Curiosities About Freud’s Theory Of The Unconscious
Freud represents the height of criticism and, at the same time, its decay. His psychoanalytic theory provoked great rejections and debates about the method’s validity, but what we cannot criticize is the advance it caused in philosophy, psychology and scientific medicine.
Pseudoscience or science, as each one wants to consider it; Freud inaugurated the line of thought based on the destruction of the concept of self through the study of the unconscious. This fundamentally influenced all the disciplines of the 20th century.
Curiosities of the mind according to Freud
as human beings that we are, we all have desires and repressions that we are forced to control in some ways in society. Even sometimes, we are not aware of it, and some of the acts that can be considered more rational are directed by our unconscious.
In many situations we behave in the way that the culture we live in accepts, and not how we actually think we would be happy. Desires are frustrated in these situations because they are seen as immoral, illegal or unworthy.
The curiosity that derives from this behavior is in the contradiction that it provokes in us and that emerges subliminally in dreams, fantasies or lapses. Why are we so limited by what others think about us?
Freud himself amplifies his 1915 theory about the human mind and explains in 1923 that it is divided into three parts. On the one hand, we have the conscious part of the subject, the “ego”, what we are in a controlled and limited way; on the other hand, the “id” is the unconscious ruled by the pleasure principle. Finally, there is the fundamental “superego” in our development as people.
This “superego” is made up of the moral norms that we have been internalizing since we were children, and that end up between guilt and morality.
just as believed in antiquity, the human mind needs harmony. We are no longer talking about the brain cells that balance the four humors, but about the three parts of the mind mentioned. According to Freud, imbalance causes neurosis or psychosis.
The curiosity or importance that this statement had at the time lies in the consideration of madness removed from a mental or organic lesion.
Curiosities of the unconscious theory and the beginning of the psychoanalyst method
when a patient wants to undergo a study of his unconscious for some kind of problem, the cure falls to the word. Language is a place where it is possible to recognize the inner conflict, as the person speaks of any topic without restrictions.
through language, the patient expresses contents that, for him, are still unconscious, which he does not superficially recognize through his “ego”.
if one of the ways in which our desires manifest is through dreams, these need to be studied. Dreams allow traumas and conflicts to surface so they can be resolved. We are what we dream and we dream what we are.
precisely this last point is what the psychoanalyst is prepared to do. It allows for the conscious study of a person’s unconsciousness.
– Would you mind telling your subconscious to calm down?
– It’s my subconscious. Do you remember? I cannot control it.
– Nolan, Inception –
it is a means of configuring the subject as it is configured by it. A feedback. Each era has its peculiarities and its ways of being that must be studied by the psychoanalyst to understand what the effects are on the patient.
this is perhaps the greatest curiosity of the unconscious theory. Freud pointed out in his researches that man moves by instincts and one of them is known as the “father’s murder”. The mother figure becomes the revealer, the essential, and one of the subject’s desires is the replacement of the father figure.
Culture, as we said, has a strong role in the realization of the “ego”. In this way, she is in charge of making the desire not come true, leading to morals and religion. Repression and the Oedipus complex can become pathological.
