Alper Mert

Ku ID: 0060708

Analysis of S. Freud’s “The Unconscious”

In his book “The Unconscious”, Freud talks about the term unconscious and how it is a
necessity to explain our behavior and thoughts, parapraxes and, actions that conflict with our
personality. In his definition, unconscious is a residuum of psychical processes that has plenty
‘point of contacts’ conscious mental processes. He argues that; at any given moment, ample
part of our knowledge and personality is outside of the reach of consciousness, in other words
latent. According to him, even though there is no hard evidence of these latent processes and
how they affect the consciousness, any model of conscious processes without them would be
insufficient in explaining the gaps in our consciousness. He also points out that when it comes
to people other than us, we successfully understand the chain of thought/events which lead to
their inconsistent behavior, even if they are not aware of this chain, and find it plausible that
people may act in a certain way without knowing the reason behind their actions. However,
when we talk about our own actions and thought processes, we refuse the existence of the
aforementioned chain of thought/events. Thus, he claims that in order to understand and be
aware of our unconscious mind, we must approach every action or thought of ours, which do
not align with our personality, as if they belonged to someone else, and by doing so approach
to the unconscious as a second conscious which interacts with the conscious one’s aware of.

The value of “The Unconscious” should be examined in three parts, and it should be kept in
mind that the effects of the book manifested themselves over the course of decades: In the
first place Freud, even though they frequently used in the past, investigated and broadly
redefined the terms conscious and unconscious with specific examples. This allowed the
conditions wrongfully linked to physical disorders (E.g. OCD, shellshock) and only to
physical disorders to be redefined and be accepted not as the sickness of the body, but
disorders of the mind. In the second place, the terms trauma and repression started to become
popular, which opened the way of new researches in clinic and developmental psychology,
stress, anxiety, and psychological traumas. The third place, the book and the premises it stood
for were very controversial and radical, on the other side of this radical view, there were
behaviorist. This led to a, still ongoing, dispute between the groups bringing further
popularity to the area, and inspiring new researches and experiments (E.g. Little Albert
experiment).

The greatest weaknesses of “The Unconscious” and the ideas it presents, is the lack of
testability “The scientific level of Freud's concept of the unconscious is exactly on a par with
the miracles of Jesus.” (Watson,1929), and his underestimation of conscious processes “Freud
reduced the role of consciousness to that of an epistemological tool to know about certain
areas of one’s mental state, removing all ontological implications” (De Sousa, 2011). By
focusing on unconscious processes and defining them with such complicated network of
characteristics he deduced from specific clinical observations; the created an idea so
complicated and fluid, that it cannot be tested. Also, by reducing consciousness to simply
awareness of certain parts of unconscious processes, the further pushes the intangibility of
definition of the unconsciousness.

His complicated and untestable approach to the subject may be a forced by the nature of the
subject, or the conditions of the time he lived in. Still, his unscientific approach hinders his
ideas from being a scientific theory and makes them philosophical ideas. Useful ideas which
influenced the culture, and many researchers after it has been raised, but an idea nevertheless.
References:

Whyte, L. L. (1983). The unconscious before Freud. London: F. Pinter.

Marcus, G. F. (2006). The Norton psychology reader. New York: W.W. Norton.
Watson, J. B. (1929). The unconscious of the behaviorist. The Unconscious: A Symposium.,
91-113. doi:10.1037/13401-005
De Sousa, A. (2011). Freudian Theory and Consciousness: A Conceptual Analysis**. Mens
Sana Monographs, 9(1), 210–217. http://doi.org/10.4103/0973-1229.77437