The theory of the unconscious according to Sigmund Freud

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

To this day, still There are many skeptics who view much of the work of the father of psychoanalysis with a touch of subtle irony. Concepts such as penis envy in the construction of female sexuality are seen as outdated and laughable, and there are also those who conceive much of its legacy as a type of pseudoscience that is not consistent with the findings of experimental psychology.

In fact, studies such as the one carried out by Dr. Peter Fonagy of the University College London It shows that psychoanalysis is today a discipline in conflict. Many of its treatments, for example, still lack solid empirical validity.

However, for those who hold these ideas, it is important to clarify a series of basic reflections. When Sigmund Freud first published his work on the unconscious he was branded a “heretic” by his colleagues.

Until that moment, psychiatry was based on a strong organicist or biologicalist substrate. Freud was the first to talk about emotional traumas, mental conflicts, hidden memories of the mind… We can undoubtedly view some of his theories with skepticism, but we cannot underestimate his legacy, his contributions and his revolutionary approach to the study of the mind.

So, beyond what we can believe, Freud’s legacy has no expiration date and never will. So much so that, today, neuroscience follows the path of some of the ideas that the father of psychoanalysis postulated at his time.

Mark Solms, a well-known neuropsychologist and psychoanalyst 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 once, our unconscious is responsible for hundreds of processes. From the purely organic ones governed by the nervous system, to also a large part of the decisions we make daily.

If we reject the value and relevance that the unconscious has in our lives, we therefore reject a large part of who we are, a large part of what remains below that small tip of the iceberg…

Next we will delve into Sigmund Freud’s theory of the unconscious.

The curious case of Anna O

We are in 1880 Now what is considered “patient 0” arrives at the consultation of the Austrian psychologist and physiologist Josef Breuer. That is to say, 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.

We talk about Anna O, pseudonym of Bertha Pappenheim, a patient diagnosed with histeria and whose clinical picture so overwhelmed Breuer that he asked for 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 that were as serious as they were strange. Her behavior was so singular that there were many who ventured to say that Bertha was possessed..

Jean-Michel Quidonoz, renowned psychiatrist and member of the British Psychoanalytic Society, described the case in the book An exploration of the writings of Sigmund Freud informing us of the following:

The truth is that Anna O’s case in itself could not be more interesting from a clinical point of view. The young woman suffered episodes of blindness, deafness, partial paralysis, ocular strabismus and, most strikingly, there were moments when she lost the ability to speak. or even communicated with languages ​​​​that he did not master, such as English or French. Freud and Breuer sensed that this went beyond classic hysteria. There was a point when Bertha Pappenheim stopped drinking liquids. The severity of her condition was such that the father of psychoanalysis resorted to hypnosis to suddenly evoke a memory of her: Bertha’s lady-in-waiting had given him a drink from the same glass as her dog. After “unlocking” that unconscious memory, the young woman was able to drink liquids again.

From now on, The sessions followed the same line: bringing past traumas to consciousness. The relevance of Anna O’s case was such that it helped Freud introduce a new revolutionary theory about the human psyche into his studies on hysteria, 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 through which he described the characteristics of its structure and function. To do this, he used an analogy that is very familiar to all of us: that of the iceberg.

On the surface is consciousnesswhere all those thoughts converge where we focus our attention, which help us develop and which we use with immediacy and quick accessibility.In the preconscious everything that our memory can easily retrieve is concentrated. The third and most important region is the unconscious. It is broad, vast, sometimes unfathomable and always mysterious. It is the unseen part of the iceberg and the one that actually occupies most of our minds.

Freud’s concept of the unconscious was not a new idea

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

The unconscious world is not beyond consciousness, it is not an abstract entity but a real, broad, chaotic and essential stratum of the mind, to which we do not have access. Now, This 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 into our consciousness and external because it affects our behavior.

On the other hand, in Studies on the freud hysteria conceived the concept of dissociation in a different and revolutionary way than the first hypnologists did like Moreau de Tours or Bernheim or Charcot.

Until that moment, this mechanism of the mind where parts that should be united, such as perceptions, feelings, thoughts and memories, are kept separate, 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 suffocate certain emotional charges and experiences in the unconscious for 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 that. He was not the first to talk about it, however, he was the first person to make this concept the constitutive system of the human being. He dedicated his entire life to this idea, to the point of stating that most of our psychic processes are themselves unconsciousand that conscious processes are nothing more than isolated acts or fractions of all that underground substrate that lies under the iceberg.

In fact, today it is impossible to leave aside the relevance that the unconscious has in our lives. Thus, studies such as the one published in the journal Frontiers in human neuroscience Dr. Howard Shevrin, from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Michigan, explains to us, for example, that Unconscious conflicts are the origin of many of our psychological disorders and diseases.

Now, on the other hand, it is worth remembering that between 1920 and 1923 Freud took a step further and reformulated his theory of the mind a little more to introduce what is known today as the structural model of psychic instances where the classic entities are included. of the “ego, id and superego”. Let’s see them in detail.

The It

The It 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, it is governed by instinct.by those most primitive drives of our essence and against which we usually fight daily.

The I

As we grow and reach the age of 3 – 4, our concept of reality and our need to survive in the context that surrounds us will appear.

Thus, with the development of that “I” a need also appears: that of controlling the “It” at every moment or carrying out actions to satisfy its drives in an acceptable and correct way socially.

Likewise, to ensure that one’s own behavior is not blatant or too uninhibited, the I use defense mechanisms.

The Superego

For its part, the Superego arises from socializationfrom the pressure of our parents, from the schemes of that social context that transmits us norms, guidelines, behavioral guides.

This psychic entity It 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 morality and that wants to satisfy its drives, and on the other hand, we have the SELF that only wants to survive, to be in balance…

The importance of our dreams as a path to the unconscious

In the excellent movie Remember by 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 rarely has this world of the unconscious been shown to us with such perfection, that universe of hidden trauma, of repressed memories, of buried emotions.

Thus, one way to evoke part of that traumatic memory kept locked in the recesses of the mind was through the analysis of dreams. Freud considered that understanding this dream world was the royal road to the unconscious.there where you can win…