Freud and the Unconscious Mind – Mrs Austin’s summary of the themes covered in class. (Part 1)

 

We have been talking about different ideas of what the nature of man is.  So far we have looked at what the Rationalist’s view is and what the Christian philosophers view of human nature is.  Now we are looking at what the Freudian view of human nature is.  To begin to understand Freud’s view of human nature is, he starts by telling us that our mind - what it is and how it works gives us a clue to human nature?  Freud says that the mind is made up of three parts that work together – the conscious mind, the preconscious mind and the unconscious mind.  But how do we know that the mind even exists?

• The conscious mind is easily provable, the very fact that we are aware of things around us and are able to interact ,process and respond to information “right here –right now” show us that there is something like a conscious mind that allows us to do that. 

•The existence of the unconscious mind is little more tricky to prove – according to Freud we are unaware of it, for the most part we don’t even know that it is there.

•To prove that the unconscious mind does indeed exist Freud provides us with a model of the mind. We need a model to give us an idea of what the mind is like. Since the mind cannot be seen or touched – the best Freud can do to give us a model of what his idea of what the mind is like is to give us an analogy.

•An analogy is like an example – it is not exactly the same as the thing we want to describe but it is very similar. An analogy is a mental picture that we use to make a difficult thing more understandable or make a concept or an idea clearer.

Examples of other analogies are like this

“I love you- like a hot, burning fire” or “My heart is on fire”

-to communicate the idea of what his love like, the romantic creates a mental picture of how  fiercely and passionately a fire burns. Obviously , neither his heart or his love is an actual fiery inferno. However when he compares it to a hot burning fire, his girlfriend gets an idea of just how intense his love is.

-A popular Nike Advertisement featuring the now infamous Oscar Pistorious – double amputee Olympic sprinter had a picture of Oscar in a sprinting stance – the caption below read: “I am the bullet in the chamber”. If we can imagine how fast a bullet fires from a gun, we can get an idea of how fast Oscar Pistorius can run.

 

-Freud paints a mental picture (makes an analogy) of the mind being like an Iceberg.

-An Iceberg sits in the ocean – only its tip pokes out of the water – this is the part you can see – you have direct awareness of it – it is undeniably there. This part of the Iceberg is like the Conscious  mind. Just like the tip of the Iceberg is the smallest part of the Iceberg, the conscious mind is the smallest part of the mind. You can only concentrate on things happening in the moment with this part of the mind, and it usually is limited to a small amount of things.

The preconscious mind is like the part of the mind that sits just under the water. Some of this part of the Iceberg is visible but it is a little murky. This part of the Iceberg is like the preconscious mind. When the letters “Pre” are at the beginning of a word – it usually means that something comes before – like the word “predict” – to predict something is to know something before it actually happens. So the Preconscious mind contains things that are stored in memory, that are there just before the conscious state of mind. You can access it if you want to - but it is not in your conscious mind yet. When someone asks you what is 2+2? Before they asked you that – the answer to that question was stored in your preconscious mind waiting, when they ask you and you “think” about it – you move the stored memory of the answer to your conscious mind (as mentioned earlier – it becomes something that you are concentrating on right now, and right here)

The biggest part of the iceberg sits deep underwater. If you were in a boat sailing toward it, you wouldn’t know that it was there, but it is there and it is big and it has the power to damage that boat if you would happen to sail over it thinking that because you couldn’t see anything, there was nothing there. This part of the iceberg is like the unconscious mind. It is the biggest part of the mind. It stores a record of everything you have ever seen, done, said or experienced in you life. It has a particular job though – and that job is to store memories of incidents or events in your life that have caused you mental pain, psychological conflict or things that you cannot consciously bear to deal with.

Freud says that certain events can cause mental conflict or dilemma.  When the event causes so much mental distress and conflict that the individual experiencing it might seemingly feel like there is no way to escape or consciously get around the conflict, the unconscious mind in steps in to help the person out.  Right now it might be hard to imagine what kinds of experiences or events would  make the unconscious “freak out” like that.  Perhaps you would be able to understand it better if we made a few examples -

Imagine a situation like this.  Imagine a child is at home one day when she hears a noise that is  frightening – she peeps around the door to see why and what she sees is her father stabbing her mother to death.  The little girl loves her mother, but the little girl also loves her father.  In her mind this might create a mental conflict – on the one hand she loves her father, and trusts him completely and trusts him to love and care for her, on the other hand she has just seen her father do a terrible thing to her mother that she loves and cares about as well.  Her father is good, loving and caring but her father is also a murdering monster.  In her mind this is mental conflict, her conscious mind cannot even begin to deal with the two opposing, contradicting concepts of her father.  In this case the unconscious mind might jump in to help the little girl solve her mental dilemma.

  Here is another less serious example.  A little boy is playing outside his house at night when suddenly he hears a strange noise behind him – when he turns around he sees a grey alien.  The Grey alien reaches out and touches him.  Then the alien turns around and disappears.  The little boy runs into the house and tells everyone what he saw.  But no one believes him and everybody tells him that there are no such creatures, aliens do not exist and in fact they accuse of him of being a liar and a terrible person for trying to get attention with such a story.  They also say that he must be crazy or mad if he belives that that did happen.

The little boy is now in a terrible mental conflict – on the one hand he knows what he saw, he knows what he felt when the alien touched him.  He knows that he had that experience, on the other had everyone around him, including his parents, teachers, older siblings – basically everyone he trusts in the world is telling him that he is wrong, that this didn’t happen, that he is either imagining it or making up a lie.  Such a situation would cause a dilemma or a mental conflict – how can the boy stop himself from knowing what happened to him because everyone is saying that such a thing is impossible.  Even though he feels that he has had that experience – everyone in the world is telling that he has not.  Can you see how that would cause a “mental dilemma”?  Which should he feel – what he thinks happened to him or what everyone else is  telling him – that there is absolutely no way that could have happened to him because aliens do not exist.  In such a case the unconscious mind might jump in to help the boy just so that the boy does not have to deal with the conflict in his mind.   

Lets look at another real life example – a young woman confronted her mother on an episode of a popular reality talk TV show.  The young woman was really upset and resented her mother.  She claimed that she had been abused by her mother’s boyfriend and she told her mother at the time, expecting that her mother would protect her and make the abuse stop.  She had expected her mother to believe her and acknowledge her story as the truth.  She claims that the mother didnt do anything about it and in fact the abuse continued for many years afterward.  The mother on the hand who was also a guest on the show claims that she doesnt remember her child telling her that, that she has no memory of the incident and she didnt know that the abuse was going on.  As the show went on Dr Phil was able to ascertain that the mother faced an impossible dilemma – she too was scared and was being abused by the abuser. The abuser had on previous occassions, made threats to the effect that if the mother had ever ever tried to leave or get him into trouble in any way – that he would torture and kill the daughter and the mother.  The mother was placed in an impossible dilemma – on the one hand she wanted to protect her child from the sexual abuse, on the other hand if she tried to report the abuser, or kick him out, the abuser would torture and kill her daughter.  She did not know consciously how to deal with this.  For Freud it is possible that in the light of such a mental dilemma, that the unconscious mind would step in and try to help the mother out.  The mother’s inability to remember the daughter’s cry for help, or even the mother’s claim that she had no knowledge of the abuse could have been the effect of the mother’s own unconscious mind trying to help her solve an impossible dilemma.

When the unconscious mind “helps the person out” what it effectively does is sort of swallow up and lock away the memory of the dilemma that is causing the mental conflict.  The act of swallowing up and locking away is what Freud calls “repression”.  When we are talking about that happening – we say “the memory is repressed” or “the unconscious mind represses the memory”

The Unconscious mind is like a big vault that keeps the things that are in it securely locked away.  Once something is stored in the unconscious mind you will have no idea that it is there or that you have even had that dilemma.  As we said earlier, the unconscious mind is like a little inner helper or protector.  The unconscious mind thinks that you will no be able to cope or deal with the mental dilemma that is causing conflict so it tries its best to keep you shielded from knowing about it.

Sometimes the way the unconscious mind tries to help you is very irrational.  It is not as rational as the conscious mind which is able to come up with fairly reasonable solutions to problems.  We often say that the unconscious mind is childish.  Stopping someone from remembering that abuse is or has taken place is not a rational solution to the problem.  Sometimes when a child is abused by his or her father, the child loses the ability to speak, there is nothing physically wrong with the child’s vocal cords or her hearing or her tongue.  The loss of speech is usually related to the effect of the unconscious mind trying to protect the child from having to recount or remember the horrible incident.  Its an irrational way of trying to protect the child from reliving the trauma of the incident.  The unconscious mind probably reasons that if the child “talks” about it, the child will be reminded of the trauma and be hurt again.  So to protect the child from re-experiencing the trauma, it will make the child believe that she is mute.  Obviously this is not the best or rational way to help the child, but it tries any way to solve the problem in whatever way it can – which we have now seen to be quite irrational or childishly.