Freud’s Conception of the Unconscious Criticized
Sigmund Freud tends to be regarded as the man who came up with the modern idea of the human mind. It’s likely that you already know what I am talking about — conscious, preconscious and the unconscious. Further on the conscious part is made out of ego, the unconscious from id and superego. This idea was quite revolutionary for the time but it wasn’t what people nowadays think of it. The words have remained but the meaning hasn’t.
The Ego
The central idea in Freud’s understanding of the human mind is the ego. Ego is the seed of consciousness, from Latin it simply means “I”, it’s the part of yourself you see as yourself. Freud himself made a more specific definition,
“We have formed the idea that in each individual there is a coherent organization of mental processes and we call this his ego.” (Freud, The Ego and the Id, p.17)
Freud’s central idea has it’s issues. People might present themselves as reliable, logical and coherent but the presentation is animated by a chaotic madman. The slightest amount of internal reflection will lead you to the conclusion that organization of the mind’s mental process is anything but coherent — random thoughts seam to come up all the time. If reflection isn’t you’re cup of tee then just try listening to Suzanne Vega’s song — Tom’s Diner. The second problem is that I’m not exactly sure what ego is. When I close my eyes and try to look for it, I can’t find it. It’s the part of the mind you’re conscious of, which means that you should know where it is. But when you look for it, it’s nowhere to be found.
Regardless, our investigation will primarily focus on the unconscious. I had to introduce the ego concept because Freud derives unconscious from it. Everybody is familiar with the iceberg image of the human mind. To be fair to Freud, he didn’t come up with it and I will shortly explain issues with it. A more pertinent image of the way Freud saw the human mind would be that of matryoshka doll. It’s a wooden figure toy and inside it there’s the same figure only smaller. Then the human mind is the whole matryoshka, everything outside it is the external world. The first doll is the ego, the second preconscious and the last — the unconscious. The main point is that only the outer matryoshka — the ego, gets to interact with the external world. In Freud’s view there is no direct link between anything that even resembles unconscious and the external world.
“Reflection at once shows us that no external vicissitudes can be experienced or undergone by the id, except by way of the ego, which is the representative of the external world to the id.” (Freud, The Ego and the Id, p.38)
The Unconscious
Freud believed that ego was the only autonomous actor in play. Ego is the mediator between the external world and the unconscious. Let’s illustrate it with a real life situation. To stay in the theme of Freudian psychology, let’s make it a sexual one. Let’s say that you’re in a work place environment, you find out that you have a new college and she’s hot. You’re attracted to her, but since expression of affection in the work place is nowadays frowned upon, you repress your desires and act as if she wasn’t a woman at all. In this example “you” that does the repressing is ego, the sexual desire comes from the unconscious, more precisely id part of the it. Repression here is the key word. As Freud explained it,
“Thus we obtain our concept of the unconscious from the theory of repression. The repressed is the prototype of the unconscious for us.” (Freud, The Ego and the Id, p.15)
Freud saw the unconscious as consisting of 2 different parts. The first part is made over our lives. It’s sort of like a hard drive full of more or less accessible memories of events that happened in the past. The second part is made out of id which encapsulates our unconscious desires. In the unconscious there resides one more part — the superego. Quite the contrary to the understanding of any second or perhaps twenty second hand source, the superego isn’t an independent part of the mind, rather it resides within id, as Freud wrote,
Thus in the id, which is capable of being inherited, are harboured residues of the existences of countless egos; and, when the ego forms its superego out of the id, it may perhaps only be reviving shapes of former egos and be bringing them to resurrection. (Freud, The Ego and the Id, p.38)
“When ego forms it’s superego out of id.” For the love of God, I can’t remember the moment I formed my super-ego out of my id. Ego is you, remember from Latin, it means “I”! That sentence put in simpler terms means that, ”I form super-ego from id.” Maybe I am just a weird human being and others in secret go trough superego formation phase. Hmm, generosity, do I want it in my superego stack? Regardless, it’s clear as day that Freud didn’t see superego as a primary element of the human mind, rather it was a secondary element formed from the id, by you, consciously… As promised it’s quite apparent now why the famous iceberg image of the human mind, to put it lightly, isn’t based on Freud’s ideas. Freud clearly states that ego is the only one seeing the sunlight and that superego is a subbranch of id made by ego, somehow…
Crux Of the Issue
Let’s say that in the repressed workplace love story, you continue repressing your attraction to her. Few weeks go by, for some reason you want to complement her book collection, you open your mouth and say, “Nice boobs, I mean books.” A good old Freudian slip comes out. An awkward moment of silence ensues and we’re at the crux of the issue- the unconscious. If the unconscious didn’t have autonomy then we would expect ourselves to be in an utterly complete control over our actions. I mean why do people sometimes “slip up” or “don’t act like themselves”. If it’s not you that’s acting then who is? There aren’t exactly a lot of places to look. If you’re not conscious of the actor, then it can’t be in the part of your mind of which your conscious.
The biggest problem in Freud’s idea of the human mind lies in the fact that he saw the unconscious as a consequence of the ego. He, “obtained the idea of the unconscious trough the idea of the repression.” Sure it’s also the part of the mind where primal desires reside, but in Freud’s view these desires are blind or to put it differently — disconnected from the external world. Further still, he said it straight up that the superego is a creation of the ego. What he in essence is saying is that the conscious part of the mind is making the unconscious part and that right there is logically impossible. How can you consciously create something of which you’re unconscious of?
For the longest time every internal process was externalized. If you acted out in anger then daemons possessed you, if you acted out of kindness then angels possessed you. Every internal process had to have an external cause. What Freud deserves credit for is developing an idea that there are forces beyond our control within our own mind, forces of which we’re unconscious of. But he didn’t go far enough. To him the father is still the primary cause for a child to develop superego i.e. become a moral human being. He insisted that issues in your life are caused by events that happened in your childhood. He still held rather religiously to the outside world as the only cause of internal processes though in his new model of the human mind, internal processes were at least given a room.
