Identification of the Human Unconscious - Essay Example

Human consciousness plays a balancing role in the personality. To explain id, one can say that it represents the natural inborn instinctual drives of food, sex, and shelter. It encourages one’s self to go about fulfilling these drives. It is these primitive drives that encourage a person to fulfill these desires. On the other hand, we have another conscious force known as the super-ego. Superego represents the ideal person we wish to be in the eyes of others. It, therefore, encourages a person to become a perfectionist and to always do the socially correct thing. However, this again is not always possible and a person needs to balance the id and the super-ego. This balancing is provided by the presence of the ego. The ego is one’s conscious personality which balances the desires of the id and superego. It is necessary because we can neither fulfill our instinctual drives and needs to look at the time and space and we cannot be perfectionists because we have to make a lot of compromises to live a successful life.

All of the above discussion was about the unconscious personality in humans which Sigmund Freud talked about. He was the founder and was the first one to promulgate this concept. There was no such concept before that and his definition and introduction of human consciousness opened the doors for various future psychological research. He believed that the actions and behaviors of every human are linked to the unconscious and this is linked to development. To further elaborate on the concept he introduced new concepts of ego, superego, and id which are discussed above. He named his approach as a psychoanalytic approach. The major problem for the psychologists following this approach and for Sigmund Freud himself was how to unearth this unconscious of human beings. According to Freud, since human beings themselves are not aware of the human unconscious, it will take something special to unearth or find the human unconscious. Freud and other psychoanalysts use different techniques through which they find the desire held by the human unconscious. The major tool to unearth human consciousness, as Freud believed, was the person’s dream. Dream through their latent and manifest content represent the human unconscious and are one of the easiest ways of finding the human unconscious. Another way to find the human unconscious that Freud did was that he used to let his patients sit on a couch and let these people talk and talk. He used to note down what these people were saying. He then used the technique of Freudian slip to find out about the unconscious of these people. Freudian slips were slips of tongues that occurred as a result of introspecting. These were important for Freud and other psychoanalysts when trying to unearth the human unconscious.  He also asked people to talk about their fantasies. Fantasies usually contain the unconscious desire of the human and were considered very important by Freud and other psychoanalysts in determining the human unconscious.

Freud also later elaborated on the psychosexual stages of human development and elaborate that it is the first few years of human life that shape his personality. During his childhood, a person may be a victim of sexual abuse and it is that in his unconscious that has shaped his personality. E.g. If a girl is a victim of incest, she may adopt feelings of hatred towards all other males. This is what Freud believed with complete certainty that sexual experience at a young age shapes the personality of an individual. This sexual experience remains in the human unconscious forever and shapes his behavior for the rest of his life and needed to be unearthed to solve the psychological problems. Freud also believed that people hide under the blanket of defense mechanisms to conceal unconscious and anxiety from the individual in society. It is this defense mechanism that is needed to be unearthed if the greater details about a personality are to be known by psychoanalysts.

Although Freud was a master psychologist and a great philosopher, it was later that many people started criticizing his theory of the unconscious. Many based their claims on the fact that Freud's research is done mainly on people of his area and time and it is not true that people of other areas or region suffer from the same problem and or their personality structure is the same as Freud think it is.  Freud was also accused of manipulating the mind of his patients to get at the result that he wants to achieve and that his way of experimenting was biased. There was also no empirical data available to support his claims and also many believed that although his theory can be valid for history it cannot be said with certainty that it will be valid for the future.