Freud and the unconscious

Many people believe that Freud discovered the unconscious, while the more cynical would even claim that he invented it. However, the magnificent history of the subject — The Discovery of the Unconscious (Ellenberger, 1970) — has over 400 pages before reaching the chapter on Freud.

From the point of view of modern psychology, perhaps the most significant of this earlier work was by one of Freud’s intellectual heroes, Helmholtz, who wrote about the importance of unconscious processes in visual perception. A second important line from a contemporary of Freud’s, Pierre Janet, focused on a number of puzzling phenomena that still engage us today. These include phenomena such as hypnotism, and the temporary but substantial loss of memory seen in so-called ‘fugue’ states (a loss of awareness of one’s own identity, often involving wandering away from home as a reaction to emotional stress), and behaviours such as sleepwalking.

Theories of the unconscious

Freud himself developed a number of models of the unconscious over the period of his work. His initial emphasis was on the dynamic aspects of the unconscious. This was in contrast to many earlier accounts of the unconscious in which, he argued, the unconscious simply played a descriptive role. That is, many earlier accounts of the unconscious had simply seen the unconscious as a ‘storehouse’ for forgotten memories that may or may not be remembered again. Freud, however, extended the range of influence of the unconscious into every aspect of both our waking and sleeping lives.

Freud believed there is no such thing as an ‘accidental’ slip-of-the-tongue, difficulty remembering a name, or a surrealistic dream that appears to have no meaning (see James Reason’s article on the Freudian slip in this special issue). Many of the dreams and slips that Freud reported to be from ‘friends’ or ‘patients’ turned out of course to be examples of his own, which were often disguised and edited because of their embarrassing content.

In a further development of his ideas on the unconscious, Freud (1915/1984a) went beyond the idea that processes may simply be unconscious to the proposal that there was a distinct system, which he referred to as the system Ucs. This system had a number of properties of importance, including being timeless, being exempt from contradiction, being based on the pleasure principle, and being driven by an instinctual energy that has come to be known in English as the ‘libido’.

These properties were needed, Freud argued, to explain numerous phenomena that he came across in his clinical work. For example, a patient might re-experience an unpleasant event from childhood as if it were happening right now even though the event might have occurred 20 or 30 years previously. The strength of the affect in such cases persuaded Freud that the system Ucs did not operate within our normal understanding of the passage of time. Similarly, the system Ucs seemed to hold completely contradictory information about the past, the self and significant others, without any need for this information to be rationalised.

This idea of an energy-based unconscious had important consequences for psychopathology within Freud’s model. The blocking of expression of the energy, a process that Freud referred to as repression, was seen to be the source of a wide variety of problems, such as the anxieties and hysterical symptoms that he saw in his clinical practice. Although the early focus of his work was on the sexual nature of this energy, his work with traumatised individuals from the First World War and his own experience of the death of his favourite eldest daughter Sophie (see Peter Gay’s excellent Freud: A Life for Our Time, 1988) led him to include aggression-based ‘death instincts’ as part of this system.

One problem with this intermediate model is that, despite Freud’s regard for Helmholtz, he considered the processes of thinking, perception and attention to occur in the conscious or preconscious systems rather than in the system Ucs. However, in agreement with Helmholtz much of modern cognitive psychology has focused on automatic or unconscious mechanisms, not just in visual perception but in a wide variety of other cognitive processes as well, examples of which will be given later.

In the final so-called structural theory that Freud developed in his paper ‘The ego and the id’ (1923/1984b) the unconscious again becomes a property of processes rather than a system in itself. He thereby rejected the idea that there was a specific unconscious structure such as the Ucs; he retuned to his earlier idea, though with a number of modifications. Freud made this change in part because he realised that through his excessive focus on repression as the source of material in the system Ucs, there were a number of other features within his new theory that were excluded. These features included the defence mechanisms themselves, which typically operated out of the awareness of the individual, and aspects of a new structure that in English translation has given us the term the ‘superego’. Unconscious aspects of the superego included the standards that we try to live up to (our ego-ideal), which lead to the experience of guilt or ‘conscience’ when we fail.

Evidence: Then

There have of course been a number of major revisions of psychoanalytic views of the unconscious over the past century, not to mention the alternative models offered by Janet and Jung contemporaneously with Freud. The drive or energy-based aspects of the proposal have been radically altered, for example by so-called object relations theorists such as Fairbairn and by the increasingly influential work of John Bowlby on the internal representation of attachment relationships.

Although by the time of Holt’s (1967) review of the issue, the notion of an energy-based and drive-based unconscious had been abandoned by most within psychoanalysis (apart from a few orthodox Freudians), there is a continuing tradition within psychology that employs energy-type concepts. This tradition is probably due to the compelling image of nerve impulses carrying electrochemical energy along nerve fibres.

In its modern form the tradition continues in the extent of interest in so-called connectionist approaches, particularly stemming from the influential work of Rumelhart and McClelland (1986). However, at a psychological and computational level there are many systems that can act as if they operated in this manner but that do not involve the literal transfer and storage of energy (see Power & Dalgleish, 1997).

The main source of evidence for the psychoanalytic unconscious has of course always been that provided on the analyst’s couch. The strength of this approach is that therapeutically there is no assumption that the analysand’s remarks have to be taken at face value, and it allows for the possibility that we might not always be aware of the motives or reasons for our thoughts, feelings and actions. In more abstract terms, in any system in which there are two or more levels of representation, there is no reason why the representations at one level need accurately reflect representations at another level (Power, 1997). There are probably no more dramatic examples of this problem than in our own self-perceptions, which are often misguided.

If the strength of the psychoanalytic approach is the centre stage that the therapeutic encounter takes, then it is also its weakness. Freud famously dismissed the need for anything other than the evidence from therapy for proof of the existence of psychoanalytic concepts such as the unconscious. However, until the advent of recording devices it has been impossible to subject the therapeutic encounter to scientific scrutiny. So the psychoanalytic insistence on the secret mystery of the therapeutic encounter has left psychoanalysis extremely vulnerable to the criticisms of more empirically minded sciences.

Evidence: Now

Leaving aside the question of the repression of painful material in the unconscious (see the article in this special issue by Chris Brewin and Bernice Andrews), much of modern cognitive psychology and the neurosciences is consistent with the Freudian view that behaviour can become automatised through repetition, and that the control of such behaviour is devolved to autonomous or semi-autonomous unconscious structures. Modern theories about the display of facial affect, for example, explicitly recognise a role for the conscious and unconscious control of behaviour (Ekman, 1986).

Neuropsychology also offers compelling accounts of behaviour that is not dependent on conscious experience. For example, in the phenomenon of ‘blindsight’ (e.g. Weiskrantz, 1997) it has been shown that individuals who are apparently blind in part of their visual field may still retain some visual capacity that can guide their actions automatically, despite being unavailable to consciousness.

Freud’s claim that the unconscious operates according to different rules has also received considerable support. Studies of perception, learning and memory suggest that unconscious processing is not subject to the same kind of capacity limitations as is conscious processing, and operates in a more stereotyped fashion, being less affected by the deployment of intentional strategies.

As modern cognitive psychology has become more sophisticated and has begun to tackle issues of emotion and motivation, it too has begun to consider the possibility that there are unconscious influences on conscious thoughts and actions (e.g. Dalgleish & Power, 1999). Examples of the interplay of conscious and unconscious processes come from studies of attention and perception, memory, and of mood and emotions.

Social psychologists have also demonstrated the interplay of conscious and unconscious processes in studies of attitude and persuasion, social perception, and social judgement (e.g. Bargh & Chartrand, 1999). In a classic earlier demonstration of these effects, Schwarz and Clore (1983) telephoned people on either wet days or sunny days to ask them about their life satisfaction. They found that people rated their life satisfaction as higher on sunny days, but this effect did not occur if attention was drawn to the weather through asking ‘What’s the weather like there?’ That is, some of these automatic or unconscious effects only occur if the individual is not aware either of the stimulus itself (as in subliminal perception) or of the relevance of the connection between the stimulus and the action.

As Williams et al., (1997) elegantly summarised matters:

Six decades ago our psychoanalytically oriented predecessors wrestled with the problem of formulating a credible account of the unconscious. Paradoxically, perhaps, having gathered such convincing evidence in recent years to support the existence of extensive and elaborate nonconscious information processing, contemporary psychologists now are faced with precisely the reverse problem. A major challenge confronting modern psychology is the need to develop an adequate account of the nature and function of consciousness. (p.260)

Is integration possible?

The notion that there are different types of conscious and unconscious processes that operate at different levels is an enduring one and as useful a proposal today as it was 100 years ago. Although the notion of an instinctual energy base for the unconscious seems not to be supported, there is clearly a need for innate temperament- and emotion-related factors that provide developmental starting points.

Similarly, the excessive focus on repression as the source of content for the unconscious would also seem to be mistaken. More recent work in cognitive psychology would emphasise automatic processes while restricting interest in repression and denial to a small proportion of individuals for whom there appear to be health-related consequences of such coping styles. Whereas cognitive psychology has emphasised the co-operation between conscious and automatic processes (essential, for example, whilst driving), psychoanalysis has always emphasised conflict instead. The most recent models in psychology have come to consider both co-operation and conflict between conscious and unconscious processes.

Just as Helmholtz demonstrated how we come to see a unified visual world despite the different input from our two eyes, perhaps modern psychology can at last come to integrate the two world views represented by the traditions stemming from Helmholtz and from Freud.

- Professor Mick Power is based at the Department of Psychiatry, Royal

Edinburgh Hospital, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH10 5HF.

References

Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand,T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462–479.

Dalgleish,T., & Power, M. J. (Eds.). (1999). Handbook of cognition and emotion. Chichester:Wiley.

Ekman, P. (1986). Telling lies.New York: Berkley Books.

Ellenberger, H. F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: The history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.

Freud, S. (1984a).The unconscious. In A. Richards (Ed.),The Pelican Freud library: Vol. 11. On metapsychology: The theory of psychoanalysis (pp.159–222). Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Original work published 1915)

Freud, S. (1984b).The ego and the id. In A. Richards (Ed.), The Pelican Freud library: Vol. 11. On metapsychology: The theory of psychoanalysis (pp. 339–407). Harmondsworth: Penguin. (Original work published 1923)

Gay, P. (1988). Freud: A life for our time. London: Dent.

Holt, R. R. (1967). Beyond vitalism and mechanism: Freud’s concept of psychic energy. In J. H. Masserman (Ed.), The ego. New York: Grune & Stratton.

Power, M. J. (1997). Conscious and unconscious representations of meaning. In M. J. Power & C. R. Brewin (Eds.), The transformation of meaning in psychological therapies. Chichester:Wiley.

Power, M. J., & Dalgleish,T. (1997). Cognition and emotion: From order to disorder.Hove: Psychology Press.

Rumelhart, D. E., & McClelland, J. L. (1986). Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition: Vol. 1. Foundations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Schwarz, N., & Clore, G. L. (1983). Mood, misattribution, and judgements of well-being: Informative and directive functions of affective states. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 45, 513–523. 

Weiskrantz, L. (1997). Consciousness lost and found: A neuropsychological exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Williams, J. M. G.,Watts, F. N., MacLeod, C., & Mathews,A. (1997). Cognitive psychology and emotional disorders (2nd ed.). Chichester:Wiley.