Sigmund Freud was born on May 6th 1856 to a Jewish family in the town of Moravian in the Czech Republic. He was a neurologist and is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind and repression.
Freud lived in a repressed time after the age of Enlightenment which taught an empirical view of everything in the universe. Freud’s theories challenged this rationality as he believed it was impossible for the human mind to understand the complexities of the universe. At the centre of all of Freud’s theories was a dark vision of humanity and pessimism.
Like Plato, Freud believed in the idea of the tripartite self, but differed to Plato in the sense that he believed that the rational part of our personalities were not the dominant force. Instead Freud believed that the dominant part of our personalities is the ID which is our basic instincts and desires; or as Freud called it the ‘cauldron of seething expectations.’ Freud claimed that the ID is present from birth and should be repressed at all costs because it reveals our deepest desires to cause pain to others and ultimately seek our own destruction. The ID is the subconscious part of our mind which we have no control or awareness of.
Alongside the ID, the other two parts of the personality, according to Freud, are the Ego and the Superego. The Ego represents the conscious part of our mind and is the reality principle. Freud believed this was the least powerful part of our personality and it is in constant battle with the ID. The Ego is our common sense and reason that we are aware of and able to control.
The Superego is the morality principle, the internalised rules imposed on us through socialisation. The Superego imposes impossible standards of perfection and then punishes us with guilt when we do not reach the internal ideal. It is in constant battle with the ID because the ID drives us to behave in ways that go against the rules of society, for example causing harm to others.
Freud was adamant that the ID needs to be repressed at all costs and that the Ego needed to be strengthened. He claimed that the only way to achieve this was through psychoanalysis, although he accepted that this was not an option available to everyone. Because of this, Freud suggested three coping mechanisms; intoxication, isolation and sublimation. He stated that these coping mechanisms only provided temporary satisfaction to the ID, but that the IID would always want total satisfaction. Freud warned that if the ID was given total satisfaction then it would lead individuals to behave in incredibly destructive ways.
Freud’s belief that the ID, our subconscious, is the dominant force in our lives is one which leads to questions of free will and determinism. If we are all driven to behave in certain ways by our subconscious mind, do we actually have free will over our actions?
In 1924 a lawyer called Clarence Darrow used the idea of the subconscious as a defence for murder. He was defending Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, aged 18 and 19, who pleaded guilty to the murder of 14 year old Bobby Franks.
Darrow believed Freud’s theory that psychological influences control human behaviour and argued that murdering Bobby Franks was not a conscious decision between right and wrong by Leopold and Loeb
Leopold himself stated that:
“The thing that prompted me to do this was a sort of pure love of excitement…a love of thrills…the satisfaction of the ego...”
If you look at the case of Leopold and Loeb from a Freudian point of view, it could be argued that they murdered Bobby Franks because their IDs had not been repressed and had overridden their ego and superego’s; which did in fact lead to destructive and dangerous behaviour. Darrow’s defence that the boys did not consciously choose between right and right and were not acting according to their own free will was successful and Leopold and Loeb were sentenced to life imprisonment instead of the death penalty.
I think that the idea that we do not have free will over our actions and that we are somehow being controlled by our subconscious mind is fascinating, and it has been the subject of many psychological and empirical experiments.
A criticism of Freud’s theory of the subconscious mind is that there is no way to prove the existence of the subconscious mind; and certainly no way of proving that the subconscious mind is able to overpower our conscious minds. However, in the 1970s a researcher in the physiology department of the University of California called Benjamin Libet conducted an experiment which could be used to prove Freud’s beliefs of the subconscious mind.
Libet monitored the electrical processes in the brain while asking the patient to perform simple tasks such as raising their arm. His results proved that subconscious electrical processes in the brain preceded the patient’s conscious decisions to perform spontaneous acts. On average, Libet found that the subconscious mind started the process of raising the arm 0.7 seconds before the patient’s conscious mind started to react.
It could be argued that these findings prove that the subconscious mind is able to control our actions over our conscious minds, or in Freudian terms, the ID is able to overrule the Ego and the Superego. Freud believed that the ID was only able to truly take control of our thoughts when we are asleep, because he claimed that when the physical body is asleep, the Ego is also asleep, allowing the ID to be expressed.
Freud believed that our dreams are the pathway to understanding the desires of the ID, and only through the interpretation and analysis of dreams are we truly able to understand what our repressed wishes. In Philosophy in the Modern World, Anthony Kenny explains that we are unable to interpret our own dreams because they are coded. These codes are unique to each dreamer and Freud believed that, when stripped down, all codes are usually repressed sexual desires. Kenny argued that in order for Freud’s theory of dreams to be accurate, the interpretation must be accepted by the dreamer, although in many cases the dreamer does not accept them. Freud would argue that the dreamer does not accept the interpretation because their conscious mind tries to repress their subconscious desires, so much so that they are unable to accept them.
The interpretation of dreams is something that has become mainstream in today’s society, with websites and magazine features dedicated entirely to helping you understand what your dreams mean. Some examples of this is that if you dream about travelling this is symbolic of the journey of life and if you dream about being in a car crash it means that you are worrying that you are not in control of everything in your life.
As well as our subconscious being revealed through our dreams, Freud also believed that there are two more sets of phenomena that reveal the existence of the unconscious. The first of these are trivial, everyday mistakes which he called ‘parapraxes’ and we now refer to as ‘Freudian Slips’. Freud used the example of a professor who in his inaugural lecture instead of saying ‘I have no intention of underrating the achievements of my illustrious predecessor’ actually said ‘I have every intention of underrating the achievements of my illustrious predecessor.’ Freud claimed that parapraxes such as this one reveal hidden motives of the subconscious.
The second way in which Freud believed the existence of the subconscious is revealed is through neurotic symptoms that can only be interpreted by a psychiatrist, although this is only successful if the patient accepts the interpretation.
Ultimately I feel that there is still a place for Freud’s theories of the subconscious mind in today’s society, particularly the significance of the interpretation of dreams.
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