- Position1 of 5›
- Interpretation has changed over time
- Argument1 of 3›
Conscious and unconscious
The mind is divided into the unconscious and the conscious. Freud's work focused on bringing thoughts from the unconscious to the conscious.
The argument
The goal of Freudian therapy, or psychoanalysis, was to bring to consciousness repressed thoughts and feelings. He believed he could do this by encouraging people to talk in free association and about their dreams. The relative lack of the therapist’s direct involvement is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst and through the process of transference, they can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts, especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents. Freud believed that the mind is responsible for both conscious and unconscious decisions that it makes on the basis of psychic drives.It has often been claimed that the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his argument for the existence of an unconscious mind.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Critics note the argument mostly restates Freud's own model as though it were settled knowledge, when much of it is exactly what later psychology disputes. Free association, dream interpretation and transference rest on concepts — repression, psychic drives, resolving childhood conflicts — that are difficult to test and have limited empirical support, and mainstream clinical psychology has largely moved to evidence-based approaches. The specific mechanisms described are not so much a stable interpretation that 'developed over time' as claims many now regard as unproven. They add that even the celebrated idea of the unconscious has been transformed rather than inherited. Cognitive science does recognise unconscious processing, but its account bears little resemblance to Freud's dynamic unconscious of repressed drives. So to say 'what we know centres on the conscious and unconscious' blurs a Freudian construct with a very different modern one, and understates how much of the original framework has been rejected rather than merely reinterpreted.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] Critics note free association and dream analysis rest on concepts like repression whose efficacy and even existence are contested, so describing them as 'what we know' overstates their standing. [Rejecting P3] Modern cognitive science's unconscious differs fundamentally from Freud's dynamic unconscious of repressed drives, so crediting the conscious/unconscious distinction to Freud conflates two different ideas and treats a disputed construct as established.
Further reading
Encyclopeadia of Gender and Society, Volume 1 Jodi O'Brien SAGE, 2009