cORRIGIBLE cORRUPTIBILITY

What would Aquinas have to say about the unconscious; nothing. To concede that there is a form, a principle of the soul that is not intelligible in the sense that Aquinas attributes intelligibility to the soul, is pure folly. The unconscious does not apprehend phantasms, outward appearances of things, bodies, tables, chairs, Fido, but has representations, or imprints of them, rebuses, not perceived through sense or reason, unintelligible in a sensate manner, inner phantasms yet to be decoded or interpreted. The unconscious would be an example of corruption, or corruptibility, and as such disunion of form and substance. The unconscious would represent a contrariness of contraries, a meaningless jumble of nonsensical cognition, an unintelligibility of form and substance, a meaningless apprehension, a corrigible phantasm, yet a phantasm that can be neither represented nor understood as such. For Aquinas the unconscious is an impossible aberration, and in its aberrance an incorrigible corruption.