Perhaps the single most important idea in Freud’s theory is that human beings are influenced by ideas, feelings, tendencies and ways of thinking of which they are not conscious. Freud’s original topography of the mind had three divisions: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. His theory can be pictured as follows: the mind is like a darkened theatre, with a single spotlight to illuminate the actors on the stage. Consciousness is equivalent to the actor in the spotlight at any moment. All of the other actors who can be illuminated as the spotlight moves across the stage are equivalent to the preconscious. To complete Freud’s picture we must imagine that there are many actors who are off-stage, in the unconscious. Unless they make the transition to the stage, the light of consciousness cannot illuminate them. Seen or unseen, on-stage or off, all the actors take part in the play of psychic life. The barrier between off-stage and on-stage is removed or weakened in dreams, and by free association, which is the basic technique of psychoanalysis.
Freud understood the unconscious as dynamic. Unconscious impulses were thought to be constantly active, influencing the preconscious and conscious—sometimes in discernible ways. Freud’s explanation for slips of the tongue (now commonly called Freudian errors) is the substitution of an unconscious thought for what was consciously intended. By considering these unconscious influences, Freud found meaning in what others saw as trivial mistakes—for example, when a man calls his wife by his mother’s name. Freud’s theory of humour is similarly based on the dynamic interaction between conscious and unconscious. The joke allows the pleasurable release of some repressed idea or feeling; aggressive sexual jokes are thus a classic example.
Freud’s theory of the unconscious became more complex in the course of his writings. At first he assumed that everything which was unconscious had once been conscious and had been repressed. The paradigmatic example was the subject who under hypnosis could be given some post-hypnotic suggestion, such as to open an umbrella indoors, but told to forget that he had been given that instruction. When the trance was ended, the subject would comply with the suggestions and open the umbrella indoors, but be unable to explain why he had done such a silly thing. Thus his behaviour was influenced by an idea about which he had no conscious awareness. Freud believed that his patients, like hypnotic subjects, were capable of splitting off from consciousness certain ideas and feelings by a defensive process he called repression. These repressed unconscious ideas could influence the patient’s behaviour, producing neurotic symptoms without his awareness.
Freud’s clinical work demonstrated that the most significant repressed ideas led back to childhood experiences. The content of the unconscious seemed to be ideas and tendencies, mainly sexual and aggressive—which he thought of as instinctual and biological—which were repressed under the moral influence of the environment. But the repressed remained active in the unconscious and continued in dynamic interaction with the conscious. Thus Freud’s conception of the unconscious emphasized the continuing and irrational influence of the past on the present.
The idea of the splitting of consciousness was not original to Freud, nor was that of an instinctive unconscious. These ideas in some form go back at least as far as Plato. The German philosophers of the nineteenth century, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, had a view of human nature which, in many ways, anticipated Freud. Freud’s theory of the unconscious none the less met with intense philosophical criticism, even ridicule. The idea that what was mental was not identical with consciousness and that the mental might be a mystery to consciousness was problematic for certain philosophical notions. Descartes had said, ‘I think therefore I exist.’ He used this introspective claim as the basis of a theory of knowledge. Freud’s concept of the unconscious challenged the certitude of all such introspective claims about the certainty of self-knowledge. The idea of unconscious influences also called into question the notion of free will. Perhaps because Freud emphasized the sexual aspects of the unconscious, his views were easy for philosophers to ridicule. The philosopher Sartre, who was in many ways more sympathetic than most contemporary philosophers to Freud’s emphasis on the importance of sex, still found it necessary to reject Freud’s fundamental concept of the unconscious. He interpreted repression as self-deception; asserting that it is impossible to lie to oneself, he described repression as bad faith.
Freud’s concept of the unconscious derived from his study of dreaming. He viewed the unconscious (associated with the infantile, the primitive, and the instinctual) as striving towards immediate discharge of tension. Dreaming and unconscious thinking are described as primary process thought, that is, they are unreflective, concrete, symbolic, egocentric, associative, timeless, visual, physiognomic and animistic, with memory organized about the imperative drive, in which wishes are equivalent to deeds and there is a radical departure from norms of logic—for example, contradictory ideas exist side by side. Primary process thought is contrasted with the modulated and adaptive discharge of tension in secondary process. By contrast, conscious thinking is reflective or directed, abstract, specific and particular, situation oriented, logical, chronological, auditory, verbal and explanatory. Memory is organized around the conscious focus of attention; thought and actions are clearly distinguished; thinking is rational and logically oriented. Freud’s view was that although the child advances from primary process to secondary process thinking, primary process does not disappear, but remains active in the unconscious. It can be revealed in dreams, in psychotic thinking, and in other regressed mental states. Preconscious thinking was characterized as intermediate between these two types. The distinction between primary and secondary process is a key development in Lacan’s linguistic reinterpretation of Freud.
Carl Jung, probably the greatest figure in psychoanalysis next to Freud, was an early advocate of what he called the collective unconscious. He assumed that in addition to repressed content, there was an inherited component to the unconscious shared by the human race. He based this conception on the evidence that certain symbols and complexes endlessly recur in the history of civilization. The Oedipus myth of the Greeks is the Oedipal dream of modern times. Freud and Jung took these ideas quite literally, believing that the individual was born not only with instinctual tendencies, but also with inherited complexes and symbols—for example, the serpent as a phallic symbol. Despite his eventual break with Jung, Freud maintained his own version of a collective unconscious, which also included the idea that certain moral concepts such as taboos had been inherited.
Freud subsequently reconceptualized his ideas about the unconscious in terms of the ego, the superego and the id. The id and the unconscious are now often used interchangeably in the psychiatric and psychoanalytic literature. While the theory of the unconscious remains controversial even now, the intuition that consciousness does not fully grasp the deeper mystery of our mental life continues to play an important role in twentieth-century thought.
Alan A.Stone
Harvard University
Further reading
Ellenberger, H.F. (1970) The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry, New York.
Freud, S. (1953 [1900]) The Interpretation of Dreams, Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, ed. J.Strachey, vol. 4, London.
