Toward a theory of the unified unconscious?

I really enjoyed Mitchell's explanation and analysis of Loewald contrasted with Freud and Sullivan, whose views I did not particularly enjoy last week. The classical rhetoric of psychoanalysis, in Freudian terms, has always felt too divisive, rooted in the separation of parts of the Mind which cannot, by principle of their existence inside a single entity, be teased apart; similarly to most attempts to peel layers of 'culture' away from the 'individual'. There is no Person who can be separated from their environments, both physical and social, just as there can be no separation of the unconscious from the conscious, the 'spirit' from the body. I realized last week, and continued musing upon this week, that the Freudian image of differentiated conscious and unconscious minds/mind spaces/places/bodies/times/etc. reminds me a bit too much of the western narrative of the soul apart from the body. The Christianized version of the Soul feels unnatural to me; a spiritual being inhabiting a mechanical flesh suit for a brief period upon Earth, during which time the soul's mission is to resist the needs of said corporeal, meat casing and prove its reliance only upon the divine gifts of an unknowable god. Ironically, Freudian psychoanalysis mirrors this narrative, despite the tradition in Jewish religion and philosophy which is rooted in the idea of a multi-'partite' personhood, invariably enmeshed within a physical form, both of which are necessary for each other (or rather, the total unit) to survive. There is actually a story about a group of rabbis who tried to separate the yetzer hara, the darkness or inherent 'badness' (read: the Id) from the body en masse - trapping it in a big pot, or a barrel of pickles, depending on the telling. The result of this action? Chickens stopped laying eggs, wheat ceased to grow, and social relations broke down. The rabbis interpreted this to mean that the yetzer hara (id) is a necessary complement of the nefesh (living soul, one of five aspects of the human persona but also the sort of core soul-ness). Without it, there would be no desire to build a home, couple, have children, conduct business, and meaning/purpose would cease. Much like the Shakry discussion of Sufi psychoanalytics last week, the nefesh, like the naf(s), is inseparable from the body and an integral part of the total human unit. There is an animal soul and a human soul, loosely translating to the id and ego, but they are two halves of the same whole, or, in less divisive terms, interlocking processes which create a whole human. Rather than locating the unconscious or soul in a part of the mind, nefesh ('living soul' which does not separate from the deceased form) loosely translates to the soul itself, as well as the conglomeration of neshamah ('breath' and the root of intellectual questioning), ruach ('wind/spirit' - origin of emotions), chayah ('life' - supra-rational, faith, will, commitment), and the yechidah ('essence' or piece of gd which speaks through us, the connection to the divine which negates any idea of separateness from it). None of these are separate parts, so much as subprocesses of a larger system which cannot be broken down into the conscious or unconscious, living from spirit, good from bad, instinct from reason, etc.This is why I appreciated Loewald's perspective, contrasted with Freud and Sullivan - the simple explanation of the unconscious and conscious as...not necessarily one and the same...but parts of a whole (both/and) which continue to dialogue with, and inform one another, throughout the individual's life. I found myself questioning the fundamental nature of the unconscious as something separate numerous times, as well as some of both Loewald's and Mitchell's language. On page 7, Mitchell discusses Sullivan's consensual validity and the idea of 'autistic' language (the primary process). Is ma-ma not universally recognized among English, and many other, speakers? How does this differ from the 'consensual' lexicon we adopt through complex language development? Freud apparently sees the mind as "linguistically coded", that for a dream to enter awareness it must operationalize words from the greater language group. Freud continues to seem inherently ableist in rhetoric, not to mention Eurocentric, in the idea that mind, thought, dreams, sense, feeling, emotion, etc. has to be rooted in a commonly understood language. I disagree.Sullivan, on page 6, describs the move from preverbal to verbal as the distinguishing feature of humans apart from animals - again, I disagree. "...culture, social organization, such things as language, formulated idas, and so on, are an indispensable and equally absolutely necessary part of the environment of the human being, of the person." This simply isn't true. Humans, culture, and verbal communications existed thousands of years before codified language, and they were no less human that the population alive today. At the same time, plenty of animal species have been documented as possessing not only proto-language systems, but concepts of play, cultures of sharing and reciprocity, performance, joking, resentment and revenge, creating complex tools and solutions. I also take issue with the idea of 'consensual validity' on the foundation of the idea of consent - while one may have "free will" and could, technically, abstain from learning or developing language, I would argue that adoption of, and adherence to, a common language is not consensual, but rather compulsory. Additionally, any academic knows fully well that there is no true lexicon set in stone, across departments, authors, disciplines, schools, countries, communities, cultures, etc. How can we call it consensual if the majority of the human experience is, indeed, inseparable from their contexts and unique understandings and operationalizations?Loewald is not exempt - on page 11, he is quoted saying that the "weakness of links between verbal thought and its primordial references makes it feasible for language to function as a vehicle for everyday rational thought and action, comparatively unaffected by or sheltered from the powers of the unconcious that tend to consume rationality." How can the unconscious consume rationality and at the same verbal thought be unaffected by it? If the unconscious "tends to consume rationality" then rationality and conscious is not so unaffected by the unconscious as Loewald seems to describe here. Similarly, the Freudian understanding of ego and reality dictates that they are "fundamentally at odds with each other...This conception of the relationship between the ego and reality,' Loewald (1980) suggests, 'presupposes a fundamental antagoism that has to be bridged or overcome otherwise in order to make life in this reality possible." This discussion honestly made me question how/why humans create worlds which are fundamentally incompatible with our internal drives/primary process/unconscious, thus necessitating an ego to cope with this incompatibility between the id and the outside world it has created. Why would humans operate in such a fashion? Are we really so intelligent, after all?Really looking forward to this discussion!