries (especially to teach sexual ethics, the sacrament of matrimony, Church history, Scripture).

3. Discover and develop gifted lay preachers in parishes and communities.

In countries of the Two-Thirds World, where many families of the lay faithful experience hunger and deprivation of basic needs from time to time, the prophetic ministry of the poor has to be recognized and developed.  The poor have to be empowered to tell their stories and to retell them from a faith perspective.  As the Second Plenary Council of the Philippines put it in 1991:

“The ‘Church of the Poor’ will also mean that the Church will not only evangelize the poor, but that the poor in the Church will themselves become evangelizers.  Pastors will learn to be with, work with and learn from the poor.  A ‘Church of the Poor’ will not only render preferential service to the poor but will practice preferential reliance on the poor in the work of evangelization.”  (PCP II, 132)

The pervasiveness and persistence of dehumanizing poverty and unnecessary violence in our contemporary world makes it imperative for the whole Church, and for every believer, to exercise better the kingly ministry by paying attention to the wisdom and folly, the fairness and unfairness, of the formulation and implementation of policies of the State and the Church.  

A major branch of the kingly ministry is the ministry of social action whose guiding principles include justice, peace, and the integrity of creation.

Church leaders can strengthen the kingly ministry of the laity in the following ways:

1. Intensify education on the Catholic Social Teachings especially on the rights and responsibilities of lay people in the worlds of politics and economics.

2. Ensure that the Parish Pastoral Council is fully functional in terms of personnel, resources,and responsibilities.

3. Open the membership of policy-making councils and boards (of trustees) of Catholic schools, hospitals and institutions to competent laity.

4. Make the Ministry of Financial Management in parishes and ecclesial communities fully functional, transparent and accountable especially when it comes to budgeting and resource mobilization.

Despite the grief and anguish of many people, especially the poor and the sick, throughout history down to our times, the faithful and merciful presence of the Spirit of Christ animates the priestly ministry of the whole Church of which every member constitutes “a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Peter 2:9).  

God’s people offer a sacrifice of praise day and night in liturgies and prayers and in the upliftment of hearts and minds to the Lord in the midst of day-to-day activities and struggles.

In the royal priesthood, there is basic equality in dignity of all the members, whether they happen to be ordained or not.  “The ordination of one should not become the subordination of another” (Peter Neuner).  The ordained priesthood and the common priesthood are meant to enhance their communion and to preserve both their distinction and their equal dignity.

One way Church leaders can strengthen the priesthood of the majority faithful is by inviting and involving them, especially those with musical and artistic talents, in the making of creative worship activities like children’s liturgies.

“When the lay faithful discover and live more and more their vocation and mission in the Church and in the world, the ordained will likewise discover the meaning of their own vocation and mission.Such a discovery on the part of both the clergy and the laity who were called not to compete but to complement each other will result in a deeper realization of the ministry and spirituality of all the baptized.” (PCP II, 417)

The Church is a mystery of communion and shared mission to make the open communion of the Holy Trinity more visible and tangible throughout the earth.  It is timely, first, to deepen understanding of the shared mission of all the disciples, both the majority and the minority faithful; second, to improve their co-responsibility and co-operation; third, to empower the laity especially through theological and professional formation.

The laity are secular because they are called to contribute to the sanctification of the world often in implicit ways especially in multireligious, multicultural, or pluralistic contexts.

Shared Mission

Fifty years since Vatican II (1962-65), it is timely, first, to deepen understanding of the shared mission of all the Lord’s disciples, both the majority (lay) faithful and the minority (religious and clerical) faithful; second, to improve their co-responsibility and co-operation; third, to empower the laity especially through theological and professional formation.

In chapter 2, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church or Lumen Gentium (LG) affirms that there is basically one vocation and one mission for all the disciples, whether lay, consecrated, or ordained. 
 
By virtue of the sacrament of baptism, every disciple has both the right and responsibility to exercise the threefold ministry of prophet (proclaimer), priest (sanctifier) and king (policy-maker) within the Church and wider society.  Thus, the laity “in their own way share the priestly, prophetic and kingly office of Christ and to the best of their ability carry on the mission of the whole Christian people in the Church and in the world” (LG 31). 
 
“Each of the faithful [has] the right and duty of exercising charisms in the Church and in the world for the good of humanity and the development of the Church, of exercising them in the freedom of the Holy Spirit who ‘breathes where It wills’ (John 3:8), and at the same time in communion with one’s brothers and sisters in Christ, and with one’s pastors especially” (Apostolate of the Laity 3).
 
“The lay faithful are not second class members [of the Church].  They share with all the baptized an equal Christian dignity.” (Second Plenary Council of the Philippines [PCP II], 405)  It is not their primary mission to be junior partners or participants in the apostolate of the minority faithful, the ordained and the consecrated members.
 
Co-responsibility among the majority and minority faithful are necessary for the work of integral evangelization in which the whole Gospel is offered to whole persons with their religious, cultural, political and economic aspects.  Both the clergy and the religious worldwide cannot offer enough energy and expertise to evangelize all the vast fields of economics, politics, and cultures.
 
The whole Church needs competent and committed laity (and even competent and benevolent non-believers) to engage with the world:

“Nowadays when things change so rapidly and thought patterns differ so widely, the Church needs to step up this exchange [with different cultures] by calling upon the help of people who are living in the world, who are expert in its organizations and its forms of training, and who understand its mentality, in the case of believers and nonbelievers alike” (Church in the Modern World 44).

 
Engagement with the world is what the laity do in their day-to-day lives.  Thus, the laity have a “secular character,” as “they are engaged in each and every work and business of the earth and in the ordinary circumstances of social and family life” (LG 31). 
 
The laity are secular, not because their activities are outside of or in opposition to the action of the Holy Spirit.  “The secular character of the laity does not make them ‘worldly’ or keep them from the sacred activities of the mission of the Church” (Aurelie Hagstrom).  They are secular because much of their day-to-day practices and affairs are outside of the control or administration of the hierarchy. 
 
More importantly, the laity are secular because they are “immediately and most numerously seen as the presence of the Church in the world” (PCP II, 423), and they are called to “contribute to the sanctification of the world, as from within like leaven” (LG 31), especially in multireligious, multicultural, or pluralistic contexts.  In such contexts, the explicit proclamation of the faith has to be done wisely and during opportune times so that faith expressions would not be like “pearls (thrown) to pigs” (Matthew 7:6) which might provoke unnecessary scorn or violence.
 
Integral evangelization entails the active participation and co-leadership of lay persons, as their “field of evangelizing activity is the vast and complicated world of politics, economics…the world of culture, the sciences and the arts, international life and the mass media.  It also includes… human love, the family, the education of children and adolescents, professional work and suffering.” (Evangelization in the Modern World 70)

The active participation of the majority faithful becomes more urgent owing to these signs of the times: the ageing of the clergy and their steadily diminishing numbers in the older churches of Europe and North America, the globalization of information and, with increasing access of masses of people to means of interactive communication, increasing discontent with one-way communication, authoritarianism, and elitism globally.

Health and Vital Enigmas

In trying to improve the services of the public health system in the Philippines, leaders and conscientious citizens have to adopt or recognize an integral model of health and to avoid an uncritical adoption of the Western “biomedical model of health” which tends to forget or repress existential enigmas and thus to become a narrow and dehumanizing view of health.
According to Anthony Giddens:
“The biomedical model of health [builds on] the belief that disease can be defined in objective terms and that the sick body can be restored to health through scientifically based medical treatment.  The biomedical model of health emerged alongside modern societies.  It was linked to the rise of demographics – the study of the size, composition and dynamics of human populations – and the growing interest of states in promoting public health.” (Sociology, 4^th ed)

In the process of building the modern urban environment, sources of existential anxiety such as deterioration and death, chronic sickness, madness, and eroticism got sequestered from day-to-day routines (Modernity and Self-Identity).  These realities remind us that we are inseparable from nature, its rhythms, and its contingencies.
 

In the process of building the surveilled environments of hospitals, asylums, and carceral complexes, these realities became secluded from regular activities.  The face-to-face presencing of dying and death, the very smell of it, and the laughing and singing of the insane have become unusual phenomena to upper-class and middle-class persons especially in urban locales.

“In pre-modern societies chronic sickness was part of many people’s lives and contact with death was a more or less commonplace feature of everyone’s experience (Modernity and Self-Identity).  These critical yet familiar features of pre-modern life were often enveloped in traditional practices and rituals that offered meaning and solace.  Deep immersion in tradition helped people to appreciate the continuous intermingling of being and non-being in the world.

The Church needs to re-examine and to redesign or restructure creatively its liturgies and rituals in order to help contemporary people appreciate better the intermingling of being and non-being in society and nature.

Power and Agency

Among interacting agents, a disparity of discursive skills, or a disparity in knowledge about rules of formal discourse, can easily lead to a structuration of domination during those occasions and in those settings in which discourses are expected.  In most day-to-day contexts of interaction, a disparity of skills and resources among the agents exists, and thus more often than not, domination structures are reproduced.

For Anthony Giddens, what is more significant is the logical conjunction of the notion of human agency and that of power.  He writes:

“Action intrinsically involves the application of ‘means’ to achieve outcomes, brought about through the direct intervention of an actor in a course of events, ‘intended action’ being a sub-class of the actor’s doing or refraining from doing; power represents the capacity of the agent to mobilize resources to constitute those ‘means.’  In this most general sense, ‘power’ refers to the transformative capacity of human action.” (New Rules)

For Giddens, the understanding of power as domination is narrower than his general conception of power as transformative capacity.  Furthermore, in his view, “the relation between power and conflict is a contingent one.” He continues:

“If power and conflict frequently go together, it is not because the one logically implies the other, but because power is linked to the pursuance of interests, and people’s interests may fail to coincide…Power is a feature of every form of human interaction, division of interest is not.” (New Rules).

For Giddens, the reproduction of a domination structure during interaction does not necessarily imply that there exists a conflict of interests among the interacting agents.  There are contexts when the interests of a dominant person (or group) and a dependent person (or group) do coincide, and although such contexts are perhaps less common than not, they can be significant enough not only for sociological analysis but also for anticipating social changes.

For Giddens, “power relations are relations of autonomy and dependence, but even the most autonomous agent is in some degree dependent, and the most dependent actor or party in a relationship retains some autonomy” (Central Problems).  All forms of dependence make some resources available to subordinates for influencing the activities of their superiors.  Giddens calls this notion the dialectic of control in systems of interaction.

Giddens’ conception of the dialectic of control recognizes that power relations are not constant-sum games.  Social power is not a fixed quantity that gets divided between the interacting parties so much so that when one party becomes more powerful the other party becomes weaker correspondingly.

The dialectic of control is open to a wide range of possible effects: (1) both interacting parties become more powerful, though usually to different degrees; (2) one party becomes more powerful while the other becomes weaker; or (3) both parties becomes weaker.

Human Consciousness

According to Anthony Giddens, practical consciousness is “tacit knowledge that is skilfully applied in the enactment of courses of conduct, but which the actor is not able to formulate discursively” (Central Problems).  It is not the unconscious.

Giddens analytically distinguishes practical consciousness from discursive consciousness, but affirms that both converge in many moments of social interaction.  In the realm of discursive consciousness, “discursive capabilities do not just take the form of propositional statements: ‘discourse’ has to include modes of expression which are often treated as uninteresting in sociological research – such as humour, sarcasm and irony” (Constitution of Society).

A living language is primarily practical consciousness not only because it is both a medium and a product of social interaction.  It is practical consciousness because, in every living language, most ordinary speakers or most native speakers know and use the linguistic rules, and the exceptions to these rules, without being able to state or explain them adequately.

Practical consciousness of a rule involves genuine knowledge or skill that is learned and taught in the doing, and somebody who has mastery of a rule rarely has to “interpret” or “think” (or “talk to some inner self” about) that rule while enacting that rule (New Rules).

Rules and skills for an interaction are not only linguistic.  They include the continuous monitoring of one’s body, of the other bodies present, of the resources the bodies carry, and the setting of the interaction.  Thus, an understanding of rules is inadequate when it is not closely connected to the use or the availability of resources.  Practical consciousness is tacit knowledge of how to proceed, how to go on, especially in the day-to-day contexts of social existence.

In a routine context of interaction, practical consciousness is expressed in a procession of gestures, facial expressions, and conventional remarks, each one of which is, in that context, regular or rational enough so much so that neither the agents nor participant observers see the need for an explanation of each act right after each act is done.  Practical consciousness, however, is not mechanical, no matter how routine is the context.

Practical consciousness entails a continuous monitoring of both one’s own and the other’s behaviour, for the regularity or rationality of even a small gesture does not depend on the gesture itself but on its timeliness and position within the continuous process of an interaction in a specific setting.

For example, a simple smile, which had passed unremarked in one moment, could provoke a demand for an explanation if inserted in another moment or in a different setting.  Any agent could be queried also about one’s untimely silence or pause in a conversation.

To routinely know both the convenient and the inconvenient continuities and discontinuities of interaction in a particular context entails skills that mostly have been learned after a long period of time or after repeated immersions in such or similar contexts.

Language as Structure

A good example of a structure is a living language, which binds a particular people and their practices across the generations and across distances.  Language is a structure that is both a medium and an outcome during instances of communication.  This necessary medium, the irreducible linguistic structure, is implicit in every instance of intelligible communication.
 
Every intelligible sentence exchanged by talkers, for example, presupposes a practical mastery of the grammar, the syntax, and the morphology of the language in use.  The talkers do not make use of all the possible linguistic rules for every sentence, but every intelligible utterance entails, none the less, a prodigious and complex set of rules.  This set of rules becomes effectively present in its absence, in its evanescent instantiation in every sentence spoken.
 
“Language is what language does” (Social Theory and Modern Sociology), or “language is practical consciousness” (Karl Marx).  Language is practical, as it facilitates social intercourse, which reproduces it as a social product.  A living language is never private property, and it can never be withheld from the other talkers, who regularly appropriate it.
 
The regular use of language by every communicative person renders the linguistic structure not only present but also evanescent, as every intelligible expression momentarily reproduces and potentially modulates the structure.  As an intelligible expression unfolds in empirical time-space, the linguistic structure is reproduced in virtual time-space.
 
A good illustration of the practical, pliable, and evanescent aspects of the linguistic structure is the phenomenon of the ordinary conversation, which never entails strict rules.  Within the flow of conversation, some half-sentences, subjectless remarks, verbless expressions, and prepositional phrases can become crucial moments of communication. 
 
The actual intelligibility of grammatically vague or mangled expressions disrupts the linguistic structure and “corrupts” or modifies its rules.  Yet it is precisely the practical mastery of the rules of a particular language, as is usually the case with native speakers, which enables conversationalists every now and then to suspend some of the rules without thereby turning their talk into a babel of voices.  The competent suspension of rules is an instance of the presence-in-absence of structure.
 
Today, most non-aboriginal languages have grammatical rules and standard lexical items in writing, but the practical reality of a living language enables some widely-used slang and colloquial expressions to be accepted eventually into formal speech and writing.  Furthermore, every standard lexical item can acquire novel connotations or even additional definitions through frequent application outside the usual contexts.
 
In the same process, formal expressions can fall into such disuse that they eventually disappear even from specialized texts.  This is a continuous process of the appearance, disappearance, and modification of the verbal expressions and their connotations, and thus the linguistic structure is never, at any moment, simply itself.

A private act of an individual agent, however, does not introduce a modification of the linguistic structure or of any structure whatsoever.  A linguistic, normative, or domination structure can undergo modification within a system of interaction and not through a private individual act.

 
The actual intelligibility of vague or inexact expressions, especially during conversation, depends on a mastery not only of linguistic rules, but more so, of corporal and contextual rules and resources.  A mastery of these rules and resources entails a “ramified control of the body and a developed knowledge of how to ‘go on’ in the plurality of contexts of social life” (Constitution of Society).

The spatio-temporal nature of the body, its movements, and the setting of the interaction can often determine the meaning of expressions to a greater degree than formal linguistic rules can.  In the flow of a conversation, for example, a mangled verbal expression can become instantly intelligible within a certain timing, spacing, and positioning of the body and its movements: the speed of gestures, the rise and fall of the voice, the inclination of the head, the facial expression, and the overall posture.

The timing-spacing of the body in day-to-day contexts is an effective expression of the practical consciousness of the agent.  This practical consciousness includes the monitoring and the use of contextual resources, the resources on the interacting bodies, the resources these bodies bring, and the resources near at hand.  For example, power-dressing (religious, military, formal, fashionable, or expensive attire) influences interaction in many contexts.