The origin of the meaning of the mind offers a long and rich history. Like many other words and phrases, no clear evolution is found for its use. The meaning of the word mind is totally context based. From the philosopher's viewpoint, the mind refers to personality, identity, and memories. Freud's main focus was on the human mind and its role in behavioral sciences. Nowadays, the concept of the mind and its function is always discussed from the scientific point of view. Sigmund Freud developed the Model of the human mind and started its analysis in the year 1897, which includes the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious. All of these work together to create reality. Although the psychoanalytic theory has made a huge contribution to psychology, it has also been criticized by many psychologists and theorists for its psychoanalytic theory.
Freud's model of the human mind includes three levels of consciousness−Conscious mind− includes thoughts, memories, feelings, and wishes in which individuals are ware off at the moment; the subconscious mind, i.e., associations and impulses that are not accessible to consciousness, and Unconscious mind−it stores feelings, urges, memories, and thoughts outside the person's conscious realization. Although the psychoanalytic theory has made a huge contribution to psychology, it has also been criticized by many psychologists and theorists for its psychoanalytic theory.
Consciousness can be best known as having an awareness of something and being able to recall it. It would be simple enough to qualify only those events we can recall as the activities of the human mind. There are two challenges regarding this view of Freud's conscious mind. One is that there is an estimation that only 10% of the human mind's work is made up of conscious thought, and the other one is that this view does not explain those random that is created within the individual's mind.
The two functions that the conscious mind can mention as their abilities are −
It is the ability to direct the focus of an individual, and it is the ability to imagine that which is not real.
In the triad of the human mind as an essential part, the conscious mind serves as a scanner of individuals. It can perceive an event, trigger a need to react, and then based on the nature of the event, keep it either in the unconscious or in the subconscious part of the human mind, where it remains available to the person.
The subconscious mind is the area of the mind where any recent memory that needs quick recall is stored, like a phone number and the name of a person the individual just met. It also stores the present information people use in everyday life, such as current recurring thoughts, behavior patterns, habits, and feelings.
The workhorse of the mind or body experience Freud's subconscious mind, which acts as the mind's random−access memory (RAM). Thus, the unconscious mind can be seen as the origin of dreams and automatic thoughts, i.e., which occur without any apparent cause, the repository of forgotten memories, i.e., which is still accessible to consciousness later). The position of implicit knowledge, i.e., the things on which a person has good knowledge, can perform that without thinking.
The unconscious mind is the place where all the memories and the experience of the individual live in. These are those memories that have been restrained through trauma and those that have been consciously forgotten and no longer important to the individual, i.e., automatic thoughts. Furthermore, from these memories and experiences, the individuals' beliefs, habits, and behaviors are formed.
From an earlier report, it can be elucidated that the unconscious mind is in a deeper layer under the subconscious mind. However, the subconscious and unconscious mind are connected directly to each other and deal with similar things. The unconscious mind is the cellar, and it is like a library where the likes and dislikes, all the memories, habits, and behaviors are stored. It is the storehouse of all the deep−seated emotions the individual has faced since birth.
Freud's Unconscious Mind |
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From the above discussion, it can be concluded that Freud's model of the human mind is divided into three levels of consciousness− conscious mind, subconscious mind, and unconscious mind. From Freud's psychoanalytic theory, it can be learned that in the unconscious mind, needful change can occur through psychoanalysis. The use of today's modern psychology in theory and practice has opened Freudian theory to many new ideas. The importance of the unconscious mind has become one of his most important contributions to psychology. Psychoanalytic therapy, which identifies how the unconscious mind influences behaviors and thoughts, has become an important tool in treating mental illness and psychological distress.
However, Sigmund Freud has been criticized for his psychoanalytic theory right from the start. The first critic was the Nobel Prize winner, Kraft−Ebbing, who described this theory as a 'scientific fairy tale' in 1896. After Ebbing, in 1909, William James criticized psychoanalytic theory as ' a most dangerous method.' He found Freud to be an ' obsessed man with fixed ideas,' Japers in 1913 criticized it as ' incautious,' Zilboorg in 1944 found out that there is 'acute dissension and schismatic undulations' in psychoanalysis, Rado in 1962 criticized this theory as 'animistic theories of Freud had been proven barren for decades. All these things describe that Freud's psychoanalytical theory has a huge contribution to psychology, but Freud was criticized by many theorists as well.