Unconscious mind

:This article refers to the psychological notion of an aspect or 'layer' of the psyche separate from but coexisting with 'consciousness'. This, it will be realised, is not the same as the unconsciousness or state of "being unconscious" that the medical doctor diagnoses when a person is no longer aware of, or responsive to, their surroundings.

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At a simple and informal level, the notion of an unconscious mind (or subconscious) would seem a usefully straightforward way of accounting for aspects of the mind of which we are not directly conscious or aware. Upon deeper examination, however, the topic reveals extraordinary complexity.

Related Topics:
Mind - Conscious - Aware - Reveals extraordinary complexity

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So many different ideas and theories have been advanced through the ages, and so widely have these various kinds of 'unconscious mind' differed from each other, that one might easily sympathise with behaviourism's decision to study merely patterns of 'stimulus and response' without engaging in speculation about conscious and unconscious mental states. At the present stage, there are still fundamental disagreements within psychology about what the nature of the 'unconscious mind' might be (if indeed it is considered to exist at all) -- whereas outside formal psychology a whole world of pop-psychological speculation has grown up in which the 'unconscious mind' is held to have any number of properties and abilities from the animalistic and infantile, through the innocent and child-like, to the savant-like, all-perceiving, mystical and occult.

Related Topics:
Theories - Behaviourism - Psychology - Animalistic - Infantile - Child - Savant - Mystical - Occult

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Probably the most detailed and precise of the various notions of 'unconscious mind' - and the one which most people will immediately think of upon hearing the term - is that developed by Sigmund Freud and his followers, and which lies at the heart of psychoanalysis. (It should be stressed, incidentally, that the popular term 'subconscious' is not a Freudian coinage and is never used in serious psychoanalytic writings).

Related Topics:
Sigmund Freud - Psychoanalysis - Freudian

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Freud's concept was a more subtle and complex psychological theory than many. Consciousness, in Freud's topographical view (which was his first of several psychological models of the mind) was a relatively thin perceptual aspect of the mind, whereas the subconscious (frequently misused and confused with the unconscious) was that merely autonomic function of the brain. The unconscious was indeed considered by Freud throughout the evolution of his psychoanalytic theory a sentient force of will influenced by human drives and yet operating well below the perceptual conscious mind. Hidden, like the man behind the curtain in the "Wizard of Oz," the unconscious directs the thoughts and feelings of everyone, according to Freud. This unconscious mind is the primitive instinctual hangover we all suffer from and which we must overcome in a healthy way in order to become fully and normally developed, i.e., not neurotic or psychotic but merely unhappy (See Frank Sulloway's "Freud, Biologist of the Mind," Basic Books, 1983).

Related Topics:
Neurotic - Psychotic - Unhappy

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