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In psychoanalysis and other psychological theories, the unconscious mind (or the unconscious) is the part of the psyche that is not available to introspection. Although these processes exist beneath the surface of Conscious mind awareness, they are thought to exert an effect on conscious thought processes and behavior. 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.
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 and neurotic symptoms, as well as in Freudian slip and . 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 , implicit memory, subliminal messages, , hypnagogia and hypnosis. While sleep, sleepwalking, , delirium and 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. (1995). 9780198661320, Oxford Univ. Press. ISBN 9780198661320
Western philosophers such as Arthur Schopenhauer,Ellenberger, H. (1970) New York: Basic Books, p. 542.Young, Christopher and Brook, Andrew (1994) Schopenhauer and Freud quotation: Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Robert Eduard von Hartmann, Carl Gustav Carus, Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, Friedrich Wilhelm NietzscheFriedrich Nietzsche, Preface to the second edition of "The Gay Science" 1886. and Thomas Carlyle used the word unconscious.
In 1880 at the Sorbonne, Edmond Colsenet defended a philosophy thesis (PhD) on the unconscious."Un débat sur l'inconscient avant Freud: la réception de Eduard von Hartmann chez les psychologues et philosophes français". de Serge Nicolas et Laurent Fedi, L'Harmattan, 2008, p. 8. Elie Rabier and Alfred Fouillee performed syntheses of the unconscious "at a time when Freud was not interested in the concept"."Un débat sur l'inconscient avant Freud: la réception de Eduard von Hartmann chez les psychologues et philosophes français". de Serge Nicolas et Laurent Fedi, L'Harmattan, Paris, 2008, p. 8.
For Freud, the unconscious is not merely that which is not conscious. He refers to that as the descriptive unconscious and it is only the starting postulate for real investigation into the psyche. He further distinguishes the unconscious from the pre-conscious: the pre-conscious is merely latent – thoughts, memories, etc. that are not present to consciousness but are capable of becoming so; the unconscious consists of psychic material that is made completely inaccessible to consciousness by the act of repression. The distinctions and inter-relationships between these three regions of the psyche—the conscious, the pre-conscious, and the unconscious—form what Freud calls the topographical model of the psyche. He later sought to respond to the perceived ambiguity of the term "unconscious" by developing what he called the structural model of the psyche, in which unconscious processes were described in terms of the id and the superego in their relation to the ego.
In the psychoanalytic view, unconscious mental processes can only be recognized through analysis of their effects in consciousness. Unconscious thoughts are not directly accessible to ordinary introspection, but they are capable of partially evading the censorship mechanism of repression in a disguised form, manifesting, for example, as dream elements or neurotic . Such symptoms are supposed to be capable of being "interpreted" during psychoanalysis, with the help of methods such as free association, dream analysis, and analysis of verbal slips and other unintentional manifestations in conscious life.
In addition to the structure of the unconscious, Jung differed from Freud in that he did not believe that Human sexuality was at the base of all unconscious thoughts."Jung, Carl Gustav." The Columbia encyclopedia. 6th. ed. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2000. 1490. Print.
In Freud's theory, dreams are instigated by the events and thoughts of everyday life. In what he called the "dream-work", these events and thoughts, governed by the rules of language and the reality principle, become subject to the "primary process" of unconscious thought, which is governed by the pleasure principle, wish gratification and the repressed sexual scenarios of childhood. The dream-work involves a process of disguising these unconscious desires in order to preserve sleep. This process occurs primarily by means of what Freud called condensation and displacement. Condensation is the focusing of the energy of several ideas into one, and displacement is the surrender of one idea's energy to another more trivial representative. The manifest content is thus thought to be a highly significant simplification of the latent content, capable of being deciphered in the analytic process, potentially allowing conscious insight into unconscious mental activity.Mannoni, Octave, Freud: The Theory of the Unconscious, London: Verso 2015 1971, pp. 55–58.
Much research has focused on the differences between conscious and unconscious perception. There is evidence that whether something is consciously perceived depends both on the incoming stimulus (bottom up strength) and on top-down mechanisms like attention. Recent research indicates that some unconsciously perceived information can become consciously accessible if there is cumulative evidence. Similarly, content that would normally be conscious can become unconscious through inattention (e.g. in the attentional blink) or through distracting stimuli like visual masking.
Franz Brentano rejected the concept of the unconscious in his 1874 book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, although his rejection followed largely from his definitions of consciousness and unconsciousness.
Jean-Paul Sartre offers a critique of Freud's theory of the unconscious in Being and Nothingness, based on the claim that consciousness is essentially self-conscious. Sartre also argues that Freud's theory of repression is internally flawed. Philosopher Thomas Baldwin argues that Sartre's argument is based on a misunderstanding of Freud.
Erich Fromm contends that "The term 'the unconscious' is actually a mystification (even though one might use it for reasons of convenience, as I am guilty of doing in these pages). There is no such thing as the unconscious; there are only experiences of which we are aware, and others of which we are not aware, that is, of which we are unconscious. If I hate a man because I am afraid of him, and if I am aware of my hate but not of my fear, we may say that my hate is conscious and that my fear is unconscious; still my fear does not lie in that mysterious place: 'the' unconscious."Fromm, Erich. Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx & Freud. London: Sphere Books, 1980, p. 93.
John Searle has offered a critique of the Freudian unconscious. He argues that the Freudian cases of shallow, consciously held mental states would be best characterized as 'repressed consciousness,' while the idea of more deeply unconscious mental states is more problematic. He contends that the very notion of a collection of "thoughts" that exist in a privileged region of the mind such that they are in principle never accessible to conscious awareness, is incoherent. This is not to imply that there are not "nonconscious" processes that form the basis of much of conscious life. Rather, Searle simply claims that to posit the existence of something that is like a "thought" in every way except for the fact that no one can ever be aware of it (can never, indeed, "think" it) is an incoherent concept. To speak of "something" as a "thought" either implies that it is being thought by a thinker or that it could be thought by a thinker. Processes that are not causally related to the phenomenon called thinking are more appropriately called the nonconscious processes of the brain.Searle, John. The Rediscovery of the Mind. MIT Press, 1994, pp. 151–173.
Other critics of the Freudian unconscious include David Stannard,See "The Problem of Logic", Chapter 3 of Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory, published by Oxford University Press, 1980. Richard Webster,See "Exploring the Unconscious: Self-Analysis and Oedipus", Chapter 11 of Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis, published by The Orwell Press, 2005. Ethan Watters,See "A Profession in Crisis", Chapter 1 of Therapy's Delusions: The Myth of the Unconscious and the Exploitation of Today's Walking Worried, published by Scribner, 1999. Richard Ofshe, and Eric Thomas Weber.
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),Wilson T. D. Strangers to Ourselves Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious. or a "dumb unconscious" (Loftus and Klinger), which executes automatic processes but lacks the complex mechanisms of repression and symbolic return of the repressed, and the "deep unconscious system" of Robert Langs.
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 been used. 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 (for example, priming), and Pawel Lewicki's nonconscious acquisition of knowledge.
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