The theory of the unconscious according to Sigmund Freud

The unconscious theory formulated by Sigmund Freud was a milestone in the history of psychology. That strange and fascinating underworld generator of fantasies, lapses and uncontrolled impulses allowed us to finally see a large part of mental disorders not as somatic diseases, not as diseases of the brain, but as specific alterations of our mind.

To this day there are still many skeptics who see with a point of subtle irony much of the work of the father of psychoanalysis. Concepts, such as envy of the penis in the construction of female sexuality, are seen as obsolete and ridiculous concepts, and there is no shortage of those who conceive much of their legacy as a type of pseudoscience not consistent with the findings of experimental psychology.

"The unconscious is the largest circle that includes within itself the smallest circle of the conscious; all conscious has its preliminary step in the unconscious, while the unconscious can stop with this step and still claim full value as a psychic activity "
-Sigmund Freud-

However, for those who hold these ideas, it is important to qualify a series of basic reflections. When Sigmund Freud first published his work on the unconscious he was branded a "heretic" by his colleagues. Until then, psychiatry was based on a strict organicist or biologicist substratum. Freud was the first to talk about emotional traumas, mental conflicts, hidden memories of the mind ...

We can certainly see some of his theories with skepticism, but we can not underestimate his legacy, his contributions, his revolutionary approach in the study of the mind, personality, in the field of dreams and in the need to reformulate psychology by uniting the organic plane with that other scenario governed by the forces of the mind, by the unconscious processes and the instincts. Ours, of course.

Thus, beyond what we can believe, the legacy of Freud has no expiration date nor will ever. So much so that today neuroscience follows the path of some of the ideas that the father of psychoanalysis postulated at the time.

Mark Solms, a well-known neuropsychologist at the University of Cape Town, reminds us for example that while the conscious mind is capable of attending to 6 or 7 things at the same time, our unconscious deals with hundreds of processes. From the purely organic ruled by the nervous system also happening for many of the decisions we make every day.

If we reject the value and relevance of the unconscious in our lives, we reject so much of what we are, much of what is below that small tip of the iceberg ...

The curious case of Anna O

We are in 1880 and at the consultation of the Austrian psychologist and physiologist Josef Breuer comes what is considered "patient 0". That is, the person who would allow Sigmund Freud to lay the foundations of psychotherapy and begin studies on the structure of the mind and the unconscious.

"The unconscious of a human being can react to the other without going through the conscious"
-Sigmund Freud-

We speak, of course, of "Anna O" pseudonym of Bertha Pappenheim, a patient diagnosed with "hysteria" and whose clinical picture surpassed Breuer so much that he asked the help of his colleague and friend Sigmund Freud. The young woman was 21 years old, and from the moment she had to take responsibility for her sick father, she began to suffer alterations as serious as strange. His behavior was so strange that there was no lack of who ventured to say that Bertha was demon-possessed.

The truth is that the case itself could not be more particular: the girl suffered episodes of blindness, deafness, partial paralysis, eye squint and, most strikingly, there were moments when she lost her ability to speak or even communicated with languages ​​that He did not dominate, like English or French.

Freud and Breuer sensed that this went beyond the classic hysteria. There was a point where Bertha Pappenheim stopped drinking. The seriousness of his condition was such that the father of psychoanalysis resorted to hypnosis to evoke suddenly a memory: the companion and Bertha had given him to drink from the same glass as his dog. After "unlocking" that unconscious memory, the young woman was able to drink liquids again.

From here, the sessions followed the same line: bring to consciousness traumas of the past. The relevance of the case of Anna O (Bertha Pappenheim) was such that it served Freud to introduce into his studies on hysteria a new revolutionary theory on the human psyche, a new concept that completely changed the foundations of the mind.

What is the unconscious mind for Freud

Between 1900 and 1905 Sigmund Freud developed a topographic model of the mind by which he described the characteristics of the structure and function of the mind. For this he used an analogy that we all are familiar with: the iceberg.

On the surface is the conscience, where all those thoughts converge where we focus our attention, which serve us to develop and that we use with immediacy and quick accessibility.

In the pre-conscious everything that our memory can easily recover is concentrated.

The third and most important region is the unconscious. It is broad, vast, sometimes incomprehensible and always mysterious. It is the unseen part of the iceberg and the one that actually occupies most of our mind.

The concept of Freud's unconscious was not a new idea

Sigmund Freud was not the first to make use of this term, of this idea. Neurologists such as Jean Martin Charcot or Hippolyte Bernheim often spoke of the unconscious; However, it was he who made this concept the backbone of his theories, endowing it with new meanings:

The unconscious world is not beyond consciousness, it is not an abstract entity but a real, broad, chaotic and essential layer of the mind, to which there is no access.

Now, that unconscious world is revealed in many different ways: through dreams, in our lapses or in our failed actions.

Likewise, the unconscious for Freud is internal and external. Internal because it extends in our consciousness and externally because it affects our behavior.

On the other hand, in "Studies on Hysteria" Freud conceived the concept of dissociation in a different and revolutionary way as did the first hypnotists such as Moreau de Tours or Bernheim or Charcot. Until that moment, this mechanism of the mind where separate parts that should be joined together are perceptions, feelings, thoughts and memories, was explained exclusively by somatic causes, by brain diseases associated with hysteria.

Freud saw dissociation as a defense mechanism. It was a strategy of the mind by which to separate, hide and suppress certain emotional burdens and experiences in the unconscious by the mere fact that the conscious part could not tolerate or accept them.

The structural model of the mind

Freud did not discover the unconscious, we know, he was not the first to speak of it, it is clear, however, he was the first person to make this concept the constitutive system of the human being. He devoted his whole life to this idea, to the point of affirming that most of our psychic processes are in themselves unconscious, and that conscious processes are nothing but isolated acts or fractions of all that underground substratum that lies beneath the iceberg.

However, between 1920 and 1923, Freud went a step further and reformulated a little more his theory about the mind to introduce what is now known as the structural model of the psychic instances where the classic entities of the "I, it and superyo. " Let's see them in detail.

The It: The Id or Id is the structure of the human psyche that remains on the surface, the first that appears in our life and that governs our behavior in that early childhood. It is the one that seeks immediate pleasure, is governed by the instinctive by those more primitive drives of our essence and against which, we usually struggle daily.

The "I": as we grow and arrive until 3 or 4 years old, our concept of reality and our need to survive in that context that surrounds us will appear. Thus, with the development of that "I" there also appears a need: to control the "It" at every moment or to carry out actions to satisfy its impulses in an acceptable and socially correct way. Likewise, in order to ensure that one's behavior is not brazen or uninhibited, defense mechanisms are used.

The Superego: the superego arises from socialization, from the pressure of our parents, from the schemes of that social context that transmits us some norms, some guidelines, some behavioral guides. This psychic entity has a very specific ultimate goal: to ensure compliance with moral rules. This purpose is not easy to carry out, because on the one hand we have the It that detests the moral and that wants to satisfy its impulses, and on the other hand, we have the SELF that only wants to survive, to be in balance.

The superego faces both, and makes us feel guilty when for example, we want something but we can not achieve or realize because social norms prevent us.

The importance of our dreams as a way to the unconscious

In the excellent film "Recuerda" by Alfred Hitchcock we immerse ourselves in the dream world of the protagonist thanks to the suggestive scenes that Salvador Dalí created for the film. The truth is that this world of the unconscious, that universe of hidden trauma, of repressed memories, of buried emotions, was seldom shown to us with such perfection.

The interpretation of dreams is the real way to the knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind "
-Sigmund Freud-

Thus, a way of being able to evoke part of that traumatic memory kept locked in the recesses of the mind, was through the analysis of dreams. Freud considered that the understanding of that world of the oneiric was the real way to the unconscious, there where to overcome the defense mechanisms and reach all that repressed material under distorted, disconnected and strange forms ...

The world of the unconscious today

Freud's theory of the unconscious was seen as an authentic heresy at the time, later it emerged as a vertebrate concept in the analysis and understanding of all behavior, and today, it is seen as a theoretical corpus not exempt from technical limitations , scientific endorsements and empirical perspectives.

Today we know that NOT all our behavior, our personality or our behavior can be explained by that universe of the unconscious. We know, however, that yes there are hundreds, thousands of processes, which are unconscious in our day to day by simple mental economy, by mere need to automate certain heuristics that allow us to make quick decisions. With the risk of perpetuating some unfair labels, yes.

The current psychology and neuroscience does not detract from the unconscious, just the opposite. In fact, it is a fascinating world and of great value to understand many of our behaviors, our daily choices, our preferences ... A psychic fabric that makes up a large part of who we are and whose discovery and formulation we owe to the figure of Sigmund Freud.