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Illustration of how the unconscious is active in every day life. 

I am a 3 ½ year old boy in a middle class family. Just at this time in my life my father becomes unemployed. He is devastated and angry. He turns his anger on me and I become a nuisance and he becomes physically abusive where he had never been before. In the experience of a 3 year old child the parents are gods. Let me expand this point a little. Whether you believe in God or not our perception of what God might be is that of an all powerful being. Whether this being is loving or not we may argue about but when we speak of God we think of this all powerful entity.

Now let us imagine a child who is 8 ½ months old and still inside his mother's womb. He is relating to his mother as a god. She provides for him everything. Every beat of his little heart is utterly dependent on her. He is at peace and she is responsible for this. In the psyche of this unborn baby his mother is a god. He also experiences her power when she expels him from this heavenly, blissful peace and births him into the world. His existence now is not so peaceful but in his psyche she is still all powerful. Similarly in his psyche the father in a different way is all powerful. He is the source of the energy that brings the child out into the world. He trusts his parents utterly and completely. He depends on them for everything and believes in their ability to console and comfort him in all his needs.

Then at 3 ½ years of age this god in his life turns on him. His self esteem will be shattered, he will experience anger, he will experience fear, he will experience disappointment and he will learn not to trust. That open, unconditional love which he had offered to his father is not to be trusted. The very person who is doing this to him, who is causing these negative experiences is the person who should be consoling him, so the little boy pretends this isn't happening and gets through it. One year later his father is re-employed and life resumes a peaceful quality.

Now we jump forward 35 years and this boy is now married with children of his own however he has encountered a difficult situation at work. His boss is a very negative person who appears to have taken a dislike to him and he is considering changing his job and is discussing this with his wife. His wife points out to him that in the last 6 years he has changed his job 3 times. In each situation it had to do with conflict with one of his colleagues or one of his superiors. She has no doubt that his boss is a very difficult person but she asks her husband if he would consider doing some inner work to see if it might help him cope with the situation rather than move and disrupt the family once again. He decides to do so and goes to a therapist and during the course of his relationship with that therapist he may get to understand that in reality he is really quite frightened of men. As he talks about the various situations which he has encountered he will in a deepening relationship with his therapist be able to talk and be able to remember about the time he was 3 ½ and his father hit him for the first time. He might get to understand that in this way that when he gets too close to individuals around him who have any power over him he begins to distrust them. What is happening is that the original wound which was so traumatic to him is coming to the surface and carries with it all the emotion that it evoked when it happened but couldn't be expressed. Now when he is nearly 40 these emotions are even more difficult to deal with than when he was 3 because he experiences them now much more intensely. In his relationship with his superiors he will become disturbed as this wound comes to the surface and in order to avoid the pain of that experience he himself will act in a way that will create an unhappy situation about him as a result of which he will change his job or be fired and will get him away from the situation which evokes these emotions of which he is not conscious. However when he has acknowledged these feelings and understood that he feared his father, that he cannot trust anybody, he will be a much freer individual than before and this is what we mean when we talk about things becoming conscious. This emotion related to a specific event is brought into consciousness and the energy associated with it is freed and in fact transformed and this man may in fact be able to trust more than the average person. He will also be able to trust himself. He will be a much freer person and not limited by the projections he has on other people. In other words he will no longer see other men as people deep down who can’t be trusted who are to be feared. Such a transformation can happen in some cases in a weekend, perhaps in a large group or it might take 2 or 3 years of therapy to achieve the same thing.