ART and the UNCONSCIOUS

The connections that paintings and dance performances, movies and novels and music make to us beyond our conscious perceptions of them are primary and transporting. Our unconscious, deep-seated responses are what bring us back to the arts for more and more, nourishing and renewing us just as food and air and water do. At the same time, we're carried away from our sensory and analytical selves, lifted or plunged into a web of emotion and association, a fretwork of glinting filaments radiating out in so many directions.
For some, this becomes a linking to the divine, to something ineffably transcendent. For others, it opens pathways to a shadowy and only fleetingly accessible territory in themselves. It may be a means of communing with an artist's own unconscious essence or of riding the mythic tides that flow timelessly through the arts. It may be a key to cultural codes or the workings of a particular artistic medium. It may open the deepest wells of delight and terror. Or it may be nothing so mysterious at all, but rather a function of physiological events in the brain and nervous system that may someday be thoroughly describable and understood.
"We have multiple minds that are processing things in parallel or interacting ways," according to Samuel Barondes, professor of neurobiology and psychiatry at UCSF. "That's what allows us to enjoy art on multiple channels."
The notion of an aesthetic bandwidth that operates with extraordinary speed and complexity is an enticing one in a digital age. The unconscious, like the Internet, can be seen as a vast interwoven fabric of data about ourselves and our connections to one another and the world. In his influential book "Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious," University of Virginia psychology Professor Timothy D. Wilson argues that we all possess "a nonconscious filter that examines the information reaching our senses and decides what to admit to consciousness."
We can only sense the workings of the unconscious, after all, through signals that we can register and at least partially decode. The arts, with their uniquely rich fusion of beauty, emotion, imaginative identification and thought, can tap our unconscious natures in particularly powerful ways. Whether by some alignment of specific circumstances and conditions or by sheer serendipity, certain works of art at certain times make that happen.
San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley attended a performance of "Die Walküre" in Washington, D.C., not long ago and found himself strangely transfixed by a second-act encounter of Fricka, Wotan and Brünnhilde. Gockley has taken in numerous performances of this Wagner opera over the years. This time, the scene's "conflict between love and power, between being self-protective and building a wall around yourself at the expense of others" struck him with heightened immediacy and force.