According to Tryon (2014), the possibility of an unconscious mind can be traced

back to the Greek physician Galen, the Roman philosopher Plotinus, St. Augustine,
Thomas Aquinas, and the physician Paracelsus who in different ways, approached
the notion of the unconscious in their works. According to Whyte (as cited n Tryon,
2014), the idea is present in Europe since 1600; there have been references in
works of Spinoza (unconscious memory), Leibniz (the mind is a merge of conscious
and unconscious procedures) Eduard von Hartmann (the unconscious in
metaphysical contexts) and Schopenhauer(Gardner, 2003). Wundt, the founder of
experimental psychology, underlined the importance of unconscious processes in
decision-making and William James in his treatise ‘The Principles of Psychology’,
examined the use of the term ‘unconscious’ and ‘subconscious'».

Even though Freud has been heavily criticized for his negligence to attribute credit
to previous scientists, it is undoubtful that he made the concept of the unconscious
omnipresent.

Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of the unconscious mind in the

topographical model of the mind’s structure o f conscious, preconscious and
unconscious (McLeod, 2009). He allegorized the model with the structure of an
iceberg.

The influences of the unconscious are revealed in dreams, as well as in slips of the
tongue(Freudian slips) or jokes. Actions in the direct field of awareness are termed
as conscious; the recollection of information that can be brought quickly to
awareness is part of the preconscious; information that cannot be reminisced at a
specific time but may surface in irrelevant circumstances belong to
the unconscious level; e.g childhood trauma (Unconscious, 2017). Freud also
assumed that the human mind is divided into three divisions: the id -motivated by
the two biological drives of sex and aggression(pleasure principle), the ego-which
serves the desires of the id in a socially acceptable way (reality principle), and the
superego-whose role is to apply moral values in the satisfaction of one’s
desires(McLeod, 2015).

The unconscious serves as a storage, a reservoir of traumatic experiences,

unwanted desires and embarrassing emotions that threaten one’s self-esteem by
inducing anxiety and guilt. Throughout the defense mechanism of repression,
people bury their most disturbing thoughts in their unconscious. The cause of many
psychological disorders was attributed to the conflict between conscious and
unconscious; On Freudian psychoanalytic theory, it is suggested that in order to
understand abnormal behaviors, a respectable expert should try techniques like
free association or dream analysis to retrieve materials hidden in the depths of the
unconscious (Strickland, 2001).

Critical of Freud’s sexual-oriented theory, Jung distanced himself and developed

his own structure of the human psyche: the ego, the personal unconscious and the
collective unconscious. The ego is linked to the individual’s awarenesss; the personal
unconscious is parallel to Freud’s with the exception of it being closer to the
surface; the collective unconscious-the most original Jungian theory- consists of
archetypes, which are universally shared images or thoughts that may surface in
dreams, art or religion. (McLeod, 2014).

Behaviorism ended the inquiries into the unconscious as it defied objective

description, until it resurfaced in the concepts of procedural memory (1972),
implicit (1995) and automatic processing(1935). According to Wilson (as cited in
McLeod, 2015), the modern view of the adaptive unconscious promotes efficiency
rather than repression- it consists of automatic processes that ‘are unconscious,
unintentional, uncontrollable, and efficient’ (Lakin, 2007).

(537 words)

References
Gardner, S. (2003). The unconscious mind. In T. Baldwin (Ed.), The Cambridge
History of Philosophy 1870–1945 (pp. 107-116). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521591041.010

Lakin, J. (2007). Adaptive unconscious. In R. F. Baumeister & K. D. Vohs (Eds.),

Encyclopedia of social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 12-12). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE
Publications, Inc. doi: 10.4135/9781412956253.n6

McLeod, S. A. (2014). Carl Jung. Retrieved

from https://www.simplypsychology.org/carl-jung.html

McLeod, S. A. (2015). Unconscious mind. Retrieved

from https://www.simplypsychology.org/unconscious-mind.html

Strickland, B. B. (2001). The Gale encyclopedia of psychology. Detroit, MI: Gale

Group

Tryon, W. (2014). Cognitive neuroscience and psychotherapy. Academic Press.

Unconscious (psychology) — Britannica Online Encyclopedia.» Encyclopedia –

Britannica Online Encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Dec. 2017.
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