INVISIBLE GEARS: UNCONSCIOUS HABITS IN THE FORMATION OF HUMAN PERSONALITY

Abstract

This article takes as its starting point the hypothesis that unconscious habits function as “invisible gears” that sustain the construction of human personality, insofar as, throughout life, recurrent ways of thinking, feeling, and acting are established that escape conscious awareness and end up being confused with a simple “way of being.” In this trajectory, it seeks to bring together the tradition of classical psychoanalysis and contemporary research on habits and self-regulation, showing how these repeated patterns arise from unconscious formations derived from repressed desires, internal conflicts, defense mechanisms, and implicit learning, until they are consolidated into relatively stable traits of character that guide choices, affective bonds, and forms of presence in the world. Drawing on the contributions of Freud, Lacan, Jung, and Klein, it discusses the constitution of the psychic apparatus, the mechanisms of defense, the logic of repetition, and the central place of desire, relating these formulations to contemporary authors such as Clear and Brewer, who conceive habits as reward circuits, automatic routines, and devices for identity construction, which makes it possible to bring psychoanalytic vocabulary closer to findings from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and habit science, culminating in the proposal of the metaphor of invisible gears to understand unconscious habits as an axis articulating subjective experience, symbolic structures, and everyday practices, with important clinical and ethical implications for processes of personality change and the reorganization of ways of life.