Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious was a milestone in the history of psychology, this strange and fascinating underground world that generates uncontrollable fantasies, failures and impulses has allowed us, finally, to see a large part of mental disorders not as somatic diseases, nor as cerebral. diseases, but as occasional disturbances of our mind.
Today, there are still skeptics who see with a little subtle irony much of the father’s work of psychoanalysis, some concepts, such as the desire of the penis in the construction of female sexuality, are considered obsolete and laughable concepts. It is also those who regard much of their heritage as a type of pseudoscience that is unlikely to be in line with the discoveries of experimental psychology.
- The unconscious is the largest circle encompassing the smallest circle of consciousness itself; everything that is conscious has an earlier unconscious stage.
- While the unconscious can remain at this stage and still claim the total value of a psychic production.
- -Sigmund Freud-.
However, for those who subscribe to these ideas, it is important to specify a series of basic reflections. When Sigmund Freud first published his work on the unconscious, was he called a?Heretics, by your colleagues. Until then, psychiatry was based on a solid organic substrate or biologist. Was Freud the first to talk about emotional trauma, mental conflict, memories hidden in the mind?
Some of his theories can certainly be seen with skepticism, but his heritage, his contributions, his revolutionary focus on the study of mind, personality, dreams and the need to reformulate psychology by combining the organic plane with this other governed one cannot be underestimated. scenario, by the forces of the mind, the unconscious processes and the instincts. Ours, of course.
Thus, beyond what you might think, Freud’s legacy has no expiration date and will never have it, so today neuroscience follows the path of some of the ideas that the father of psychoanalysis postulating in his time.
Mark Solms, a well-known neuropsychologist at the University of Cape Town, reminds us, for example, that if the conscious mind is able to handle 6 or 7 things at the same time, our unconscious faces hundreds of processes. purely organic ones governed by the nervous system for most of the decisions we make on a daily basis.
If we reject the value and relevance of the unconscious in our lives, do we reject much of who we are, much of what lies beneath the tip of the iceberg?
It is 1880 and the consultation with the Austrian psychologist and physiologist Josef Breuer reaches who was considered “patient 0”, that is, the person who would allow Sigmund Freud to establish psychotherapy and initiate studies on the structure of the mind and the unconscious.
“The unconsciousness of one human being can react to that of another without going through the conscious. -Sigmund Freud-
We’re talking about Anna O, a pseudonym for Bertha Pappenheim, a patient diagnosed with hysteria. and whose clinical condition overcame Breuer in such a way that he was helped by his colleague and friend Sigmund Freud. The young woman was 21, and from the moment she had to take care of her sick father, she began to undergo changes as severe as strangers. His behavior was so strange that many people would dare say bertha was possessed by the devil.
From then on, the sessions continued in the same direction: bring back the trauma of the past. The relevance of Anna O’s (Bertha Pappenheim) case was so great that Freud used it to introduce a new revolutionary theory into his hysteria studies. about the human psyche, a new concept that completely changed the foundations of the mind.
Between 1900 and 1905 Sigmund Freud developed a topographical model of the mind through which he described the characteristics of its structure and function. To do this, he used a rather familiar analogy for everyone: the iceberg analogy.
Sigmund Freud was not the first to use this term, this idea, neurologists such as Jean Martin Charcot and Hippolyte Bernheim spoke of the unconscious, but it was he who made this concept the guiding principle of his theories, giving it new meanings. :
On the other hand, in “Studies on Hysteria”, Freud developed the concept of dissociation in a different and revolutionary way from that of the first hypnotists, such as Moreau de Tours or Bernheim or Charcot. Until that moment, this mechanism of the Mind in which parts of the mind – such as perceptions, feelings, thoughts and memories – that must be joined if they remain separate is 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, through which it could push away, hide and stifle certain emotional charges and experiences in the unconscious for the simple fact that it could not tolerate or accept the conscious part.
Freud did not discover the unconscious, we know that he was not the first to speak of him, however, he was the first to make this concept a system constitutive of the human being, he has devoted his whole life to this idea, to the point of stating that most of our psychic processes are, in themselves, unconscious and that conscious processes are nothing more than isolated acts or fractions of all this underground substrate that lies beneath the visible part of the iceberg.
However, between 1920 and 1923, Freud went one step further and further reformed his theory of mind to introduce what is now called the structural model of psychic instances, which includes the classical entities of the self, that and the superme. we’ll analyze them in detail.
The Surmoi confronts the two and produces a sense of guilt when, for example, we want something, but we cannot achieve it or realize it because social rules prevent us.
In the excellent film When Does the Heart Speak?From Alfred Hitchcock, we immerse ourselves in the dream world of the protagonist thanks to the suggestive scenarios that Salvador Dalí created for the film. The truth is that the world of the unconscious has rarely been seen. showed us so perfectly, the universe of hidden traumas, repressed memories, buried emotions.
“The interpretation of dreams is the true path to knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind. -Sigmund Freud-
Thus, one way to successfully evoke a part of this traumatic memory preserved in the corners of the mind was through the analysis of dreams. Freud considered that understanding this dream world was the true path to the unconscious, where defense mechanisms can be overcome and all repressed matter is achieved in distorted, disconnected and strange ways?
Freud’s theory of the unconscious was then considered a true heresy, later emerging as a guiding concept in the analysis and understanding of any behavior and is now considered a theoretical corpus that is not free of technical limitations, scientific guarantees and empirical perspectives.
Today we know that not all of our behavior, our personality or our behavior can be explained by this universe of the unconscious. We do know, however, that there are hundreds, thousands of unconscious processes in our daily lives by a simple mental economy, because of the simple need to automate certain heuristics that allow us to make quick decisions. At the risk of perpetuating certain unfair labels, in fact.
Today’s psychology and neuroscience do not diminish the value of the unconscious, quite the opposite, in fact, is it a fascinating and precious world to understand many of our behaviors, our daily choices, our preferences?A psychic fabric that makes up much of who we are and whose discovery and formulation we owe to the figure of Sigmund Freud.
References
Freud, Sigmund (2012)? The Self, Ello and Other Metapsychology Essays ?, Alliance Editorial
Freud Sigmund, (2013) “Studies on Hysteria”, Think Collection. Madrid