Summary OfThe Cognitive Unconscious

BibliographyBooks1.Burt, C. (1962). The concept of consciousness. British Journal of Psychology, 53, 229-2422.Carlson, N., & Buskist, W. (1997). Psychology: The science of behavior (5th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

The human mind is vast and intricate, yet responsive. Everyone has their own special abilities and talents. Eidetic memory, artistic brilliance, and mathematical mastery are all special skills possessed by very few, but the one that Gladwell glorifies in his non-fiction story, “Blink”, is the power of thinking without thinking. He discusses how certain people’s subconscious mind has the capacity to respond to complex dilemmas and situations in less than two seconds. Similar to talents such as photographic memory and musical mastery, Gladwell states that the adaptive unconscious can be strengthened and improved.

Also, his aim which is to give a complete theory of human nature is way over-ambitious. Yet, this can be argued that cognitive psychology has identified unconscious processes, like our memory (Tulving, 1972), processing information (Bargh &Chartrand, 1999), and social psychology has shown the significance of implicit processing (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). These findings have confirmed unconscious processes in human behaviour.

There are many thoughts or factors that go into how we judge and treat others that we may not be aware of. The book breaks them down into two categories unconscious and conscious thoughts. Our unconscious brain is gathering information from a very small age and continues to constantly work to help you understand what is going on in the world around you. Our unconscious brain is programed to stereotype from birth. An example of this is how infants at three months can distinguish faces of different races from their own. They tend to prefer the faces of their own race over others which was determined by how long the infant looks at the different faces (p128). This was not taught by a parent or others which brings to our attention that some stereotyping

The surface represents the consciousness. It comprises of the thought which would be at the centre of our consideration now and this is viewed as the tip of the iceberg. The most significant region is the unconsciousness. This is where the process that is generally the real reason of our general conduct. The unconscious mind acts as a storage of primitive wishes and motivation kept under control and arbitrated by the preconscious area. Sigmund Freud emphasized the significance of the unconscious mind, and an essential presumption of Freudian hypothesis which is the unconscious mind represents conduct to a more prominent degree than people had suspected. Certainly, the objective of psychoanalysis is to make the unconscious conscious. His psychoanalytic theory of personality challenges that human conduct is the after effect of the associations among three segment parts of the brain which are the Id, ego and superego. This “structural theory” of personality has a large significance on how disagreements among the parts of the mind shape behaviour and personality. These disagreements are mostly unconscious.

I will focus on the Psychodynamic concept in relation to the unconscious mind. I will look at the concept of ‘Object relations’ and particularly I will look at what Freud called Transference.

The unconscious is an area in the mind which is physically inaccessible but affects our conscious behaviour. Freud developed the iceberg model to represent this concept, in which the unconscious is the emerged under water, mainly consisting of the id, storing our traumas and desires. When an individual experiences a traumatic event, the unconscious represses it to prevent causing distress to the individual. Freud proposed that triggers in life can help unconscious traumas emerge into the conscious (Solms, 2004). Concentration helps the process of bringing the unconscious into the conscious, such as remembering names (Freud, 1914). The unconscious is understood to be as powerful as the conscious because the id can influence human behaviour, explaining why humans act in accordance to their impulses at times. As the unconscious is physically

The famous psychologist Carl Jung believed that the universe and all of its inhabitants are made up of a measureless web of thought called the collective unconscious, it’s suggests that the collective unconscious is rooted in the genetic code of every living thing. This collective unconscious is evident in an individual’s personality, which is comprised of five separate personalities blended together; these are called archetypes. In Jungian psychology, there are five different archetypes: the shadow, anima, animus, persona and the wise old man or mana-personality. Each influences a different aspect of one’s personality. These influences vary from one individual to another depending upon the dominance of each archetype. In the play

It can be said that psychology owes its lineage to depth psychologists who pioneered the field with bold assertions of an enigmatic influence in human behavior. Contemporary thought knows this force as the unconscious, and by contemporary we mean to say that the word itself is relatively new; to assume one can approach the unconscious only from the point of view that its concept is as new as the word itself ignores evidence to the contrary. Instead one must speak of the unconscious from the context of the totality of the human species and not from the confines of modern thought.

I completely disagree with the fact that we are oblivious to our unconscious behavior, as I believe that the unconscious mind is a mere shadow of the conscious and attentive mind. Like a young child, the unconscious mind likes to serve, and it needs very clear instructions. And just like a child it's based on certain ethics taught and accepted by one's self or their surroundings. So if someone once thought "blacks are dangerous", the unconscious mind would respond to that even after your conscious mind has later on rejected that thought. The two unconscious and conscious minds are two separate minds; however they both function in the same person with the same values and moral views. In conclusion, the unconscious mind cannot be used as a scapegoat

The mind exists in two states namely the conscious and the subconscious mind; the conscious mind is often referred to as the aware state of the mind. Research has it that the conscious mind processes 10 percent of an event whereas the remaining 90 percent processed in the subconscious mind; even with this fact each mind is mutual to the other and none can function without the other. The conscious mind acts as a curtain to the subconscious mind, this limited access to the subconscious mind acts as preventive measure to negative

Through the different processes of social attachment and detachment, individuals are shaped and influenced because of the way people and entities become connected in our shared worlds (Redman, 2008a, p. 181). These processes are important mechanisms by which collective worlds and the individuals who reside in these worlds are created (Redman, 2008b, p. 4). From a psychoanalytic point of view, sociologists suggest that these social attachments happen through processes that are, to some extent, unconscious (The Open University, 2014a). These processes, which range from thoughts and feelings to impulses and emotional textures, are not easily available to conscious reflection. However, the effects of unconscious activity can be located in conscious thought and witnessed in human interactions (Redman and Whitehouse-Hart, 2008, p. 60). These unconscious processes mediate our personal awareness of social worlds by ‘translating’ the individuals and entities we encounter in the outer world into forms that ‘resonate with internal experiences, preoccupations, fantasies and senses of self-other relationships’ (Chodorow, 1999, cited in Redman, 2008a, p. 177). This assignment will explore how social worlds are mediated by unconscious processes using research surveillance from the television programme ‘Big Brother’, the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ and the case of Victoria Climbié. Furthermore, it will outline some potential criticisms of this claim.

The unconscious mind is not some black hole of unacceptable impulses waiting to rip you apart. It is the source of hidden beliefs, fears, and attitude that interferes with everyday life. According to Psychology Today (unconscious), the unconscious is where most of the work of the mind is done the source of intuition and dreams, the engine of much information processing. The unconscious mind shows the real intentions behind the hypocritical mask. Freud developed a topographical model of the mind, whereby he described the features of the mind’s structure and function. Freud used the analogy of an iceberg to describe the three levels of the mind. The iceberg metaphor is in Figure 1.

The term “unconscious” was first defined by Freud. He stated that, “the unconscious is the part of the mind that holds ideas, thoughts, and memories that we cannot access and bring into our conscious awareness. Because we

“The unconscious mind is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that is 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