Psychoanalysis: The Unconscious Mind

PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND
In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, the unconscious mind is a

reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of our
conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable
or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. According to Freud,
the unconscious continues to influence our behavior and experience even
though we are unaware of these underlying influences.
The Unconscious Mind: Below the Surface of Awareness
When thinking of 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.
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”).
Freud 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 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 often utilize a number of different
defense mechanisms to prevent them from rising to awareness.
How Is Unconscious Information Brought Into Awareness?
There are a few different ways that information from the unconscious might be
brought into conscious awareness, according to Freud.
Free Association: Freud also believed that he could bring these 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. Dream
interpretation often involves 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.
Criticisms
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,
yet it does offer evidence that things that we are not aware of consciously may
still have an influence on our behaviors.
Unlike early psychoanalytic approaches to the unconscious, research within the
field of cognitive psychology is driven by scientific investigations and empirical
data supporting the existence of these automatic cognitive processes.

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PSYCHOANALYSIS: THE UNCONSCIOUS MIND

In Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, the unconscious mind is a

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