Unconscious | Psychology, Cognitive Science & Neuroscience (2024)

unconscious, the complex of mental activities within an individual that proceed without his awareness. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, stated that such unconscious processes may affect a person’s behaviour even though he cannot report on them. Freud and his followers felt that dreams and slips of the tongue were really concealed examples of unconscious content too threatening to be confronted directly.

Some theorists (e.g., the early experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt) denied the role of unconscious processes, defining psychology as the study of conscious states. Yet, the existence of unconscious mental activities seems well established and continues to be an important concept in modern psychiatry.

Freud distinguished among different levels of consciousness. Activities within the immediate field of awareness he termed conscious; e.g., reading this article is a conscious activity. The retention of data easily brought to awareness is a preconscious activity; for example, one may not be thinking (conscious) of his address but readily recalls it when asked. Data that cannot be recalled with effort at a specific time but that later may be remembered are retained on an unconscious level. For example, under ordinary conditions a person may be unconscious of ever having been locked in a closet as a child; yet under hypnosis he may recall the experience vividly.

Because one’s experiences cannot be observed directly by another (as one cannot feel another’s headache), efforts to study these levels of awareness objectively are based on inference; i.e., at most, the investigator can say only that another individual behaves as if he were unconscious or as if he were conscious.

Efforts to interpret the origin and significance of unconscious activities lean heavily on psychoanalytic theory, developed by Freud and his followers. For example, the origin of many neurotic symptoms is held to depend on conflicts that have been removed from consciousness through a process called repression. As knowledge of psychophysiological function grows, many psychoanalytic ideas are seen to be related to activities of the central nervous system. That the physiological foundation of memory may rest in chemical changes occurring within brain cells has been inferred from clinical observations that: (1) direct stimulation of the surface of the brain (the cortex) while the patient is conscious on the operating table during surgery has the effect of bringing long-forgotten (unconscious) experiences back to awareness; (2) removal of specific parts of the brain seems to abolish the retention of specific experiences in memory; (3) the general probability of bringing unconscious or preconscious data to awareness is enhanced by direct electrical stimulation of a portion of the brain structure called the reticular formation, or the reticular activating system. Also, according to what is called brain blood-shift theory, the transition from unconscious to conscious activities is mediated by localized changes in the blood supply to different parts of the brain. These biopsychological explorations have shed new light on the validity of psychoanalytic ideas about the unconscious. See also psychoanalysis.