Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. ISSN 0077-8923 ANNALS OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES Issue: Unlocking the Unconscious: Exploring the Undiscovered Self COMMENTARY The deeper self: an expanded view of consciousness Steve Paulson, 1 Siri Hustvedt, 2 Mark Solms, 3 and Sonu Shamdasani 4 1 Wisconsin Public Radio, Madison, Wisconsin. 2 Weill Cornell Medical College, New York, New York. 3 University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. 4 University College London, London, England As science continues to explore the mysteries of the unconscious, two critical questions remain. First, can unconscious impulses, desires, and feelings be willfully raised to the level of the conscious self?, and, if so, would the unveiling of unconscious mechanisms lead to genuine self-knowledge or empowerment? Second, can we methodically tap into the unconscious to gear ourselves along more creative lines? If the unconscious is a source of intuitive and creative inspiration, how might a more expansive understanding of consciousness help us to flourish? How can we harness the intuitive parts of ourselves to think “outside the box,” transcending the limitations of preconceived categories? And along those same lines, how would an expanded view of the unconscious frame our spiritual experiences or offer spiritual nourishment? Writer Siri Hustvedt, historian of psychology Sonu Shamdasani, and neuropsychologist Mark Solms will tackle everything from noetic experiences and the role of intuition to the phenomenon of peak experience and Jung’s “collective unconscious.” Keywords: consciousness; the unconscious; collective unconscious; Freud; Jung; subliminal self; subliminal con- sciousness; active imagination; neuropsychoanalysis; cognitive unconscious; cognitive neuroscience; fantasy; symbol; intuition; REM sleep behavior disorder Steve Paulson: Many thanks go to the New York Academy of Sciences and the Nour Foundation for making this series possible. This series on the unconscious has been really exciting for me, because it raises all kinds of questions that I think about all the time—like, where do our dreams come from? and what about creativity? Is it something the science of neural correlates and brain chemistry will ever explain? And what should we make of those experiences that I would call transcendent, when the world suddenly opens up and seems to be full of meaning? Those are questions that lurk on the edges between our rational, scientific understanding of the world, and what may be a different way of knowing—more intuitive, less analytical, but perhaps more deeply felt. Then, on top of that, you have the great theorists of the unconscious, Freud and Jung, with their complicated history together before they split and went their separate ways. So we have a great evening ahead of us, and not only do we have a leading Freudian scholar and a leading scholar of Jung, but we also have a remarkable novelist who has carved out a second career writing about science, psychology, and the mind. Let me introduce our speakers. Siri Hustvedt, PhD, is Lecturer in Psychiatry at the Weill Cornell Medical College. She’s a novelist and an essayist, whose works repeatedly pose questions about the nature of identity, selfhood, and perception. She’s also published papers in academic and scientific journals. Her novels include What I Loved and The Summer Without Men, and her nonfiction includes The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves. She also has a new collection of essays, A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women. Sonu Shamdasani, PhD, is a London-based author, editor, and professor at University College London; he’s codirector of the Health Humanities Centre there. His writings focus on Carl Jung and cover the history of psychiatry and psychology from the mid-nineteenth century to current times. He edited one of Jung’s major works, The Red Book, and he’s the cofounder of the Philemon Foundation, which aims to publish all of Jung’s unpublished writings. doi: 10.1111/nyas.13403 1 Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. xxxx (2017) 1–18 C  2017 New York Academy of Sciences.