Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Freud developed his theory over a period of fifty years. He believed that people
have unconscious motives that drive their behaviour. Freud believed that the
mind is divided into three parts the largest and most important of which is the
unconscious mind. He compared the mind to an iceberg the unconscious mind
is the largest part which is under the water and the conscious mind is the small
part above the water. The pre-conscious lies where the iceberg breaks through
the water. Because the unconscious mind is seen to drive all behaviour Freud
focuses a great deal of attention on ways of accessing the unconscious mind.
The unconscious mind
This part of the mind is a store of passions repressed memories and sexual drive /energy
(referred to as the libido).All of these things influence the persons behaviour and if a
person is having problems the unconscious mind needs to be accessed in order to find out
out the causes.(linked with the ID which we will cover later)
The pre conscious mind
Lies between the conscious and unconscious it can only be accessed through therapy and
information from the unconscious must be brought into the pre-conscious as part of psychotherapeutic process.(linked with the ego which we will cover later)
The conscious mind
Is the only part of the mind that we are aware of and it is the sanitised version of reality that is all
that the ego (we will learn more of this later) can accept/deal with. The conscious mind can only fully
develop as we learn the values of our own society which we do through our parents.(linked to the
super ego which we cover later)
Freud believed that through therapy people should bring into conscious awareness past experience
that they had been unable to deal with at the time.
Then they could properly deal with the issues and theoretically should be cured of their problems.
Sometimes such problems would manifest themselves in a physical way for example what he refered
to as hysterical paralysis or blindness.(being blind when there is nothing physically wrong with your
eyes.
Accessing the unconscious mind
Dream analysis/analysis of symbols from dreams
Free association
Projective tests
Freudian slips
are all ways of accessing the unconscious mind according to Freud