Freudian Unconscious and Cognitive Neuroscience - Essay Example

Running Header: Freud and the Unconscious Student’s Name: Instructor’s Name: Course Name & Code: Date of Submission: Freud and the Unconscious Sigmund Freud made great contribution to Western thought through his arguments concerning the importance of the unconscious mind as well as understanding conscious behavior and thoughts. Freud is the founder of present abnormal psychology. He went ahead to establish psychoanalytical point of view. According to psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer, Freud was not the one who discovered unconscious although he made a lot of contributions towards its popularity and development. Unconscious are parts of the mind that deal with mental processes which are below awareness level. Unconsciousness is the part of the mind which has feelings, memories and thoughts which are outside our awareness. Conscious mind involves every aspect which we are alert of and talk about rationally. The unconscious according to Freudian theory plays a great role in mental functioning. It contains instincts, emotions and memories that have been repressed. The repressed feelings are the stimulus for actions and behavior. According to Freud, it was crucial to separate conscious and unconscious part of mind. This according to Freud was because unconscious was a submerged part of mind although it was a vast portion (Freud, Eder, & Tridon, 2009). According to Freud’s view, unconscious was made of the id, this account for instinctual drives. It acts as a force which motivates the behaviors of human being. It has wishes and desires hidden or even repressed from conscious recognition. According to Freud, separating psychical into unconscious and conscious is a vital psychoanalysis premise. Separating conscious and unconscious according to Freud helped one in becoming more aware of his consciousness and unconsciousness behaviors. He believed that separating conscious and unconsciousness, this will make one more aware through dreams on our unconscious. This will also make people become more independent, mature and conscious. The fact that conscious in a person is driven by unconscious part made Freud get the feeling that there was need to separate the two apart. This is because they played different roles in human minds and thoughts. Therefore, separating them would help in analyzing the behavior and characteristics of a person and motives behind them. He supported his argument with that unconscious was part of the psyche which lies below consciousness. He further maintained that it cannot be raised into conscious. He explained that unconscious cannot be observed directly with the conscious mind and at the same time it has its own processes which affect conscious minds greatly. This greatly influenced Freud towards the importance of separating them because they were different things altogether which required separation as well as being viewed separately. He further argued that their functioning were totally different and required different analysis (Freud, Eder, & Tridon, 2009). According to Freud, there was repression deep into the unconscious mind. He argued that a lot of people repress painful memories into their unconscious mind unknowingly. This brought out a major difference between unconscious and conscious according to Freud. Therefore, this made Freud to think on how to create diversity between the two. There is a great variation between conscious and non-conscious hence Freud found the importance of separating the two concepts. Freud argued that most people are unaware of memories or traumatic experiences behind their memories which were referred as unconscious by Freud. These are different from the conscious parts which people are aware of in their life. This made Freud to think of how to differentiate or divide psychic life into unconscious and unconscious. He went further to differentiate them into unconscious, preconscious, or unconscious. According to Freud, it was crucial to have the difference between the conscious and unconscious. Conscious and unconscious required to be separated because they reflected a great difference in understanding of human psychic activity and thoughts. Conscious involves what one knows or is aware of while unconscious involves what one is not aware of. Therefore, there was the need to separate the two in order for one to be able to understand his mind well according to Freud. Unconscious mainly refers to things which we cannot be able to know how they are happening and when they are happening in our mind. According to Freud, there is need to separate them from conscious ones because they are not recognized by the person. He said that conscious and unconscious had different influences on a person’s mental processes. Therefore, he saw the need to separate them in order to know the exact influence of each one of them. Freud realized and showed that there is a great difference between what we believe and feel and what we think we believe and feel. There is a great difference between who a person actually is and who they think they are. Therefore, there is need to rationalize unconscious processes. This will enable one to keep the in-built self-image intact. Freud wanted a public acceptance on the fact that there is difference between conscious and unconscious. He also explained that the knowledge of unconscious part is vital in making one realize who he is. Therefore, there was need to separate the conscious and unconscious in order to make people realize who they are and what they have and capable of doing. Freud distinguished unconscious into three main concepts after sometimes. They included descriptive unconscious, system conscious, and dynamic conscious. The descriptive unconscious referred to the mental life features that people are not subjectively conscious. The dynamic unconscious is the mental process and the contents which are removed defensively from consciousness due to conflicting attitudes. The system unconscious indicates the thought that, when there is mental processes repression, they become prearranged by values which are dissimilar from those of the conscious mind (Talvitie, 2009). Conscious mind is what one is alert of at any specific moment, present perceptions, thoughts, feelings and what one has among others. According to Freud, working closely with the conscious mind was referred to as preconscious. This is referred to as available memory nowadays or anything which can be made conscious. Freud argued that those were the smallest part of mind; he said that the largest part was unconscious part. He said that these were the things that were not easily available to our awareness including several things which have their origins there. They include instincts or drives; there are things which are put there because we cannot be able to look at them like emotions and memories which are associated with trauma. Freud arrived into the conclusion that unconscious is psychic domain of an individual which is unaware but houses feelings, desires and memories which are of threat if exposed to the conscious memory. He further explains that unconscious is mental space or domain whereby maladaptive mental activity takes place and cannot be assigned to conscious part of the mind. Freud argues that the source of our motivations is unconscious. They may be desires for sex, food, motives for a scientist or an artist, and neurotic compulsions. Unconscious according to Freud can as well be referred to as an area of great psychic activity, whereby behavior and personality are influenced with material not subject of recalling through a mental normal process. He also referred to unconscious mind as a reservoir of urges, thoughts, feelings, and memories which are outside our conscious awareness. According to Freud, major part of unconscious mind is unacceptable or even unpleasant and includes anxiety, conflict or pain. He continues to argue that the unconscious continues to influence our experience and behaviors although we are not aware of those underlying influences (Talvitie, 2009). Freud referred dreams as a royal road to the unconsciousness. He used dreams in his illustrations of unconscious mind. In trying to propose that unconscious exist, Freud developed the Interpretation of Dreams (1899) as his first topology of the psyche. He also described a method of gaining its access. Freud argued that sexual desires play an important part in our unconscious. In some instances, dreams are associated with unconscious and therefore one cannot be able to comprehend or know what exactly was happening behind the mind. This supports the concept of unconscious as illustrated by Freud. Freud supported his unconscious argument through his argument that some people plan with no conscious. Other phenomena that led to Freud stress the unconscious mental essence included creation of fantasies, metaphors, dreams, and psychic disorders. Other things like hallucinations caused very deep unconscious that human beings have. Freud argues that dreams are usually caused by some desires which we are unaware of (Talvitie, 2009). Freud believed that various actions which take place behind our mind mostly occur in unconscious part of brain. He supported his argument by saying that there are a lot ideas and mental functioning which takes place behind our brain without our knowledge or with us being unaware. This was the need according to Freud to separate unconscious and conscious due to the diversity they have in a psychological point of view. Unconscious is related to mental actions and feeling that we are unaware of and those which we cannot be able to control or even know about them. Conscious on the other hand are the things which take place, feelings, emotions, and mental functions which we are aware of very well. This was main idea behind the need of separating them according to Freud. References Freud, S. F., Eder, M. H. & Tridon, A. D. 2009. Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners. New York: Digireads.com Publishing. Talvitie, V. 2009. Freudian unconscious and cognitive neuroscience: from unconscious fantasies to neural algorithms. London: Karnac Books. Read More