Three Levels Of Awareness By Freud 34x27

Sigmund Freud described several components which have been very influential in understanding personality. Three levels of awareness Freud identified three different parts of the mind, based on our level of awareness. •

Conscious mind: includes everything that we are aware of. This is the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk about rationally. The conscious mind is where we are paying attention at the moment. It includes only our current thinking processes and objects of attention, and hence constitutes a very large part of our current awareness. •

Unconscious mind: is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. According to Freud, the unconscious continues to influence our behavior and experience, even though we are unaware of these underlying influences. For Freud, the unconscious is the storehouse of instinctual desires, needs, and psychic actions. While past thoughts and memories may be deleted from immediate consciousness, they direct the thoughts and feelings of the individual from the realm of the unconscious. Freud divided mind into the conscious mind or Ego and two parts of the Unconscious: the Id or instincts and the Superego. He used the idea of the unconscious in order to explain certain kinds of neurotic behavior. He believed that significant psychic events take place "below the surface" in the unconscious mind. •

Preconscious mind: is part of the conscious mind and includes our memory. These memories are not conscious, but we can retrieve them to conscious awareness at any time. the word preconscious is applied to thoughts which are unconscious at the particular moment in question, but which are not repressed and are therefore available for recall and easily capable of becoming conscious .'Preconscious' thoughts are thus 'unconscious' in a merely 'descriptive' sense, as opposed to a 'dynamic' one. The preconscious includes those things of which we are aware, but where we are not paying attention. We can choose to pay attention to these and deliberately bring them into the conscious mind. We can control our awareness to a certain extent, from focusing in very closely on one conscious act to a wider awareness that seeks to expand consciousness to include as much of preconscious information as possible. •

Subconscious mind: the latent content of a dream is the hidden psychological meaning of the dream. Freud believed that the content of dreams is related to wish fulfillment and suggested that dreams have two types of content: manifest content and latent content. The manifest content is the actual literal subject-matter of

the dream, while the latent content is the underlying meaning of these symbols. Freud believed that the latent content of dreams is suppressed and hidden by the subconscious mind in order to protect the individual from thoughts and feelings that are hard to cope with. By uncovering the hidden meaning of dreams, Freud believed that people could better understand their problems and resolve the issues that create difficulties in their lives. At the subconscious level, the process and content are out of direct reach of the conscious mind. The subconscious thus thinks and acts independently. One of Freud's key findings was that much behavior is driven directly from the subconscious mind. This has the alarming consequence that we are largely unable to control our behavior, and in particular that which we would sometimes prefer to avoid. More recent research has shown that the subconscious mind is probably even more in charge of our actions than even Freud had realized. Although later theories have improved understanding, Freud's ideas still provide a useful model for the more complex actions that are really going on.