Sigmund Freud didn’t exactly invent the idea of the conscious versus unconscious mind, but he certainly was responsible for making it popular and this was one of his main contributions to psychology. He developed the typographical model of the mind where he partitioned the mind into three levels. They are—the conscious, preconscious and unconscious. For the sake of the brevity of space, we will only explore the third—the unconscious mind—which is the major focus of our discourse.
The unconscious mind comprises mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness but that influence judgments, feelings, or behavior (Wilson, 2002). According to Freud (1915), the unconscious mind is the primary source of human behavior. Like an iceberg, the most important part of the mind is the part you cannot see. Our feelings, motives and decisions are actually powerfully influenced by our past experiences, and stored in the unconscious (Mcleod, 2015).
According to Westen Drew (1999), the unconscious mind (or the unconscious) consists of the processes in the mind which occur automatically and are not available to introspection, and include thought processes, memories, interests, and motivations, The unconscious mind is often represented as an iceberg. Everything above the water represents conscious awareness while everything below the water represents the unconscious. The things that represent our conscious awareness are simply “the tip of the iceberg.” The rest of the information that is outside of conscious awareness lies below the surface. While this information might not be accessible consciously, it still exerts an influence over current behavior. Freud believed that many of our feelings, desires, and emotions are repressed or held out of awareness. Why? Because, he suggested, they were simply too threatening. Freud believed that sometimes these hidden desires and wishes make themselves known through dreams and slips of the tongue (aka “Freudian slips”) (Cherry, 2016).Freud (1920) gave an example of such a slip when a British Member of Parliament referred to a colleague with whom he was irritated as ‘the honorable member from Hell’ instead of from Hull (McLeod, 2015).
While we are fully aware of Freud’s unconscious mind iceberg picture, what is going on in the conscious mind, we have no idea of what information is stored in the unconscious mind. The unconscious contains all sorts of significant and disturbing material which we need to keep out of awareness because they are too threatening to acknowledge fully. The unconscious mind acts as a repository, a ‘cauldron’ of primitive wishes and impulse kept at bay and mediated by the preconscious area. For example, Freud (1915) found that some events and desires were often too frightening or painful for his patients to acknowledge, and believed such information was locked away in the unconscious mind. This can happen through the process of repression (Mcleod, 2015).
The unconscious mind contains our biologically based instincts (eros and thanatos) for the primitive urges for sex and aggression (Freud, 1915). Freud argued that our primitive urges often do not reach consciousness because they are unacceptable to our rational, conscious selves. People has developed a range of defence mechanisms (such as repression) to avoid knowing what their unconscious motives and feelings are. Freud (1915) emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind, and a primary assumption of Freudian theory is that the unconscious mind governs behavior to a greater degree than people suspect. Indeed, the goal of psychoanalysis is to reveal the use of such defence mechanisms and thus make the unconscious conscious (McLeod, 2015).
While conducting test on how to bring the unconscious into the conscious mind, Freud said it can be done through a technique known as free association. He asked patients to relax and say whatever came to mind without any consideration of how trivial, irrelevant, or embarrassing it might be. By tracing these streams of thought, Freud believed he could uncover the contents of the unconscious mind where repressed desires and painful childhood memories existed (Cherry, 2018).
At this juncture, let’s do a brief critical evaluation of the unconscious mind. Initially, psychology was sceptical regarding the idea of mental processes operating at an unconscious level. To other psychologists determined to be scientific in their approach (e.g. behaviorists) the concept of the unconscious mind has proved a source of considerable frustration because it defies objective description, and is extremely difficult to objectively test or measure. However, the gap between psychology and psychoanalysis has narrowed, and the notion of the unconscious is now an important focus of psychology. For example, cognitive psychology has identified unconscious processes, such as procedural memory (Tulving, 1972), automatic processing (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999; Stroop, 1935), and social psychology has shown the importance of implicit processing (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Such empirical findings have demonstrated the role of unconscious processes in human behavior (McLeod, 2015).
However, empirical research in psychology has revealed the limits of the Freudian theory of the unconscious mind, and the modern notion of an ‘adaptive unconscious’ (Wilson, 2004) is not the same as the psychoanalytic one. Indeed, Freud (1915) has underestimated the importance of the unconscious, and in terms of the iceberg analogy there is a much larger portion of the mind under the water. The mind operates most efficiently by relegating a significant degree of high level, sophisticated processing to the unconscious. Whereas Freud (1915) viewed the unconscious as a single entity, psychology now understands the mind to comprise a collection of modules that has evolved over time and operate outside of consciousness. For example, universal grammar (Chomsky, 1972) is an unconscious language processor that lets us decide whether a sentence is correctly formed. Separate to this module is our ability to recognize faces quickly and efficiently, thus illustrating how unconscious modules operate independently (McLeod, 2015).
In conclusion, McLeod notes that while Freud believed that primitive urges remained unconscious to protect individuals from experiencing anxiety, the modern and contemporary view of the adaptive unconscious is that most information processing resides outside of consciousness for reasons of efficiency, rather than repression which was widely extolled by Freud (Wilson, 2004)
References
Cherry, K (2016). What is the Unconscious? Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-unconscious-2796004
Chomsky, N. (1972). Language and mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Freud, S. (1915). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159-204.
McLeod, S (2015). Unconscious Mind. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/unconscious-mind.html
Westen, D (1999). “The Scientific Status of Unconscious Processes: Is Freud Really Dead?”. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. 47(4): 1061–1106. doi:10.1177/000306519904700404
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