Consciousness, Instincts, and Life (2026)

Image: Milky Way and Supernova: Firefly, Freud: Wikimedia Commons

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Consciousness, Instincts, and Life

Antti Talvitie
aptalvitie@gmail.com

Abstract

This paper discusses my enduring curiosity as a Freudian psychoanalyst and engineer on the origins of life and consciousness. In a 2016 paper I offered the hypotheses that the Life-Death force separated in the Big Bang as the fifth fundamental force about 13.8 billion years ago, slightly after gravity. It therefore qualifies as a force. As a corollary, I proposed that the mysterious ‘dark energy’ may be evolutionary and connected with ‘dark matter’ in the Milky Way region of the universe.

Nine billion years later, about four and half billion years ago, Earth formed – in the same epoch as the Sun – and became hospitable to life forms and began biological evolution. The hypothesis in the paper is that the fifth force – the Life-Death Force – became decohered from the primordial coherent state of the unified force at the Big Bang and subsequently re-cohered, in some presently unknown process, when life emerged. (‘Decoherence’ and ‘re-coherence’ may extend these concepts beyond their established use). Life became the necessary and later the sufficient condition for consciousness.

Inspired by the quantum world, I hypothesize that transmission of energetic excitations, both conscious and unconscious, may occur instantaneously, analogous to entanglement, from psychic energy, the instincts, distributed in superposition over the whole nervous system. Mental states, thinking, random and chosen exigencies of life, and explanations about them, update and store the transmitted information. Nachträglichkeit from the timeless unconscious may revise and reorganize these experiences, memories and past events in the unconscious with (un)temporality and strange causality, simultaneously even accepting contradictions. At the end of the paper quantum processes as the operating system of classical events are related to everyday behavior.

DOWNLOAD the whole paper, 25 pages, 670 kb

Antti Talvitie - Psychoanalysis Full Papers

The complete list of psychoanalysis full papers by Antti Talvitie.

Consciousness, Instincts, and Life (2026)
About four and half billion years ago, Earth formed – in the same epoch as the Sun – and became hospitable to life forms and began biological evolution. The hypothesis in the paper is that the fifth force – the Life-Death Force – became decohered from the primordial coherent state of the unified force at the Big Bang and subsequently re-cohered, in some presently unknown process, when life emerged. Life became the necessary and later the sufficient condition for consciousness. 

The Robber Synod (2026)
This paper explores the issue of the Catholic dogma of a unitary deity on the Catholic-dominated US Supreme Court’s apparent misunderstanding of the unitary authority of the Executive.


Enigma of the Nirvana Principle (2025)
Freud introduced the ‘Nirvana principle' as evidence of the existence of death instincts. Its effects are explored in the paper, especially the puzzlement about why so many act against self-interest and ruin the prospects which open out to him and how they are acted out in the real world.


Troika: Trump, Putin, Xi (2023)

The paper is an application of psychoanalytic theory to examine the psychology, traumas, and psychopathology of these three globally important leaders. It proposes that they have fallen prey to a persistent asymptomatic psychosis from conflicts between the external world (Trump), the super-ego (Putin), and the Id (Xi) that are now acted out in the real world. Their rise to power could not have happened without the support of the surrounding ‘cultural community’

Trump’s Etiology and His Herd (2021)
The first part of the paper is a diagnosis of Mr. Trump’s psyche based on publicly available material and informed by psychoanalytic theory and case studies. The paper asserts that endogenous and exogenous events in Trump’s infancy have caused non-correctable mental disorders.


Freud as a Lamarckian (2021)
Memories, the writings of Freud, concepts about transgenerational heritance, neurobiology and (epi)genetics, and their therapeutic uses motivated this paper. After reviewing the relevant theory and observational evidence., it is concluded that Freud was a Lamarckian, as Ferenczi and Freud recognized in the 1910s, and others did later.


Rail factor and realism of the unconscious (2020)
The paper reviews and challenges the spoken but unknown behavioral ‘rail factor’ that may bias travel forecasts toward rail, or favor investments in urban rail, foster economic development, or add to satisfaction of travel.


Freud, the Big Bang, and the Origin of Life (2016)
In 1924, Freud thought that the “the theory of the instincts is the most important but…the least complete portion of psycho-analysis”. A hypothesis is then made that Life's origin is in the "Big Bang" and that Freud’s constructs of life and death instincts are real, a viable fifth force, and absent from the present standard model of physics.


Observed Differences in Corruption between Asia and Africa: The Industrial Organization of Corruptionand Its Cure (2016)
The paper seeks to explain why, despite pervasive corruption, economies in Asia achieved remarkable economic growth. The leaders are implicated as enablers of corruption. Corruption is an emotional disorder and the main economic difference between the two regions is that corruption is part of the fixed cost in Asia and the variable costs in Africa and therefore had less distortionary effect on economic growth in Asia. The paper outlines group psychoanalytic process to good enough governance.


Theoryless Planning (2009)
The paper begins with doubts about the scientific basis of (transport) planning and then offers a scientific approach to planning that is experiential rather than positivist. Theoryless planning model recasts and expands on my paper International Experiences in Restructuring the Road Sector (1997) with the unconscious as its starting point, and patterns it as a psychoanalytic group process and technique.


Things planners believe in, and things they deny (1997)
The paper examines the economic theory of consumer behavior from the Modern Psychoanalytic point of view with a metaphor of (transport) planning as a backdrop.

Images: Christ Pantokrator, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Sigmund Freud: Wikimedia Commons

The Robber Synod (2026)

©Antti Talvitie, 2026. Roof fresco of Pantokrator, Supreme Court and Trump: Wikimedia Commons

FULL PAPER. PDF, 6 pages, 298 KB

Prologue[1]

This paper explores the issue of the Catholic dogma of a unitary deity on the Catholic-dominated US Supreme Court’s apparent understanding of the unitary authority of the Executive. For ten centuries a core dispute within Christendom lay in whether God was one, or whether Jesus was a separate (and lesser) person in the Godhead. The schism has a history of debate and violence, spiritually in the various councils in 4th and 5th centuries, and physically in wars before and after. Knowledge of that long history is necessary for understanding the unconscious relationship of Unitary God and Unitary Presidency.

My interest in the convoluted historical events around Christian doctrines is prompted by the ongoing question of the constitutional authority of the US President. While the centuries-old theological schism continues today, I hypothesize that it has metamorphosed into a parallel dispute within secular affairs: is the nature, powers and authority of the Unitary Presidency as the Supreme Court has decided in several court cases? Or is it checked and balanced by the Congress and Judiciary? Given the preponderance of Catholic belief among the US Supreme Court Justices, this provocative question is worth serious consideration. Does the Justices’ bias toward unitary power and authority in the Executive arise from centuries of embedment of the doctrine of the unitary power and nature of God and Jesus?

The title of this paper is from Pope Leo I, who dubbed the Council of Ephesus in 449 the "Robber Synod" for challenging the complex Christian doctrine around ‘the unitary nature of God’. The Nicene creed that was re-ratified by the Council of Constantinople in 381 remains part of the Catholic and many Protestant churches liturgy. It defines what one believes as a Christian.[2]

The triangle of power (2025)

©Antti Talvitie, 2025

I recently read Finnish President Stubb’s excellent and courageous book Vallan kolmio.  I will write about what I read in between the lines. I stress that I do not in any way question President Stubb’s ideas or message – on the contrary, I agree with him. But I would like to add something of great importance.

As a teenager during the Korean War, I heard two priests warn of nuclear conflict and the Bible’s three Apocalyptic woes. Barely six years had passed since Finland’s war with the Soviet Union had ended and the atomic bombs had fallen on Japan. Everyone present had vivid memories. Would there be a world war? A layman answered bluntly: the Third World War has already begun. It is about money and power.

These two are not spelled out in the president’s book, though he explores their many dimensions with great depth. Would it have been too disruptive to say them openly? Multinational corporations and great wealth – money – exert an immense influence in the world. They shape geopolitics, the balance between democracy and autocracy, the divides in income and welfare, trade, technological progress, investment, and even our thoughts and opinions through the mass media. Power is often tied to money, but it exerts an independent force, as we can clearly see in the political, civic, and corporate life in the United States.

The dominance of money and power reflects human instincts of aggression and self-destruction. They are not the only instinctual expressions, but in the context of Vallan kolmio, perhaps the most important ones (with sexuality lurking behind). Freud propounded his ideas in correspondence with Einstein, Why War?

Enigma of the Nirvana Principle (2025)

©Antti Talvitie, 2025

FULL PAPER, PDF, 980 KB, 24 pages.

ABSTRACT
Enigma of the Nirvana Principle
Antti Talvitie (aptalvitie@gmail.com)  

Freud introduced the ‘Nirvana principle’ (the term he borrowed from Barbara Low, a British analyst) in Beyond the Pleasure Principle thus: “The dominating tendency of mental life … is the effort to reduce, to keep constant or to remove internal tension due to stimuli –a tendency which finds expression in the pleasure principle; and our recognition of that fact is one of our strongest reasons for believing in the existence of death instincts.”

Nirvana is colloquially thought of as the ultimate state of bliss, eternal happiness, not death. The incomprehensibility of this enigmatic duality consists in the pleasure principle being both the ‘watchman of our waking life’, and the ‘modus operandi of our mental life’, the life and death instincts. This enigma of the Nirvana principle is explored in this paper.

Hundred years ago, in The Economic Problem of Masochism, Freud returns to his puzzlement about why many act against self-interest and “ruin the prospects which open out to him in the real world.” He admits to having ignored the incomprehensibility of the conflict between the pleasure principle and the demands of the instincts to reach Nirvana. This conflict is the theoretical issue in this paper, which also explores the consequences now observed as recreations to the past acted out in the real world.

Troika: Trump. Putin, Xi (2023)

©Antti Talvitie, 2023

FULL PAPER, PDF, 634 KB, 31 pages,

updated 15 April 2026

ABSTRACT

Troika: Trump, Putin, Xi

Antti Talvitie (aptalvitie@gmail.com)

The paper is an application of psychoanalytic theory to examine the psychology and traumas of globally important leaders —Trump, Putin, Xi — the Troika. It also discusses psychoanalytic theory’s value in public discourse about the public interest.

Freud’s Project for Scientific Psychology and his Structural Theory of the psyche are used as the frameworks for analyzing Troika’s pathologies.  Observed circumstances, speeches, public information, and the invisible forces in the psyche as data, the paper reasons that the life and death instincts and the neuronal ‘machine that runs by Itself’, organized by the early experiences of these global leaders, drive the Troika’s destructive actions.  These profoundly impact the citizens of the world. 

The paper recognizes and expands on Freud’s important generalization (in Neurosis and Psychosis):

“Transference neuroses [phobias, hysterias] correspond to a conflict between the ego and the id; narcissistic [psycho]neuroses [schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder] to a conflict between the ego and the super-ego; and psychoses to one between the ego and the external world.”

Trump’s Etiology and His Herd (2021)

©Antti Talvitie, 2021

FULL PAPER, PDF, 513 KB, 24 pages

ABSTRACT

Trump’s Etiology and His Herd

Antti Talvitie (aptalvitie@gmail.com) 

The first part of the paper is a diagnosis of Mr. Trump’s psyche based on publicly available material and informed by psychoanalytic theory and case studies. It portends that events in Trump’s infancy have caused irreversible mental disorders, among them a fetish, the psycho-physical origin of his lying, and ignorance about the truth; and a “split” psyche resembling psychosis, with ‘repudiation of femininity’, reverence to strong leaders, use of ‘ad hominem’ labels, conspiracy theories, and threats of violence. This, and obfuscation in the courts are the ‘new abnormal‘. Rational dialogue with Trump is futile.

The second part examines why trumpism has emerged as a powerful political and social ‘organization’. Why has his herd become hypnotized to accept the ‘new abnormal’ of lies and lying, fake news, election fraud, conspiracy theories, and tacit provocations for violence? A three-group taxonomy -- normal, hypnotic, psychotic -- of ‘cultural communities’ is used to discuss, analyze, and interpret group behaviors with experiential knowledge about them.

Freud as a Lamarckian (2021)

©Antti Talvitie, 2021
Freud: Wikimedia Commons / Max Halberstad / Public domain
Lamarck: Wikimedia Commons / Charles Thévenin /  Public domain

FULL PAPER, PDF, 760 KB, 27 Pages

ABSTRACT

Freud as a Lamarckian

Antti Talvitie (aptalvitie@gmail.com) 

Memories, the writings of Freud, concepts about transgenerational heritance, neurobiology and (epi)genetics, and their therapeutic uses motivated this paper.  These issues go back to Freud’s 1895 groundbreaking paper Project for Scientific Psychology [Project] judiciously annotated by Freud’s translator James Strachey in 1954.

After reviewing the relevant theory and evidence, as well as the exogenous and endogenous forces that impinge on the psyche, it is asserted that not only are neurobiological factors heritable, but so are behaviors and traditions communicated non-verbally in cultural communities.  It is determined that Freud was a Lamarckian, as Ferenczi and Freud recognized in the 1910s, and others did later.  For Freud “… heritage of human beings comprises … memory traces … of earlier generations, [thus] the compass as well as the importance of the archaic heritage would be significantly extended”.

Rail factor and realism of the unconscious (2020)

©Antti Talvitie, 2020

FULL PAPER, PDF, 560 KB, 11 pages

Rail Factor and Realism of the Unconscious

Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 6 (2020) 100144

Antti Talvitie (aptalvitie(at)gmail.com)
Aalto University, Espoo, Finland

ABSTRACT

The paper reviews the spoken but unknown behavioral ‘rail factor’ that may bias travel forecasts toward rail, or favor investments in urban rail, foster economic development, or add to satisfaction of travel. The rail factor hypothesis is examined from cognitive and unconscious points of view.  The former is based on the mode specific constants in mode choice models, types of travel time data, values of travel time reductions, and citizen preferences in two urban transport corridors.  The unconscious view is based on Freud’s conception of the unconscious and his and others’ perceptions about rail travel and ‘knowledge illusion’. It is pointed out that the cognitive factors already broach the unconscious and its unobservable dynamics. The realism of the unconscious is related to the cognitive findings via a literature review of the most typical genres on rail factor research. 

Freud, the Big Bang, and the Origin of Life (2016)

©Antti Talvitie, 2016 (revised as noted)
Freud: Wikimedia Commons / Max Halberstad / Public domain

FULL PAPER, PDF, 368 KB, 20 pages

ABSTRACT
Freud, the Big Bang, and the Origin of Life

Antti Talvitie (aptalvitie@gmail.com) 

In 1924, Freud thought that the “the theory of the instincts is the most important but…the least complete portion of psycho-analysis” (Freud 1905, p 168, fn in 1924).  The paper addresses this matter and starts where Freud broke off his reflections about the origin of life in Beyond the Pleasure Principle: “…that living substance at the time of its coming to life was torn into small particles, which have ever since endeavoured to reunite through the sexual instincts.” In this paper, these words are placed in the context of the Big Bang beginning of the Universe, which is discussed and then related to concepts and processes in Freud’s theory.  Other theories about the origin of life are discussed briefly.  A hypothesis is then made that Freud’s constructs of life and death instincts are real, a viable fifth force, and absent from the present standard model of physics. They originated with the Big Bang. A companion hypothesis is that, after a supernova, the fifth force’s means of transmission (particles, if particles are used to transmit it) produced organic elements which when combined with an energy source, formed living eukaryotic cells by a process “of which we have no conception” (Freud’s words).  Simply, it is hypothesized that the fifth force ignited the formation of life and consciousness and their continued evolution. There was (cosmological) physics before biology. These hypotheses are discussed, and proposals are made to test them.

Things planners believe in, and things they deny (1997)

©Antti Talvitie, 1997

FULL PAPER, PDF, 235 KB, 27 pages

Things planners believe in, and things they deny

Transportation, No. 24. Vol 1. pp. 1-31. 1997

Antti Talvitie (aptalvitie(at)gmail.com)

World Bank

ABSTRACT

The paper examines the economic theory of consumer behavior from the Modern Psychoanalytic point of view with a metaphor of (transport) planning as a backdrop. It is claimed that the utility maximization principle of economic theory, no matter how broadly interpreted, does not envelop the motivation of human behavior and that the economic explanation of the aims of human behavior, which disregards the "dark side" of man, will result in narrowly conceived plans and policies.

The application of economic theory, and other social sciences, to public policy has led to disjointedness of data collection, method of analysis, and planning and implementation. This, combined with a tautological behavioral theory, has made the current planning and public policy procedures self-verifying, and issues an invitation for a new theoretical approach which is comprehensive, does not ignore complexity and the large 'error term', and appreciates the unity of data collection, method of investigation, and process of implementation.