TDC PART1st PSY

JLCollege, Hajipur

Paper 2nd Concept of mind topographical and dynamic aspects of mind developed by Frued.

Topographical Aspect of Mind:- Freud has divided the structure of mind into three levels: i. Conscious,

ii. Preconscious or subconscious and

iii. Unconscious.

i. Conscious: By consciousness Freud meant that segment of the mind which is concerned with immediate awareness. Thus, consciousness may be described as the awareness of any stimulus, any object or any situation, the capacity of having experience or the relation of the self to the environment.

Consciousness always refers to the experience or awareness of an object at the present moment. While reading a book one is only aware of what has been written there and he is not aware of the sound coming from the time piece or moving fan.

Freud has compared the human mind to an iceberg and stated that only one tenth part of the mind deals with conscious experience. According to him most of our activities are usually guided by the unconscious mind.

ii. Subconscious or Preconscious: As pointed out by Brown (1940) that segment of the mind where the readily recallable is to be located is called by Freud the preconscious or subconscious. Thus, subconscious is a process of which the individual is not aware but which appears otherwise akin to the process of conscious experience, i.e., deemly or marginally conscious.

When a particular object is in the subconscious stage, the individual is not directly or immediately aware of it but it can come to his consciousness at any moment. The subconscious is the storehouse of surface memories and are readily recallable though are not conscious at the moment. The subconscious idea is weak and when it gets some force from the outside, it comes to the conscious part of the mind.

According to this process, we can bring into the consciousness a lot of things such as names, dates, arguments and several past experiences etc

iii. Unconscious: Freud (1927) has done major work to popularize the term unconsciousness. So much so that his whole system of psychoanalysis is based on unconsciousness and repression. Among the three topographical aspects of mind such as conscious, subconscious and unconscious, Freud has given maximum emphasis on the concept of unconscious. So much so that he views that about 9/10 part of the mind is unconscious.

Freud gave a new dimension to the concept of unconscious mental process by predicting its tremendous impact on the development of human personality and its significant role in mental abnormality. In fact, Freud gave it a new colour, new recognition and made the term unconscious popular as well as important in the world.

Freud tried to explore the contents of the unconscious mind through hypnosis, psychoanalysis and dream analysis. He brought into surface the role of unconscious wishes which are dynamic and try all the while to come to the conscious mind. Through free association and dream analysis techniques he tried to unveil the mysteries of the unconscious mind which is so useful for treating mental patients.

From various dream analysis, he noticed that all the unconscious wishes and urges of an individual are reflected in his dreams in disguise form and therefore he rightly pointed out that, ‘dream is the royal road to the unconscious’. Thus, Freud by and large has made the concept of unconscious more useful by relating it to his findings as well as to the findings of other psycho pathologists. The discovery of the unconscious erased the view that man is a rational animal which was the great pride of mankind.

Several day to day incidents along with these examples indicate that unconsciousness is something of which we are not directly aware. The importance attached to unconsciousness in human personality by Freud is well evident when he compared the human mind to an iceberg and opined that 9/10th part of it is unconscious.

It is therefore evident that Sigmund Freud is the first person who focused the world’s attention on the unconscious aspect of mind, though it was dealt with by other psychologists and philosophers two decades back.

The dynamicity of unconsciousness is proved in the psychopathology of everyday life such as careless actions like slip of tongue, common forgetting, slip of pen and inner conflicts. In dream we are mostly in the unconscious stage and sometimes in the subconscious stage.

Reference; Books and Online sources