The Unconscious
The concept of the unconscious was central to Freud's account of the mind. Freud believed that while poets and thinkers had long known of the existence of the unconscious, he had ensured that it received scientific recognition in the field of psychology. The concept made an informal appearance in Freud's writings.
The unconscious was first introduced in connection with the phenomenon of repression, to explain what happens to ideas that are repressed. Freud stated explicitly that the concept of the unconscious was based on the theory of repression. He postulated a cycle in which ideas are repressed, but remain in the mind, removed from consciousness yet operative, then reappear in consciousness under certain circumstances. The postulate was based upon the investigation of cases of traumatic hysteria, which revealed cases where the behavior of patients could not be explained without reference to ideas or thoughts of which they had no awareness. This fact, combined with the observation that such behavior could be artificially induced by hypnosis, in which ideas were inserted into people's minds, suggested that ideas were operative in the original cases, even though their subjects knew nothing of them.
Freud, like Josef Breuer, found the hypothesis that hysterical manifestations were generated by ideas to be not only warranted, but given in observation. Disagreement between them arose when they attempted to give causal explanations of their data: Breuer favored a hypothesis of
hypnoid states, while Freud postulated the
mechanism of defense.
Richard Wollheim comments that given the close correspondence between hysteria and the results of hypnosis, Breuer's hypothesis appears more plausible, and that it is only when repression is taken into account that Freud's hypothesis becomes preferable.
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Freud originally allowed that repression might be a conscious process, but by the time he wrote his second paper on the "Neuro-Psychoses of Defence" (1896), he apparently believed that repression, which he referred to as "the psychical mechanism of (unconscious) defense", occurred on an unconscious level. Freud further developed his theories about the unconscious in
The Interpretation of Dreams (1899) and in
Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), where he dealt with condensation and
displacement as inherent characteristics of unconscious mental activity. Freud presented his first systematic statement of his hypotheses about unconscious mental processes in 1912, in response to an invitation from the London Society of Psychical Research to contribute to its
Proceedings. In 1915, Freud expanded that statement into a more ambitious metapsychological paper, entitled "The Unconscious". In both these papers, when Freud tried to distinguish between his conception of the unconscious and those that predated psychoanalysis, he found it in his postulation of ideas that are simultaneously latent and operative.
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