What is freud's theory of the unconscious

Freud and the Unconscious Mind

By Dr. Saul McLeod, published 2009, updated 2015

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.

Freud (1900, 1905) developed a topographical model of the mind, whereby he described the features of the mind’s structure and function. Freud used the analogy of an iceberg to describe the three levels of the mind.

Freud (1915) described the conscious mind, which consists of all the mental processes of which we are aware, and this is seen as the tip of the iceberg. For example, you may be feeling thirsty at this moment and decide to get a drink.

The preconscious contains thoughts and feelings that a person is not currently aware of, but which can easily be brought to consciousness (1924). It exists just below the level of consciousness, before the unconscious mind. The preconscious is like a mental waiting room, in which thoughts remain until they ‘succeed in attracting the eye of the conscious’ (Freud, 1924, p. 306).

This is what we mean in our everyday usage of the word available memory. For example, you are presently not thinking about your mobile telephone number, but now it is mentioned you can recall it with ease.

Mild emotional experiences may be in the preconscious but sometimes traumatic and powerful negative emotions are repressed and hence not available in the preconscious.

Finally, 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.

Freud applied these three systems to his structure of the personality, or psyche – the id, ego and superego. Here the id is regarded as entirely unconscious whilst the ego and superego have conscious, preconscious, and unconscious aspects.

Unconscious Mind

While we are fully aware of 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.

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 use a range of defense 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 defense mechanisms and thus make the unconscious conscious.

Freud believed that the influences of the unconscious reveal themselves in a variety of ways, including dreams, and in slips of the tongue, now popularly known as ‘Freudian slips’. 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.

Critical Evaluation

Initially, psychology was skeptical 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.

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.

Finally, while Freud believed that primitive urges remained unconscious to protect individuals from experiencing anxiety, the modern view of the adaptive unconscious is that most information processing resides outside of consciousness for reasons of efficiency, rather than repression (Wilson, 2004).

How to reference this article:

McLeod, S. A. (2015). Unconscious mind. Simply Psychology. www.simplypsychology.org/unconscious-mind.html

APA Style References

Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American psychologist, 54(7), 462.

Chomsky, N. (1972). Language and mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Freud, S. (1915). The unconscious. SE, 14: 159-204.

Freud, S. (1924). A general introduction to psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere.

Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological review, 102(1), 4.

Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of experimental psychology, 18(6), 643.

Tulving, E. (1972). Episodic and semantic memory. In E. Tulving & W. Donaldson (Eds.), Organization of Memory, (pp. 381–403). New York: Academic Press.

How to reference this article:

McLeod, S. A. (2015). Unconscious mind. Simply Psychology. www.simplypsychology.org/unconscious-mind.html

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In Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, the unconscious mind is defined as a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of conscious awareness.

Within this understanding, most of the contents of the unconscious are considered unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. Freud believed that the unconscious continues to influence behavior even though people are unaware of these underlying influences.

How the Unconscious Mind Works

When conceptualizing the unconscious mind, it can be helpful to compare the mind to an iceberg. Everything above the water represents conscious awareness while everything below the water represents the unconscious.

Consider how an iceberg would look if you could see it in its entirety. Only a small part of the iceberg is actually visible above the water. What you cannot see from the surface is the enormous amount of ice that makes up the bulk of the iceberg, submerged deep below in the water.

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.

Impact of the Unconscious

Unconscious thoughts, beliefs, and feelings can potentially cause a number of problems including:

Anger
Bias
Compulsive behaviors
Difficult social interactions
Distress
Relationship problems

Freud believed that many of our feelings, desires, and emotions are repressed or held out of awareness because they are 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”).

Freud also believed that all of our basic instincts and urges were also contained in the unconscious mind. The life and death instincts, for example, were found in the unconscious. The life instincts, sometimes known as the sexual instincts, are those that are related to survival. The death instincts include such things as thoughts of aggression, trauma, and danger.

Such urges are kept out of consciousness because our conscious minds often view them as unacceptable or irrational. In order to keep these urges out of awareness, Freud suggested that people utilize a number of different defense mechanisms to prevent them from rising to awareness.

Uses of Your Unconscious Mind

Freud believed that bringing the contents of the unconscious into awareness was important for relieving psychological distress. More recently, researchers have explored different techniques to help see how unconscious influences can impact behaviors.

There are a few different ways that information from the unconscious might be brought into conscious awareness or studied by researchers.

Free Association

Freud believed that he could bring unconscious feelings into awareness through the use of a technique called 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.

Dream Interpretation

Freud also suggested that dreams were another route to the unconscious. While information from the unconscious mind may sometimes appear in dreams, he believed that it was often in a disguised form.

As such, from Freud’s point of view, dream interpretation would require examining the literal content of a dream (known as the manifest content) to try to uncover the hidden, unconscious meaning of the dream (the latent content).

Freud also believed that dreams were a form of wish fulfillment. Because these unconscious urges could not be expressed in waking life, he believed they find expression in dreams.

Continuous Flash Suppression

Modern cognitive psychology research has shown that even perceptions that we don’t consciously attend to can have a powerful impact on behavior. Using a technique called continuous flash suppression, researchers are able to display an image without people consciously seeing it because they are instead distracted by another visual display.

Research has shown that people will rate certain visual displays more negatively when they are paired with a negative or less desirable “invisible” image (such as a picture of an angry face). Even though people have no conscious awareness of even seeing those negative images, exposure to them still has an effect on their behavior and choices.

Potential Pitfalls

The very idea of the existence of the unconscious has not been without controversy. A number of researchers have criticized the notion and dispute that there is actually an unconscious mind at all.

More recently in the field of cognitive psychology, researchers have focused on automatic and implicit functions to describe things that were previously attributed to the unconscious. According to this approach, there are many cognitive functions that take place outside of our conscious awareness.

This research may not support Freud’s conceptualization of the unconscious mind, but it does offer evidence that things that we are not aware of consciously may still have an influence on our behaviors.

One of the major pitfalls of Freud’s work is his lack of scientific methodology in the development of his theories. Many of his ideas were based upon case studies or observations of a single individual.

Unlike early psychoanalytic approaches to the unconscious, modern research within the field of cognitive psychology is driven by scientific investigations and empirical data supporting the existence of these automatic cognitive processes.

History of the Unconscious

The idea that there are forces outside of conscious awareness has existed for thousands of years. The term “unconscious” was first coined by the philosopher Friedrich Schelling in the late 18th-century and was later translated to English by poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Within the field of psychology, the notion of unconscious influences was touched on by thinkers including William James and Wilhelm Wundt, but it was Freud who popularized the idea and made it a central component of his psychoanalytic approach to psychology.

The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung also believed that the unconscious played an important role in shaping personality. However, he believed that there was a personal unconscious that consisted of an individual’s suppressed or forgotten memories and urges as well as what he referred to as the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious was said to contain inherited ancestral memories common to all of humankind.

While many of Freud’s ideas have since fallen out of favor, modern psychologists continue to explore the influences of unconscious mental processes including related topics such as unconscious bias, implicit memory, implicit attitudes, priming, and nonconscious learning.

A Word From Verywell

While Sigmund Freud did not invent the concept of the unconscious mind, he did popularize it to the point that it is now largely associated with his psychoanalytic theories. The notion of the unconscious continues to play a role in modern psychology as researchers strive to understand how the mind operates outside of conscious awareness.

What is freud’s theory of the unconscious