Freud’s Conception of the Mind

Freud’s Conception of the Mind

Freud Sigmund was a famous psychoanalyst who perceived the mind as a component of three levels of awareness. Freud had a conception that the behaviours and individuality of a person originated from special interaction of different psychological forces that performs at the three levels. The three levels of awareness are unconscious, preconscious and conscious. The three components of the mind plays a vital role in imparting the behaviour of a person. Freud proposed that the preconscious is composed of all the things that can be passed on to the conscious mind. The conscious mind entails all the wishes, memories, feelings and thoughts that we are responsive to at the given time. The conscious mind is perceived as the mind that is involved in thinking.

Freud presented the unconscious mind as a storehouse of our memories, thoughts, urges and feelings.  The memories that are present in the unconscious mind are out of our conscious awareness. The unconscious mind also harbours unpleasant information such as feeling of conflicts, anxiety and pain. Freud compared the three levels of mind to the iceberg (Boothby, 2014). The conscious mind can be likened to the top of the iceberg where one can view while the part that is beneath the water but can be viewed is the preconscious mind. The large deep part that cannot be viewed is the unconscious mind.

The Freud psychoanalytic theory differs from the other philosophers since the other philosophers express the mind as a union between the body and the soul. Other philosophers have explained the mind from a metaphysical point of view where the mind is perceived in terms of materialism and dualism. In the viewpoint of dualism, the conscious mind is not physical whereas the materialist perceives the mind to be the brain (Groth, 2016). The conscious activities of the mind are the same as the neural activities. The conscious perceptions of desires and pain have no potentiality of being physical in any sense. Consciousness cannot be comprehended in any physical way since it is special. However, some philosophers have arguments that do not support materialism and dualism.  They hold that a person can conceive of one conscious state presence in the absence of one body. The ultimate metaphysical perception is that consciousness cannot be compared with anything physical since there is no connection between physical and mental (Kim, 2018). The argument that the conscious mind is not physical can create the belief that there is life after a person dies according to theological philosophers.

Philosophers like Descartes presented the philosophy of the mind using the Cartesian philosophy. The philosophy of Descartes has various aspects which are not the same with the philosophy of Freud. The aspects of his philosophy are based on dualism. He studies the mind by comparing his relationship with the body. He presents the body and the soul as separate entities.  His second aspect is rooted in the presence e of numerous scepticism that is not only about the external world but also the presence of other minds. The third aspects is that the mind is presented to be a place that secret to the thinker (Sayre, 2014). The fourth aspect incorporates the thoughts which not only entails imagination but also the understanding and willingness. The final aspect of the mind has to do with the premise that the mind is found in human beings only.

Descartes identified the mind with qualities such as self-awareness and consciousness. The substance dualism by Descartes is also agreed upon by the theologians who view the soul as an immortal substance that does not seize to exist after the death of the body. The substance dualism is presented in three ways: interactionism, parallelism and occasionalism (Talvitie, 2018). In interactionism, the mental causes which include desires and beliefs can generate material effects. Occasionalism holds that material forms of collaboration between the immaterial and material cannot occur thus the collaboration may be enhanced by God. Parallelism asserts that mental causes possess effects that are mental while physical causes can only produce physical effects.

Other philosophers have perceived the mind in the standpoint of monism. These philosophers argue that the body and the mind cannot be separated from each other. This school of thought was first propagated by Parmenides. Monism is further divided into physicalism which holds that the mind is purely physical paradigm thus it can be illustrated using the physical theory. The mind is not a static substance but a dynamic one and it will progress with its process of evolving.  The philosophers who use idealism to explain the mind presupposes that mind is real and it’s all that appears (Groth, 2016). They also hold that the outside world may be mental or illusion created by the mind.

In conclusion, Freud conception of the mind based on the conscious, subconscious and preconscious does not align with other philosophical perception of the mind. The other philosophers explain the mind by relating it to the body. Freud believed that the unconscious mind affects our experiences and behaviours without our conscious awareness. He categorized the unconscious mind as possessing hidden thoughts, memories and desires and feelings. Descartes explained the mind using Cartesian philosophy where he presented the mind as an immaterial mind or soul.