Meditation Beyond the Unconscious: What Freud, Jung and Lacan Could Not See

In his Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Sigmund Freud wrote:

“In the course of centuries, the naïve self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first when they learnt that our earth was not the centre of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness, this was associated with the name of Copernicus. The second when biological research destroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature; this associated with the name of Darwin. But human megalomania will suffer its third and most wounding blow from psychological research, which is to prove to the ‘ego’ that it is not even master in its own house.”

Freud, no doubt, launched one of the most revolutionary explorations in modern thought. Yet, the psyche he described as “divided within itself,” where consciousness is only the tip of a vast iceberg of repressed contents, was not an entirely discovery. As Freud himself admitted, the poets and dramatists had long discovered this division of the mind. Religion, too, had always known of the hidden motives, the darkness of desire, and the fallibility of reason. We can say that what he actually challenged was not the timeless understanding of man’s inner division, but rather the Enlightenment ideal of man as a rational, self-governing being who could know and master himself. His claim that psychoanalysis delivered the “third great blow” to human pride must therefore be read in context: it was a blow not to the human condition as such, but to the Enlightenment’s image of autonomous man. In truth, the unconscious was not a new continent discovered by science; it was an old truth rediscovered by modernity under a new name.

We can say that Freud was not fundamentally different from his Enlightenment predecessors. They, too, believed that man could redeem himself by following the guidance of reason and logic, and Freud’s psychoanalysis carried forward the same faith in the liberating power of knowledge. In his view, although human beings are burdened with repressed content, those unconscious elements can be brought to awareness and thus integrated into the conscious mind, leading to healing and freedom. Psychoanalysis, we can say, extended the Enlightenment conviction that understanding yields liberation. Yet, like the Enlightenment itself, Freud’s vision could not fulfill what it promised.

Religion introduced a redemptive space that could be attained through surrender. Yet God, being too vast and abstract, was not easily accessible to the ordinary believer. To bridge this distance, religion introduced the figure of the priest — the mediator who guided man in the act of repentance and surrender, making the divine presence more tangible. The Enlightenment project dismantled this structure, declaring that man no longer needed a mediator and could rely instead on his own reason and understanding for redemption. Freud, through psychoanalysis, in a sense restored the priestly function but without the presence of God. The analyst replaced the priest, the consulting room replaced the confessional, and introspection replaced prayer — but the essential hierarchy remained. What was lost was the sacred dimension that gave meaning to surrender; what remained was a purely psychological structure of dependence.

In religious settings, the priest functioned as a mediator between God and man. His role, though essential, was ultimately subordinate to the divine; he facilitated communion but did not claim authority over it. In the psychoanalytic setting, however, this hierarchy was subtly inverted. The analyst became not merely a mediator but a kind of substitute for the divine presence — one who listens, interprets, questions, and even contends with the patient. Assuming the role of guide and judge, the analyst occupies a quasi-godly position within the therapeutic encounter. Yet, despite this authority, he remains powerless to master the unconscious he seeks to interpret. Confronted with its elusiveness, the analyst has continued to devise ever-new routes and techniques to maneuver through its depths — an endless struggle to domesticate what was never meant to be controlled.

In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud defined dreams as “the royal road to the unconscious,” and later, in his technical writings, he advised analysts to maintain an “evenly suspended attention,” a mental openness that allows unconscious material to emerge. Freud had, in effect, discovered that to access the unconscious, one must create a psychological space within.

Yet this “space” remained limited to the workings of mind itself — it was a space of contents, not beyond them.

The Incomplete Liberation

Instead of leading humanity toward a redemptive space, Freud’s successors seemed determined to dig deeper into the labyrinth he had opened. The unconscious, far from being integrated, became an empire without borders. Jacques Lacan, with structuralist flair, informed us that the unconscious is “structured like a language,” meaning it was not confined within us at all — it was also outside, dispersed in words, symbols, and the chatter of culture. Liberation, it seemed, now required fluency in a language no one could ever finish learning. Carl Jung, not to be outdone, expanded the map still further by discovering the collective unconscious — a vast psychic reservoir in which humanity’s entire mythic past resides. Thus, the task of “making the unconscious conscious” kept growing, as if salvation depended on an ever-lengthening to-do list. In the end, psychoanalysis did not deliver us from the unconscious; it only made sure we would never run out of it.

The Missed Question: What Is Consciousness?

Both Freud and Jung spoke about the need to create a psychological “space” where unconscious contents could surface. But they never inquired deeply into the nature of consciousness itself. For them, consciousness was a fragile epiphenomenon — a product of the unconscious, a surface effect of deeper psychic forces.

This is where depth psychology meets its limit. If consciousness is merely the servant of the unconscious, how can one ever transcend it? The very act of analysis — speaking, interpreting, remembering — remains bound to the same domain it seeks to master.

Meditation: Working Alone

We find a similar moment of revolt in the time of Gautama Buddha. He too rose against an established religious order — the Brahmanical culture of his age — which rested on the metaphysical doctrines of ātman (the self) and paramātman (the supreme self). The Buddha refused to accept either. But unlike modern depth psychology, he did not busy himself with cataloging or interpreting the unconscious contents of the mind. His concern was far more radical: to discover whether there exists within us a vantage point from which both the conscious and the so-called unconscious can be observed without interference. And he found it. What he called mindful awareness was not another theory of the mind but the discovery of a space beyond it, a direct seeing that dissolves rather than interprets mental contents. The rest of his life was devoted to helping others recognize that same space. His was a totally radical approach in his context, where he not only discarded the metaphysics but also the mediator. The depth psychology project is flawed in its approach and methodology.

Depth psychology’s gift was to expose the inner complexity of human life. Its limitation was to remain trapped within the very mind it sought to heal. Meditation, by contrast, points to a radical simplicity. It does not promise meaning; it reveals presence. It does not analyze darkness; it brings light.

The priest mediated between man and God.

The analyst mediates between man and his unconscious.

Meditation introduces no such mediation between man and the redemptive space. And Buddha was so tactful in his approach that he did not give any positive name to that which lies beyond mental contents. See the etymological roots of the word nirvāṇa where it comes from the prefix nis- (“out”) and the root vā- (“to blow”), meaning “to blow out” or “to extinguish”.