Unconscious mind

For the physiological state of "being unconscious", as when knocked-out or asleep, see unconsciousness.

In psychoanalytic theory, the unconscious refers to that part of mental functioning of which the subject makes himself unaware. The psychoanalytic unconscious is similar to but not precisely the same as the popular notion of the subconscious.

For psychoanalysis, the unconscious does not include all of what is simply not conscious - it does not include e.g. motor skills - but rather, only what is actively repressed from conscious thought.

As defined by Sigmund Freud, the psyche is composed of different levels of consciousness, often

For Freud, the unconscious was a depository for socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of mind by the mechanism of psychological repression. However, the contents did not necessarily have to be solely negative. In the psychoanalytic view, the unconscious is a force that can only be recognized by its effects - it expresses itself in the symptom.

At the present stage, there are still fundamental disagreements within psychology about the nature of the unconscious mind (if indeed it is considered to exist at all), whereas outside formal psychology a whole world of pop-psychological speculation has grown up in which the unconscious mind is held to have any number of properties and abilities, from animalistic and innocent, child-like aspects to savant-like, all-perceiving, mystical and occultic properties.

Pre-Freudian history of the idea

Although the idea of the unconscious is generally attributed to Freud, the notion of the unconscious originated in antiquity. The Romantic philosophers and writers helped to popularize the notion from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Leibniz, Schopenhauer, and later Nietzsche all developed ideas that foreshadowed the modern conception of the unconscious, as did writers such as Mary Shelley in her novel, Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson in The Adventures of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Its more modern history is detailed in Henri F. Ellenberger's Discovery of the Unconscious (Basic Books, 1970).

Medical researchers also made important contributions. With the rise of industrialization, industrial accidents helped provide a curious background to Freud's "discovery" of the unconscious mind. Railway accidents in particular were significant, as doctors discovered that some accident victims with no organic trauma would nonetheless experience symptoms that seemed to mimic those with physical wounds. This opened to door to lots of investigations and speculation about the nature of the unconscious mind. One such researcher was Jean-Marie Charcot, one of Freud's teachers and mentors. Charcot became interested in hysteria, as he noticed that his hysterical patients had symptoms that mimicked those of his epileptic patients. Based on that finding, he experimented with hypnosis, discovering that he could introduce symptoms and remove them through the use of the hypnotic trance. What the railway accident patients and Charcot's hysterics had in common was the ability to produce the symptoms of organic injury illnesses without any physical cause. This led to much speculation about the nature of the mind.

Freud studied with Charcot, becoming interested in the problem of hysteria. Freud's view of the unconscious was influenced by his time spent at Charcot's clinic (1885-6), the Salpetriere, and his use of hypnosis on his patients to induce and remove hysterical symptoms. Freud confessed that "I received the profoundest impression of the possibility that there could be powerful mental processes which nevertheless remained hidden from the consciousness of men." (Autobiography, S.E. 20:17)

The Freudian unconscious

Freud does not have a singular theory of the unconscious. His views changed over time as his theories changed. In his early topographical theory, which dominated his view from roughly 1890 to 1920, the division of consciousness was tripartite. The three parts were designated as follows:

the waking consciousness
preconsciousness
the unconscious proper

However, early psychoanalytic theory was essentially dualistic. The preconscious refers to those ideas, memories, etc. that are not currently conscious, but which are capable of becoming conscious by merely turning our conscious attention to them. The conflict that drives Freud's early psychoanalytic theory is the one between consciousness and the unconscious, which is defined as that which is not capable of becoming conscious. For example, we don't have memories from our first few years in life because memories require some conceptual ability and linguistic ability that babies lack. Yet, according to Freud, events that happen in early childhood have an enormous influence on the development of the personality. Even more important are those ideas and desires or impulses that must be repressed. The Freudian unconscious is unavailable to consciousness due to repression. It exists as a product of repression.

Freud's theory of the personality is based on a system of cathexis and anti-cathexis, the libido. The libido seeks an object which releases the energy. A buildup of energy creates tension, creating anxiety. But not every release of tension is socially acceptable to in civilization. Some desires have to be repressed because they are socially unacceptable.

Repression exists in two forms, the primal repression and repression proper. The primal repression refers to the repression of the (male) child's Oedipal desire to possess the mother. This is the source of what Freud calls the incest taboo. According to Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex every (male) wants to possess his mother, but due to the demands of civilization expressed in the incest taboo, the Oedipal desire is repressed into the unconscious. In addition to this primal repression, which forms the basis of civilization, since society could not function were every male child to fulfill this desire, there are other socially unacceptable desires that must also be repressed. The function that allows this material to be repressed is the unconscious.

Nonetheless, the unconscious erupts into the conscious world, but in marginal ways, such as in dreams, slips of the tongue and etc. Freud referred to dreaming as the "royal road to the unconscious".

After the publication of Ego, Id and Superego Freud introduces his structural theory. According to this new theory, the personality is composed of these three aspects. The focus shifts from the split between the conscious and the unconscious, to the struggle between the ego, id and superego. Most of the aspects of the unconscious were folded into the id.

By 1895 Freud and Breuer, who were working on Studies in Hysteria together, came to the conclusion that the "strangulation of affect" was caused by three unconscious processes:

strong affect experienced during "hypnoid states." (Anna 0.)
inadequate conscious discharge of affect
ego defense mechanism against unwanted ideas (sexual)

Freud's concept was a more subtle and complex psychological theory than many. Consciousness, in Freud's topographical view (which was his first of several psychological models of the mind) was a relatively thin perceptual aspect of the mind, whereas the subconscious (frequently misused and confused with the unconscious) was that merely autonomic function of the brain. The unconscious was indeed considered by Freud throughout the evolution of his psychoanalytic theory a sentient force of will influenced by human drives and yet operating well below the perceptual conscious mind. Hidden, like the man behind the curtain in the "Wizard of Oz," the unconscious directs the thoughts and feelings of everyone, according to Freud. This unconscious mind is the primitive instinctual hangover we all suffer from and which we must overcome in a healthy way in order to become fully and normally developed, i.e., not neurotic or psychotic but merely unhappy (See Frank Sulloway's Freud, Biologist of the Mind, Basic Books, 1983).

In another of Freud's systematizations, the mind is divided into the conscious mind or Ego and two parts of the Unconscious: the Id or instincts and the Superego. Freud used the idea of the unconscious in order to explain certain kinds of neurotic behavior. (See psychoanalysis.)

Freud's theory of the unconscious was substantially transformed by some of his followers, among them Carl Jung and Jacques Lacan.

Jung's collective unconscious

Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconcious." He was a pioneer in the use of dreams to explore the unconscious. However, while Freud believed that dreams consisted of repressed desires, Jung found in dreams a source of myths and symbols that would be a key in his own and his patients' self-understanding and journey to wholeness.

According to Jung, the unconscious is made up of two layers. The top layer contains material which has been made unconscious artificially; that is, it is made up of elements of one's personal experiences, the personal unconscious. Underneath this layer, however, is the collective unconscious: an absolute unconscious that has nothing to do with personal experiences. Jung described this bottom layer as "a psychic activity which goes on independently of the conscious mind and is not dependent even on the upper layers of the unconscious—untouched, and perhaps untouchable—by personal experience" (Campbell, 1971).

Jung considered the collective unconscious as the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain-structure of every individual. It can be considered as an immense depository of ancient wisdom. It contains archetypes, which are forms or symbols that are manifested by all people in all cultures. Jung postulated that the archetypes of the collective unconscious can be discovered by the primitive, analogical mode of thinking specific to dreams.

Jung did not see dreams as a way to hide the dreamer’s true feelings from the conscious mind, as Freud did. Instead, he saw dreams as providing a guide to the waking self and helping the dreamer achieve a kind of wholeness. To Jung, dreams were a way of offering solutions to problems the dreamer was experiencing in his or her waking life. In Analytical psychology, dreams are considered an integral, important, and personal expression of the individual's unconscious. They reveal the symbols and archetypes contained in the person's unconscious, which can be keys to the individual's growth and development.

Lacan's linguistic unconscious

According to Jacques Lacan's famous formulation, "the unconscious is structured like a language." The starting point for the linguistic theory of the unconscious was a re-reading of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. There, Freud identifies two mechanisms at work in the formation of unconscious fantasies: condensation and displacement. Under Lacan's linguistic reading, condensation is identified with the linguistic trope of metonymy, and displacement with metaphor.

Lacan's theory is based on the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure's linguistic theory focuses on synchronic analysis, as opposed to the diachronic analysis of language, that is, on its system of discontinuity. According to this view, language is based on the differences in structure of the signifiers. So, the word "cat" is based not on any intrinsic relationship between the word and the thing, but on the relationship of cat with other words, like "hat," "cot," etc.

Lacan's formulation means that symptoms are literally words trapped in the body, through a process of displacement analagous to a metaphor. The structure of the symptom is, like a metaphor, the substitution of one thing for another. What the analyst must do is find a translation. According to a symbolic exchange, the only way to relieve the symptom is to find the lost signifier, to replace it in the chain of signifiers. Symptoms are made of words. The nature of the symptom is that one word is replaced with another, which is kept repressed. Reconnecting the work in the chain of signifiers releases the symptom.

The unconscious, Lacan argued, was not a more primitive or archetypal part of the mind separate from the conscious, linguistic ego, but rather, a formation every bit as complex and linguistically sophisticated as consciousness itself. (Compare collective unconscious).

Since the unconscious is structured like a language conceptualized as a system of discontinuities, Lacan argues that the self occupies no stable or privileged place in the chain of signifiers. As a consequence, the self is denied any point of reference to which it can be 'restored' following trauma or 'identity crisis'. In this way, Lacan's thesis of the structurally dynamic unconscious is also a critique of the ego psychology that Freud himself had opposed.

Lacan famously used other mathematical and scientific concepts to bolster his theories, although his understanding of them has come into question. Also, within linguistics Saussurean models have largely been replaced by those of Noam Chomsky, among others.

Criticism

Many modern philosophers and social scientists either dispute the concept of an unconscious, or argue that it is not something that can be scientifically investigated or discussed rationally. In the social sciences, this view was first brought forward by John Watson, considered to be the first American behaviorist. As a behaviorist, Watson criticized the idea of an "unconscious mind." because he was more interested in observable behavior, which he considered to be the appropriate object of scientific investigation. Among philosophers, Karl Popper was one of Freud's most notable contemporary opponents. Popper argued that Freud's theory of the unconscious was not falsifiable, and therefore not based on a scientific hypothesis. After Popper, numerous other scientists such as Adolf Grunbaum have made similar criticisms about the lack of scientific rigor in Freud's theories.

Unlike Popper, the epistemologist Adolf Grunbaum argues that psychoanalysis could be falsifiable, but its evidence has serious epistemological problems. David Holmes examined sixty years of research about the Freudian concept of “repression”, and concluded that there is no positive evidence for this concept. Given the lack of evidence of many Freudian hypotheses, some scientific researchers proposed the existence of unconscious mechanisms that are very different from the Freudian ones. They speak of a “cognitive unconscious” (John Kihlstrom), an “adaptive unconscious” (Timothy Wilson), or a “dumb unconscious” (Loftus & Klinger), which executes automatic processes but lacks the complex mechanisms of repression and symbolic return of the repressed. (->Scientific research on unconscious processes).

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Bouveresse argued that Freudian thought exhibits a systemic confusion between reasons and causes: the method of interpretation can give reasons for new meanings, but are useless to find causal relations (which require experimental research). Wittgenstein gave the following example (in his Conversations with Rush Rhees): if we throw objects on a table, and we give free associations and interpretations about those objects, we’ll find a meaning for each object and its place, but we won’t find the causes.

Other critics of Freudian unconscious were Hans Eysenck, Jacques Van Rillaer, Frank Cioffi, Marshal Edelson, Edward Erwin.

In modern cognitive psychology, many researchers have sought to strip the notion of the unconscious from its Freudian heritage, and alternative terms such as 'implicit' or 'automatic' have come into currency. These traditions emphasize the degree to which cognitive processing happens outside the scope of cognitive awareness, and show that things we are unaware of can nonetheless influence other cognitive processes as well as behavior. Active research traditions related to the unconscious include implicit memory [1], priming, and implicit attitudes.

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