Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [117]
The dynamic unconscious: 39 Nearly all the previous research and theorizing of psychologists had dealt with conscious mental processes, such as perception, memory, judgment, and learning. What Freud added to psychology and to Western culture was a set of theories of the unconscious and its crucial role in human behavior. Ernest Jones says this is generally held to be his greatest contribution to science.40
Freud, to be sure, did not discover the unconscious, as is often said. For two centuries thinkers had speculated about it—everyone from the rationalist Leibniz to the nineteenth-century hypnotherapists and from the poets and philosophers of the Romantic movement to Helmholtz, the members of the Würzburg School, and William James. By and large, though, they had all considered the unconscious merely a repository, a warehouse of experiences and information waiting to be called to use. Freud would label this relatively inert but accessible area of mental life the “preconscious” and conceive of it as quite distinct from the unconscious.
There had been, however, many clues in the work of Freud’s predecessors and contemporaries, especially the hypnotherapists, that the unconscious played an active role in mental life; some even applied the term “dynamic” to it. Freud adopted and transformed this idea on the basis of his clinical experience and self-analysis.
He envisioned the mind as having three levels of functioning: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. The last was the largest and most influential part; far from being a warehouse of inactive material, it was an area of highly active and powerful primitive drives and forbidden wishes that constantly generated pressure on the conscious mind, in disguised or altered form, thereby motivating and determining much of our behavior.
This had become apparent to Freud from his clinical work. The thinking and behavior of his neurotic patients before analysis were controlled by forces they knew nothing of and could not master. The goal of psychoanalysis was to give the patient’s ego “freedom to decide.”41 This did not imply free will but an awareness of one’s unconscious motives and the attainment of a state in which choices were determined by conscious ones.
Freud came to believe that what was true of neurotics was equally true of normal people. The latter, however, developed in such a way that their unacceptable desires, hidden from awareness, were converted into acceptable ways of acting. Thus, healthy behavior, like pathological behavior, was motivated and directed largely by the forces of the unconscious.
Primary and secondary processes: 42 The unconscious mind, in Freud’s view, is not merely a place in which we sequester the intolerable ideas and desires of the primitive and infantile part of the mind. He termed the mental processes that take place in it “primary”; they seek the uninhibited fulfillment of wishes either through actions or, when these are blocked by real-world forces, fantasies like those of childhood seduction, or dreams. The content of the unconscious, though not derived from the real world, is the psychic reality that motivates us.
As we grow up we learn that we cannot behave according to these untamed primary-process urges; we learn what is acceptable and successful in the real world and what is not. Our conscious mind operates according to “secondary processes”—the thinking, knowing, and problem-solving mental activities needed to conceive of and carry out ways of satisfying our desires that are socially acceptable.
The pleasure principle: 43 Many philosophers and psychologists had theorized that human behavior is largely governed by the quest for pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Freud incorporated this doctrine into his theory of the unconscious but altered its focus. The fundamental motive force for