Chapter 1. Consciousness and What is Unconscious of The Ego and The Id - Study Guide by Sigmund Freud

1. Consciousness and What is Unconscious

The fundamental divide here is between those that believe there is no need to postulate the separate existence of the unconscious and those that do. Freud argues that the psychology of the conscious alone is incapable of solving the problems of dreams and hypnosis. He proposes that the concept of the unconscious can be arrived at from the theory of repression - the repressed is the prototype of the unconscious for us. We have, however two kinds of unconscious - one which is latent but capable of becoming conscious and one which is repressed and not, capable, without much ado, of becoming conscious. Derived from this, we have the three terms - conscious ('Cs.') preconscious ('Pcs.') and the unconscious ('Ucs.') - however Freud maintains that these hold in a descriptive sense, only and that in the dynamic sense there is only one type of unconscious.

In subsequent psychoanalytic work, these distinctions have become inadequate, and further ideas have been formed, concerning a coherent organization of mental processes - which we call the ego, and it is to this ego that consciousness is attached. Furthermore, Freud records findings that there is something in the ego itself that is also unconscious and behaves exactly like the repressed. This has important consequences for our perception of the unconscious, since whilst all that is repressed is unconscious, it does not follow that all that is unconscious is repressed; some of the ego is also unconscious, not in a similar way to the Pcs. Thus we find ourselves confronted by the necessity of postulating a third Ucs. so the Ucs. begins to lose some of its significance.