On August 31, 2006, at the Book Fair in the Argentine city of Rosario, Silo presented his work Apuntes de Psicología (Psychology Notes).
The material, as the author comments its composition, “is a compilation of four notes taken on dates and places quite distant from each other”. The first note was taken in Corfu, Greece in 1975; the second, in Las Palmas de Canarias, Spain in 1976; the third, also in Las Palmas in 1978 and the fourth in Parque La Reja, Buenos Aires in 2006.
At the beginning of his presentation, Silo synthetically traces the point of view of his conception, clearly existential, marking differences with other lines of psychological analysis and offering in just one sentence, and almost in passing, a powerful definition of the human being.
“In saying above that our conception of the human psyche “does not start from materiality”, we place ourselves in a dimension close to that of existential analysis which places the consciousness in the explanatory plane of intentionality and purpose, and which also discards any appeal to the unconscious in order to understand different phenomena such as oneiric and even subliminal productions. I should add that this psychology is not alien to our general anthropological vision that understands human beings as “historical beings whose mode of social action transforms their own nature”.
Significant explanations will be given in the following paragraphs, substantiating the possibility of choice, freedom and transformation of the human species towards the overcoming of pain and suffering.
“In Psychology I, the psychism is studied in general as a function of life in relation to the environment. In the case of the human being, this horizon is broadened to reach the world of meanings and significant facts projected into the future, capable of overcoming the various determinisms in the direction of choice and freedom. The basic tension to overcome the pain and suffering present in life configures a behavior that is oriented by images and that is not limited to simple reflexes of flight as can happen in the world of natural life. The violence of nature that acts on the body, externally and internally, is registered in living beings as pain, but it is in the human being where the image of possible future situations that end up guiding a characteristic behavior is gestated”.
Here the relevance and goodness in the thinker’s attitude is already unveiled. The incursion into the complexity of mental phenomena and their explanation to wide audiences, aims at overcoming human suffering.
In Psychology 2, the Theory of Representation Space is developed. The novel notion addresses the necessary spatiality of the phenomena of consciousness and the location of the phenomena and of the observer or “gaze”.
As is often the case in the approach to these categories, the issue of representational space will lead to fundamental questions about representational time.
This time is radically different from the linear time with which we usually appreciate the occurrence of external events and leads us to understand the dimension of a complex time, in which “remembrance, evocation and even the simple discourse that appeals to previously acquired data and futurizations or possible directions of thinking” intertwine and operate.
This discovery has important implications, since it lets us see that not only the past – or what one imagines the past to have been – influences our way of seeing and living things, but also the image of a possible future. This opens up the personal and social scenario, once again, to the possibility of modifying aspects of the present on the basis of an intention converted into a clear and brilliant image.
But far from the task being confined to the hidden world of the psyche, Silo emphasizes that all true inner change is finally manifested in daily conduct, whose action in the world is what gives value to the changes of direction operated internally.
In the course of the presentation, Silo addresses this central question for all his work by commenting on the content of Psychology III, whose content is referred to foundations for the techniques known as catharsis and transference, saying:
“Far above any technique of Operative, it is the action in the world that gives value and direction to the changes that occur in the psyche. The understanding of this point places our Psychology at the level that corresponds to it, that is, at the level of everyday life.”
Characteristic of all of Silo’s work is the firm intention to go beyond the walls that usually surround the ivory towers of the eminent academics, for the benefit of the ordinary citizen. It is possible that this fact, together with the simplicity, but at the same time precision of language, have been difficulties for those who, accustomed to complex words, have not known how (or wanted) to appreciate Silo’s conceptual power.
Something similar to what has happened in other fields of thought and collective action, in which Universalist Humanism – the original current of thought founded and promoted by Silo since the 1960s – still awaits, actively, the overcoming of prejudices to open up to the moment of its massive recognition as a doctrine of liberation.
Later in that conference, Silo derives, in a very original way, from the convergence or contradiction between the impulses that circulate in the conscience, a clear moral orientation of actions, placing the need to direct them towards the unity between what is thought, felt and done:
“In general, human actions are touched by the convergence or contradiction between impulses and this is what shapes behavior and personality. The convergence or contradiction between impulses.”
To which he adds: “Exemplifying, when a set of personal actions is launched with the internal register of opposition between what is done and what is thought and felt, we suffer a contradictory and painful mental situation that, as such, is recorded in memory. Inversely, the acts that are registered converging with each other, converging with each other… because they make coincide what one thinks with what one feels, contribute to form a behavior of strong internal unity that, being recorded in memory, predisposes positively and in depth towards future actions. This point, of great importance, allows us to draw practical consequences and to establish a table of values and behavior in daily life”.
If already in the first 3 sections that compose the work, revolutionary concepts are found, it is in Psychology IV where Silo crowns the exposition by connecting with the possibility of going beyond the usual and determined mechanics of the consciousness, in a leap to the indefinition and the search for a transmutation towards new deep meanings.
Silo provides a masterful description of that singular paradox that is the “I”, saying:
“Of course the notion of the “I” also belongs to the realm of consciousness even if its reality is questioned. And entering into the discussion, it was said that “the register of one’s own identity is given by the data of the senses and of memory plus a peculiar configuration that gives the consciousness the illusion of permanence, the illusion of permanence… notwithstanding the continuous changes that take place in it. That illusory configuration of identity and permanence is the ‘I’”.
Specifying further on that “It is clear that there exists for the consciousness the register and the notion of the self, but we understand that it is a variable structuring dependent on the situation of the senses, of the memory and of the position of the attention in the space of representation.”
“At this point in the development of Psychology IV,“ the author points out further on, ‘we arrive at the paragraph on the ’structures of consciousness”. And from the mention of different structures of consciousness studied by different authors, such as the “unhappy consciousness”, the “anguished consciousness”, the “excited consciousness”, the “disgusted consciousness”, the “nauseated consciousness”, and the altered states of consciousness, Silo arrives at the analysis of the structure of “inspired consciousness”. In his words, “a global structure of consciousness in which immediate intuitions of reality arise” and which “appears in great fields such as Philosophy, Science, Art and Mysticism, but also appears daily in the intuitions or inspirations of wakefulness, semi-dreaming and paradoxical sleep.”
“It is in Mysticism especially, where the search for inspiration has given rise to psychological practices and systems that have had and still have an uneven level of development,” he will say.
Then, without appealing to incomprehensible formulisms, and stripped of all linguistic exoticism, Silo invites in this final paragraph of his intervention to draw back the veil of the apparently unknowable and venture into a search for definitive meaning.
Thus he will say: “It is to be observed that some of these techniques achieve the substitution of the self by another spiritual or divine entity and on the basis of these images that are deepening in the space of representation, contact is made with another state or perhaps with another level of consciousness to which we refer with the designation of ‘The Profound’. The investigation of this possibility of the psyche remains open in the final section of our Psychology Notes.”
In this way, Silo connects psychology and mysticism in the same thread, showing the way to enter into the deepest questions of human life.
Here is the full presentation (in Spanish).