Does the unconscious exist?

The article is devoted to the analysis of the problem of the unconscious from the point of view of Orthodox anthropology. The doctrine of the unconscious looks, at a superficial glance, very plausible even from the Orthodox point of view, but it contains a completely different anthropology than the one taught by the holy fathers. In it, a person by nature is initially good or initially evil, while in Orthodox anthropology the human soul is the battlefield between God and the spirits of evil. Therefore, the doctrine of psychological complexes and their influence on a person, adopted in the twentieth century, needs to be revised. Cultural anthropology comes to the same idea, which for decades has unsuccessfully tried to establish a connection between a person’s personality type and his childhood traumas. What a person perceives as a projection of his unconscious is often the influences of the spiritual world - thoughts inspired by God, angels or demons. In reality, the unconscious is functional; it is only stable associative connections that serve as a tool for a fallen person to adapt to the fallen world.