Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) is easily one of the most influential people of the XX century. Although lots of his ideas have been denied in the years after his death, as being pseudo-scientific, Freud has surely shaped the way, we people think of ourselves.
One of his key ideas is the idea of the unconscious.
It is important to note that the term was actually coined in the XVIII century by the German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling.
The unconscious mind (or the unconscious) consists not of things but of processes that occur in the mind, without us being able to control, nor directly observe them. Such processes could include memories, interests, and motivations. They are most often related to different complexes and irrational (in a negative) sense behavior.
For example, if a man had had a difficult and rejection-filled relationship with his mother, most often than not when trying to build a relationship with a woman in the latter stages of his life, he is to struggle with the constant fear of being abandoned. Due to that fear, he is to become jealous and controlling and in the end, he is to repeat the relationship that he had with his mother with the woman that he had a romantic interest in. That is, he’ll make her leave him, and his fear of abandonment will become reality.
Of course, on a conscious level, he doesn’t want, nor need that. Yet, the unconscious will automatically connect the woman of romantic interest to what his first relationship with a woman was – abandonment, and will expect it every step of the way. Making it, eventually, reality.
According to the psychoanalytical theory, the unconscious processes are directly represented in dreams, as well as in slips of the tongue (Freudian slips), jokes, the examples we choose, the metaphors we use, etc.
A number of critics doubt the existence of the unconscious, as it is not falsifiable (n. the condition of admitting falsification: the logical possibility that an assertion, hypothesis, or theory can be shown to be false by an observation or experiment).
Whether true or not, we are not to say, but the important thing is that the theory is one of the most influential theories of the XXth century.
Related:
- Consciousness
- Unconscious (Psychology section)
