One of the things that has fascinated me for years is human psychology and how it affects our personality. Initially, I believed that our conscious mind drives our lives and personalities. But after doing a bit of research and digging up information, I concluded that it's not our conscious mind, rather it is our unconscious mind which drives our personalities.
Before presenting my concepts, I would like to give credit to the pioneer of this concept, often regarded as the father of psychology, Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist who always researched the effect our consciousness had on our personality. It was he who first made us realize the importance of psychological health at a time when no one cared about it.
Of the many books written by him, one of the most famous is "Interpretation of Dreams". This book made the people of the world understand how dreams are formed, why we sec dreams, and what effect it has on our minds. However, Freud's main area of research was psychoanalysis. In this writing, I will be touching upon some of the points he proposed in short.
Let us imagine an iceberg that is floating on water. The apex of the iceberg is our conscious mind. The part of the iceberg under water that we can see is our subconscious mind and the part that we cannot see is our unconscious mind. These three aspects of our mind are what enables us to survive in society. Let's explore these three aspects individually.
Conscious Mind is the part that remains active when WE are awake and active. The conscious mind helps us to make various decisions by deducing the condition of our surroundings. This part of our mind is filled with thoughts, memories, desires, and emotions. But our life is not rainbows and unicorns all the time. We face a bunch of traumatic experiences and remain anxious at certain points in our lives.
This leads to the creeping of intrusive thoughts, traumatic memories, taboo desires and hateful emotions, But fortunately, our conscious mind has a defense mechanism against it which is known as repression. It Just squeezes out the negative thoughts from our conscious mind to our unconscious mind. But it doesn't mean that those thoughts are gone forever. When you see some weird and negative dreams, it shows that the repressed emotions have crept up from the bottom to the tip of the iceberg through some cracks and holes.
Subconscious Mind is the most interesting and unexplainable part of our mind. Though I am not in favour of their belief but it doesn't mean that I don't respect them. I think that the subconscious mind is that part which remains active when we sleep. It collects information when we think that our conscious mind is taking a rest. This part fascinates me because it
has no real definition or condition to exist. It is abstract and as some people mind say, non-existent. But there is so much which is left to explore regarding our sub conscious mind.
Unconscious mind is the part of our mind which is instilled in each and every human being since their birth and this unconscious mind is formed on the basis of evolution. The unconscious mind consists of the animalistic and primal drives which reside within us.
Now, renowned psychologist Sigmund Freud has presented an interesting explanation on how our personality is shaped up on the basis of the three states of our mind. He gave us the three conditions of our consciousness Id: This is the condition which is based on the Pleasure Principle, This principle aims at immediate gratification of an activity, whether it's good or bad. This condition, makes us hostile towards others and pushes us to do unethical deeds and crimes.
Superego is the moral compass of our mind. It shows us which is the right path. It basically acts as a judge for our choices.
Ego is the condition which can be compared with our conscious mind which has a choice regarding whether it will listen to Id or Superego. The choices that this condition makes are what builds up our personality.
If you want an example, then try to remember a scene which you have seen in various cartoons, when the main character is spoiled with a choice, there remains a devil in its left shoulder which gives the bad advice, and an angel its right shoulder which gives the good advice. In this case, the devil is the Id, the angel is the Superego and the character's mind is the Ego.
So, the choice is yours that the id or the Superego, that is your choice. But psychoanalysis has been able to find out the reason behind the formation of different personalities. We are still doing ground level research, but the moment we take off, there will be no looking back.
With💙
©chrysanthemum