Stream of Consciousness: From Psychology to Philosophy and the Arts

 

 

It is the 4^th of July weekend, and there are gatherings all around town. A friend invited me to meet his neighbors over food and celebration.

Since I did not know most of the attendees, he introduced me as “a man who has criss-crossed the continents and lived in more than half a dozen countries.” And soon I was asked “where did you live for the longest time?”

Having been asked this question before, I knew there was no good way of avoiding further questions, no matter what my answer was. So I tried a new approach:

“I have inhabited my own self all my life”

And to my surprise, everyone was a bit puzzled, did not follow-up on my response, and we went on to talk about what we do in the High Desert of Arizona.

On the way back, I wondered why I chose the answer I gave. After all, don’t we all “inhabit our own selves”? Or do we?

 

To my delight, this simple moment made me think of the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdock (1919-1999) and her writings about the arts and love. Most à propos to my thinking about the “self” was her definition of love (and the arts) as the act of “unselfing”.

So, I took my dog for a walk then sat down to read some of her essays and refresh my memory.

… I learned about “stream of consciousness” through a psychology class when Alexander Bain, the Scottish philosopher, was introduced. He cornered the term in 1855 almost four decades before William James, the father of American Psychology, used Bain’s definition to describe how we organize the stream of thoughts when we are aware (conscious) of these thoughts.

Years later, I discovered that Virginia Woolf had pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative mode to depict the plethora of thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind of a narrator.  In the process of learning more about the use of a unifying concept in psychology and literature I was surprised to that “stream of consciousness” was not first proposed by Bain, nor James, but by Daniel Oliver, a physician and academic from New England, in 1835 in First Lines of Physiology: Designed for the Use of Students of Medicine. He wrote:

If we separate from this mingled and moving stream of consciousness, our sensations and volitions, which are constantly giving it a new direction, and suffer it to pursue its own spontaneous course, it will appear, upon examination, that this, instead of being wholly fortuitous and uncertain, is determined by certain fixed laws of thought, which are collectively termed the association of ideas”

Finally, it was through my readings about Virginia Woolf that I learned about Iris Murdoch, and through analysis of my own stream of consciousness, realised how her describing beauty and art as “an occasion for unselfing” and love as the act of unselfing, had influenced my behavior as a health care professional and an artist.

 

… So, should I have responded to the question “where did you live for the longest time?” by “I inhabited my own self all my life, yet my most glorious memories are those when I unselfed”?

I will try that next time the opportunity presents.

 

July 1, 2023

© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2023

 

PS/ I took this street photo in Paris. It is one that I have not published given its poor quality, but somehow I felt it now fits well with the concept of “stream of consciousness.”