The psychology of readers

A reader is a self composed of words. We readers consist of the words we experience in a text and the echoes they provoke in us. Words combine consciousness and the unconscious. Words do not point to or symbolize an unconscious that lies “inside” us out of direct reach. Words themselves are the unconscious in all its potency. Consciousness is relative, not an absolute point of reference. When we are awake, we are conscious of certain things, unconscious of others. When we are asleep, we are also conscious of certain things, unconscious of others. If the waking world and the unconscious converge, we no longer need to descend into the underworld of dreams to find the soul. We simply need to look at the world in a psychological manner. Words are objects in the world, too, and can, therefore, be the unconscious. The reader’s self extends from out of the words just as it extends from out of a dream. We would grasp this possibility if we stopped thinking of the text as a medium of communications and instead treated it as an experience.