Long before Freud, philosophers suggested that a certain part of our mental life is manifested in emotions, behavior and actions, but not available to consciousness. The unconscious and today remains a secret that everyone is in their own way.
We are not the owners in our house: our “I” partly subordinate to the forces of the unconscious. Our unconscious is not an enemy for us, even if it causes unpleasant symptoms. We fall into a trap when we do not hear its signals. Trying to decipher them, we can know ourselves better and get closer to ourselves real.
Our remote ancestors attributed spiritual processes to the influence of higher forces. The ancient Greeks, falling into uncontrolled anger or panic, feeling passionate love or irresistible desire, explained their state “obsession with the gods”.
Until the VIII century B.e. People were simply unable to realize themselves in the usual sense, the American psychologist, researcher of the history of consciousness Julian Jaines believes. They considered all their sudden internal motives the result of divine intervention.
This kind of explanation (“the Lord directed” or “the devil has been counted”) can be heard, by the way, to this day. The idea of a certain individual deity, “Diamone” inhabiting in us (in fact, from this Greek word “demon” comes), which, as an inner voice, encourages one or another act, is also present in the philosopher Socrates. However, Socratic “Diamon” is individual and inseparable from the personality. So the first step was taken to the modern understanding of the unconscious.
Dark abysses
Gradually, the source of unconscious impulses began to call the human soul.
“Events are taking place in our soul, which we do not know in a direct way,” said the ancient Roman doctor Galen 1 . Closer to our time, in the 17th century, Cartesianism – the teachings of the French philosopher Rene Descartes affected the notions of the unconscious.
He identified conscious and mental, so that the world was cut into two parts: on the one hand, deprived of consciousness of matter, our body, on the other – the spirit that lives in it.
Most of us like the idea that we could be extremely angry, you just have to give ourselves will
Descartes erected in principle doubt in everything, and only one thing was not in doubt: his own consciousness (“I think, therefore, I exist”). The next step in the XVIII century took a German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz.
For him, the unconscious acts as the lower form of mental life, which lies beyond what we realize. The zones of the conscious, he likens to the “islands rising from the ocean of dark perception” 2 .
However, until the end of the 19th century, the opinion was that this form of mental life was mainly related to mentally ill or hysteria, grimacing in hospitals like a possessive. In that era, a healthy person was not supposed to.
“The prevailing public opinion is still based on the concept of“ mental ”and“ conscious ”equivalent,” wrote the German philosopher Edward von Gartman in “Philosophy of the unconscious” 3 .
After his work, the term “unconscious” became popular. So the soil was prepared so that the demon of the “unconscious” demonstrate to our stable Descartes picture of the world.
Personality inside the personality
In search of the causes of mental disorders, Freud turned to the fact that “supplanted into the unconscious”. Of course, for him the “unconscious” consisted not only of the displaced.
However, he pays special attention to the supplanted, considering the unconscious as a storage of impermissible desires, not every, but incestoose desires of the child. Impulses are triggered in us, which our consciousness cannot bear, rejecting them or not even allowing them to ourselves (which, in fact, is the “crowding out” in the Freudian sense).
They conceive from consciousness, but survive, continuing to murmur inside us, and look for ways to come into the light. A long -term conflict between them and the conscious “I”, which builds numerous protection against them, makes us sick.
Hearing our unconscious, we will become closer to ourselves and can act in accordance with our nature
Freud initially called the colony of these voluptuous impulses the colony of voluptuous impulses, but when it became clear to him that the other areas of the soul-“I” and “Super-I”-function not only in the daytime light of consciousness, he renamed this colonyIn “it”.
In this picture, the “system of unconscious”, or “it” creates an independent unity inside the psyche, which is filled with its own feelings, thoughts, lusts and memories. “It” looks like a secret personality inside ours and differs from us in that this inner personality is more illogical, more passionate, irresponsible, misanthropic, and we cannot find it even during the most thorough searches.
Freud believed that unconscious states “can be described using all those categories that we apply to conscious spiritual acts, that is, to ideas, aspirations and the like. Yes, about some of these hidden states, we must say that they differ from conscious only the lack of consciousness ”4 .
Does the medieval theory of demonic?
The English philosopher Bertrand Russell believed that it was, and was joking: “The unconscious appears here a kind of prisoner of the dungeon who lives in a dungeon and only occasionally with heavy moans and curses and bizarre atavistic lusts caught the eyes of a respectable audience.
Most of us like the idea that we could be extremely angry, you just have to give ourselves will. Therefore, the Freudian unconscious was a consolation for many quiet and glorious people ”5 .
Non -accurate errors
No matter how much sober heads Freud is heard, the idea of the unconscious is deeply rooted in us, and we see its manifestations even where they are not. Often our reservations seem to be significant, they are looking for a hidden meaning. Meanwhile, not all linguistic oversights turn out to be “reservations on Freud”.
Our language can follow the sound of the sound of words, especially if we are tired. However, Freudian optics prompts to perceive any accident as a “supplanted” content. And sometimes tactless psychotherapists or relatives prone to psychological violence inspire us that they see us through and through.
In the 1990s, several American psychotherapists, convinced that the neurotic symptoms of patients are associated with childhood injuries, managed to create false memories of incest in them. These false memories were so distinct that the patients even attracted their fathers to the court.
What knows about the unconscious cognitive science?
Outside our consciousness, not only motives and motives remain, but also a variety of information that affects our behavior and the interpretation of even those information that we are aware of. “For example, we can skip your ears or forget some kind of advertisement, but when we see an advertised product in the store, we will buy it more likely,” explains the cognitive psychologist Maria Falikman. – Psychologists use the “subpoor presentation” procedures in the experiments, when the object is highlighted by a flash or demonstrated to thousandths of a second so that a person cannot perceive it. But it affects the speed or accuracy of identification of the next object, and sometimes on its interpretation: for example, even if we did not have time to consciously read the word “bow”, then the next word “braid” we will perceive as a hairstyle,
and if we were presented with the word “meadow “, the same word” braid “will perceive as an instrument.
We may not be aware of the patterns that we use, or our own actions, the execution of which is well mastered, automated. How you fold your fingers when you turn the page? It’s hard to answer? But this does not prevent you from reading a book or magazine. If everything goes according to plan, we do not need consciousness to perform automatic actions “.
Maria Falikman – Doctor of Psychological Sciences, senior researcher at Moscow State University. M.IN. Lomonosova, leading researcher at the Cognitive Research Laboratory of NIU High.
Collective different
Subsequent generations criticized Freud for the fact that for him the unconscious is inextricably linked with sexual desires. Karl Gustav Jung, a student of Freud, could not accept such a restriction. Ungiana unconscious includes the memory of all mankind and even a genetic memory of prehistoric eras.
The collective unconscious can send us signals through the centuries and, regardless of cultural differences. For example, the “field behavior” of autists-the swinging back and forth-the Yungians associate with the rites of antiquity and the rituals of modern Africa.
Psychoanalyst Jean Lacan also claimed that the unconscious is the voice of “another”, but he significantly narrowed the circle of these others. We are the result of what our first “others” said – parents, brothers and sisters.
It is their thoughts and desires live in us that, in addition to our will, affect our decisions in love and professional sphere. Our unconscious is the product of our personal history, but it does not make us hostages of the past, this is a window into the future.