A case for the supremacy of the unconscious mind

March 13, 2011|Bill Beuttler, Globe Correspondent

David Brooks’s third book, “The Social Animal,’’ is his most ambitious and earnest, and will likely surpass his sharply observed satirical masterpiece, “Bobos in Paradise,’’ as his biggest seller if not necessarily his best.

Brooks, the amiably conservative columnist for The New York Times (and frequent guest on NPR, PBS, and “Meet the Press’’), makes the case that society’s longstanding emphasis on the rational mind over the unconscious is misplaced. “We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness,’’ he explains. “Over the past few years, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and others have made great strides in understanding the building blocks of human flourishing. And a core finding of their work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.’’

Here’s where the book’s title and subtitle come in. The outward mind, according to Brooks, focuses on the power of the individual; the inner mind highlights the bonds among people. Those bonds have become frayed in recent decades, he argues, and need rebuilding if we are to thrive as individuals and as a society.

“The unconscious is impulsive, emotional, sensitive, and unpredictable,’’ Brooks concedes. “It has its shortcomings. It needs supervision. But it can be brilliant. It’s capable of processing blizzards of data and making daring creative leaps. Most of all, it is also wonderfully gregarious. Your unconscious, that inner extrovert, wants you to reach outward and connect. It wants you to achieve communion with work, friend, family, nation and cause. Your unconscious wants to entangle you in the thick web of relations that are the essence of human flourishing.’’

Brooks fills his book with recent scholarly studies. But he makes his theories vivid via fictional characters, a technique Brooks borrows from the Rousseau classic “Emile.’’ Princeton researchers demonstrating people being able to “make snap judgments about a person’s trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness and likability within the first tenth of a second’’ come up in the context of a character doing essentially that on blind date. A whole series of studies showing morality arising more from the unconscious than from reason are linked to another character’s self-disgust after committing adultery. There are dozens of other examples of Brooks using his characters’ stories to humanize new scientific insights regarding the primacy of the unconscious. This approach may sound unbearably didactic, but it works.