The unconscious self and extreme behaviours

Humans are like onions; no matter how one-layered they look on the outside, there are swathes of layers underneath that unfold, known or unknown to them. Recently, I came across the most horrific stories ever committed by mankind. Hang on, who am I to label them as horrific when I, as the same biological human being, could metamorphose into the worst version of myself any possible day? What stops, aside from punishments laid down by the authorities, someone from becoming Hitler-esque and committing crimes?

Resentment, jealousy, thoughts to hurt someone, inclinations to superimpose dominance in every possible way, and deep, dark acts shaking the insides of the earth—don't most of us harbour a few of these to exhibit the initial extent of the human’s destructive dispositions? Or is this gibberish grisly enough? Follow on.

We have often been told that humans, apart from their public persona and ego, have unconscious selves deeply embedded in them. A layer of your conscious self is followed by another layer of your unconscious underneath, leading all the way to more dark layers until you reach the bottom layer of your onion self. Our unconscious manifests itself without us knowing that it’s our unconscious forcing us to.

Tongue slips or a body-shaking strong slap, as in. Picture Peter Scully (a horrific human trafficker and a pedophile), Adolf Hitler, Joseph Fritzl (a merciless incest), Jeffery Dahmer (a serial killer and a cannibal), and most recently, a case in which a she-doctor was raped and murdered. All humans, and all macabre and grotesque. To a man in the pursuit of utopian society, this seems to be horrific. One crime followed by another. Who is to blame?

Let’s take an analogy: suppose I, as a child, was deprived of love and was a victim of neglect. This would translate into the possibility of me growing old with the same insecurities and memories (childhood trauma), and if the passive dark harboring beneath was left unchecked and not conversed with, I could manifest it negatively in the future, projecting it onto something or someone else: sometimes inflicting grave pain on ourselves and sometimes on others. Most criminals, serial killers, and rapists seemingly have a history of neglected, abandoned, or abusive childhoods. What’s the solution to it?

Add to it the evil we have created in our modern societies: discarding our feelings in the pursuit of reducing everything to measures. Everything should be seen, talked to, and compounded by evidence. This lopsided pursuit, however, comes at the expense of murdering our other living entities: subjectivity, feelings, instincts, and assumptions. Our animal instincts remain like an orphan, unseen and unresolved. And at the end of the day, we come across cases gross enough vis-à-vis our inner self: anger, jealousy, resentment, leading to the darker and darker versions of them. Is this therefore fairly normal?

Living a life isn’t simple. Repressing (or discarding) our emotions and never letting them speak to us and hardly coming to terms with them in order to take hold of them better amounts to bringing the darker version of ourselves to the fore later on. However, should we be deeply engrossed in our repressed emotions and inclinations to inflict pain or harbor resentment and bring them to our conscious attention, we are left with the least chance of causing harm—to ourselves or to others. There are more layers to you than you can possibly imagine; remember that.

No holistically whole human being, who has both conscious and unconscious accessible to him, could let any dark desire take reins. They have a dialogue with their unconscious and shape their personalities and actions accordingly. Should we work on it?

Note: This is to meditate on the connection between criminal behaviors and repressed emotions and doesn’t in any way endorse crime.