Aesthetic Realism Foundation

Current issueProfits & Feeling in America • July 21, 2010  •  #1775

We are proud to publish, from notes taken at the time, the lecture Eli Siegel gave on April 17, 1947, at Steinway Hall. In The Unconscious of America, he explains what people now, six decades later, need to know: what is the biggest question in the life of each of us, and also the biggest question America as nation needs to answer.... “The unconscious” is not talked about as much as it used to be. In 1947, when this lecture was given, the Freudian picture of the unconscious was everywhere one turned....

Meanwhile, today most people would grant that there are things in them they don’t know, that they’re affected in ways they don’t understand. In the 1940s, Mr. Siegel gave this description of the unconscious—so clear, and so different from the murky cauldron Freud depicted: “The unconscious is, most deeply, what we want which we don’t know we want” (Self and World, p.112)....

Weeks ago I wrote about the explosion and ensuing oil spill off Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s clear to millions of Americans that this spill, which is really a continuous gushing, was caused by the profit motive. Millions of people are conscious that the company, BP, did not take the needed precautions, and for only one reason: to do so would have cut into BP’s profits, which mattered much more to it than people’s lives. There is fury in America about this fact. more