Unconscious mind

In psychoanalysis and other psychological theories, the unconscious mind (or the unconscious) is the part of the psyche that is not available to introspection.[1] Although these processes exist beneath the surface of conscious awareness, they are thought to exert an effect on conscious thought processes and behavior.[2] Empirical evidence suggests that unconscious phenomena include repressed feelings and desires, memories, automatic skills, subliminal perceptions, and automatic reactions. The term was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge.[3][4]

The emergence of the concept of the unconscious in psychology and general culture was mainly due to the work of Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. In psychoanalytic theory, the unconscious mind consists of ideas and drives that have been subject to the mechanism of repression: anxiety-producing impulses in childhood are barred from consciousness, but do not cease to exist, and exert a constant pressure in the direction of consciousness. However, the content of the unconscious is only knowable to consciousness through its representation in a disguised or distorted form, by way of dreams and neurotic symptoms, as well as in slips of the tongue and jokes. The psychoanalyst seeks to interpret these conscious manifestations in order to understand the nature of the repressed.

The unconscious mind can be seen as the source of dreams and automatic thoughts (those that appear without any apparent cause), the repository of forgotten memories (that may still be accessible to consciousness at some later time), and the locus of implicit knowledge (the things that we have learned so well that we do them without thinking). Phenomena related to semi-consciousness include awakening, implicit memory, subliminal messages, trances, hypnagogia and hypnosis. While sleep, sleepwalking, dreaming, delirium and comas may signal the presence of unconscious processes, these processes are seen as symptoms rather than the unconscious mind itself.

Some critics have doubted the existence of the unconscious altogether.[5][6][7][8]

  1. ^ Westen, Drew (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. ISSN 0003-0651. PMID 10650551. S2CID 207080.
  2. ^ Kahneman, Daniel (2013). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-0374533557.
  3. ^ Cantor, G. N. (1981). Bynum, W. F.; Browne, E. J.; Porter, Roy (eds.). "Dictionary of the History of Science". Medical History. 26 (2): 225–226. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-05549-4. ISBN 978-1-349-05551-7. PMC 1139175.
  4. ^ Murray, Christopher John (2004). Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850. Taylor and Francis. pp. 1001–1002. ISBN 1-57958-422-5.
  5. ^ Honderich, Ted, ed. (1995). The Oxford companion to philosophy. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0-19-866132-0.
  6. ^ "David E. Stannard. Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory. New York: Oxford University Press. 1980. Pp. xx, 187. $12.95". The American Historical Review. 1981. doi:10.1086/ahr/86.2.369. ISSN 1937-5239.
  7. ^ Callender, J. S (1996-02-24). "Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis". BMJ. 312 (7029): 518. doi:10.1136/bmj.312.7029.518a. ISSN 0959-8138. S2CID 62293185.
  8. ^ Karbelnig, Alan Michael (2020). "The theater of the unconscious mind". Psychoanalytic Psychology. 37 (4): 273–281. doi:10.1037/pap0000251. ISSN 1939-1331. S2CID 198760071.