Freud's Main Issues Of Freud

2.2 Freud’s main issues Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Freudian theory is the predominance of the unconscious. According to Freud the human mind is like an iceberg. It is frequently hidden in the unconscious. He further supposed that the conscious level of the mind was like to the tip of the iceberg which could be seen, but the unconscious was mysterious and was hidden. Freud's interest lay in those unconscious beliefs which, he claimed, the greater part of what one experiences in her/ his life, the underlying sensations, beliefs, feelings, and impulses are not available to one at a conscious level. He believed that most of what drives us is buried in our unconscious. Freud makes a distinction between the levels of conscious

These unconscious wishes, according to Freud, can find expression in dreams because dreams twist the unconscious material and make it appear different from itself and more acceptable to consciousness. They may also appear in other concealed shapes, like in language (sometimes called the Freudian slips), in creative art and in neurotic behavior. One of the unconscious desires Freud believed that all human beings supposedly suppress, is the childhood desire to displace the parent of the same sex and to take his or her place in the warmth of the parent of the opposite sex. This so-called “Oedipus Complex,” which all children experience as a rite of passage to adult gender identity, lies at the core of Freud's sexual theory. Freud divides the level of mental life of human psych into three “provinces,” id, ego,

In other words, ego mediates between the urges of the id and the moral strictures of others in the super-ego. It is the decision making component of personality. Ideally the ego works by reason. Yet Freud states that “In popular language, we may say that the ego stands for reason and circumspection, while the id stands for the untamed passions.” Another province, of the psyche, which he called the superego, is really a projection of the ego. The superego almost seems to be outside of the self, making moral judgments, telling us to make sacrifices for good causes even though self-sacrifice may not be quite logical or rational. And, in a sense, the superego is “outside”, since much of what it tells us to do or think we have learned from our parents, our schools, .or our religious institutions.

What the ego and superego tell us not to do or think is repressed, forced into the

unconscious mind. according to moral customs of parents and culture. It is, as Freud says in “The Anatomy of the Mental Personality,” the “representative of all moral restrictions, the advocate of the impulse toward perfection, in short it is as much as we have been able to apprehend psycho- logically of what people call the ‘higher’ things in human life”