For my own heuristic, analytical purposes, I have recently–and tentatively, as I may well change my mind– adopted the term “Channel 1” for overt communications, and Channel 2 for latent, hidden, covert communications.
In all human communications there is what is said, and there is what is not said. There is the intent we are trying to communicate, and the effect which is being received. In this, I am borrowing somewhat from a similar conception proposed–as far as I know, not having studied this extensively–by the architects of Neurolinguistic Programming, Richard Bandler and John Grinder.
Put another way, Channel 1 is the conscious, and Channel 2 is the supposed “unconscious”. I use the term supposed, because in my view we all regularly feel sexuality, aggression, anger, the need for dominance, and all the emotions that Freud supposed were hidden. I would in fact argue that the extent to which we regularly feel our negative as well as our positive emotions well describes our mental health.
The alternative, of course, is to pretend you are capable of hewing perfectly to a doctrine which requires only the expression of positive emotions, and which idea leads inexorably not to the extinction of negative emotions, but to their expression in ways which are “non-conscious”, which is to say by a more or less second personality that comes to exist in you, that has as its job the management of all the angers, petty vanities, sense of insult, sexual frustrations, and other difficulties which are inevitable in a life in motion, bouncing as we all do into all sorts of people continually (unless we are hermits, and even they still have dialogues with others in their minds).
I got to thinking about this, and was wondering if eating meat is not perhaps one useful and overt way of disposing of some of our aggressive, negative energy. Animals eat one another. None of them are capable of self pity, even if they manifestly ARE capable of physical and emotional suffering.
This is the question: is it a REALISTIC hope that in an open, free social order that we can fully dispose of all negative emotions? In my own family, I try to teach the expression of feeling, but in a self conscious way such that whenever your pity party, or outburst is done, you can feel regret, apologize, and reintegrate yourself into the whole. I am trying to teach emotional intelligence, and of course model it myself.
I look at serious vegetarians, and what in effect seems to happen with the more ideological ones is they wind up hating HUMANS. Reading some of their literature, one gets the sense they would prefer humans go extinct. They have retained a sense of us and them, but simply chosen to side with the animals, with “Earth”, against their fellows, and inhabit a tribe which consists only in those who share with them a sense of self loathing.
Food for thought.