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Freud's Theory Of The Subconscious Mind

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The existence of the subconscious mind is widely believed to have been first discovered by Sigmund Freud (1900) . He stated that the subconscious mind is like a big storehouse for repressed desires that is exclusive to each individual and they’re shaped by your life experiences, your memories and beliefs that can’t be deliberately brought to surface. For example, our basic instinct like urges for aggression and sex are contained in the subconscious mind and do not reach our consciousness because we see them as unacceptable to our rational and conscious selves. They are a part of your mind that you can’t access by your own will, a portion of minds that sleeps within you but in some ways affect your thought processes, behaviours and actions in …show more content…

In his theory of dissociation he stated that: “The nature of conscious activity, especially partial automatism in which a part of one's personality is split off from self-awareness and follows an autonomous subconscious development”. Janet’s theory of the subconscious can be compared to Freud’s theory which is: “the unconscious mind governs behavior to a greater degree than people suspect”. Although there’re differences in the two theories, the main idea still remains, that the subconscious mind comprises thoughts inaccessible to the consciousness but to some extent, affect our behaviours personalities. Carl Jung (1953) also arrived at the same theory as Freud regarding the subconscious mind . However, there is a major difference between Jung and Freud’s model of the unconsciousness. Jung theorized the notion of collective (or transpersonal) unconscious. This is the second layer of his model of unconsciousness, with the first layer similar to Freud’s model. According to Jung, the human mind’s has innate characteristics imprinted on it as a result of revolution. These stem from our ancestral past (e.g. fear of the dark…) and they’re shared unconsciously with all the members of the human …show more content…

Later on, Timothy D. Wilson proposed his own version of the unconscious mind which is the adaptive unconscious which is a set of mental processes that influence judgments, setting goals, evaluating events and decision making outside of our conscious awareness, and thus linked to the unconscious mind. Although they both have the same idea about how the conscious mind plays a limited role in human experience, action and thought, Wilson’s model of the unconscious mind is more “friendly” than Freud’s model as he theorized the adaptive consciousness as our friend who supports us to live more effectively and not the repression of primitive urges like violence and lust in regards to Freud’s

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