Key Takeaways
- The conscious mind is everything we are aware of, like thoughts and feelings.
- Freud’s topographic model includes the conscious, unconscious, and preconscious mind.
- The iceberg metaphor illustrates how much of the mind is unconscious.
Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, helped change the way we think about the mind and mental health. His topographic model of the mind divides the psyche into three elements: the conscious, unconscious, and preconscious. While Freud devoted much attention to understanding the impact of the unconscious, his approach to the conscious mind was also important and influential.
Freud was not the first theorist to describe consciousness or unconsciousness. However, these two elements take on a unique and vital role in his approach to human psychology.
What Is the Conscious Mind, Exactly?
In Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of personality, the conscious mind consists of everything within our awareness. It’s this part of our minds that is the most familiar to us, since it makes encompasses everything in our daily lives.
The conscious mind includes:
- Fantasies
- Feelings
- Memories
- Perceptions
- Self-awareness
- Sensations
- Thoughts
The conscious mind is everything you are actively aware of: your thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and your awareness of your current environment are all part of your conscious experiences.
How the Conscious Mind Works
It isn’t possible to keep every thought, memory, or feeling inside of conscious awareness at all times. So instead, certain information is maintained in awareness, other information remains outside of immediate awareness but still accessible, and other information is hidden from awareness.
Freud’s topographic theory was a “map” of the different systems that make up the human mind. According to Freud, the mind is made up of three systems: the conscious (Cs.), the preconscious (Pcs.), and the unconscious (Ucs.).
These systems are controlled by what Freud identified as the primary and secondary processes:
- The primary processes are a way to discharge unacceptable urges that arise from the unconscious mind. It often involves creating a mental image to act as a substitute for acting on an unacceptable urge.
- The secondary processes are how the mind deals with conscious urges through delayed gratification. For example, instead of acting immediately on a thought you just had, you wait for a more appropriate time to take action.
The topographic model of the mind is also part of Freud’s larger structural model of personality, which includes the id, ego, and superego.
How the Conscious, Preconscious, and Unconscious Interact
The preconscious (or subconscious) is closely allied with the conscious mind. It includes the things we are not thinking of at the moment but can easily draw into conscious awareness.
Things that the conscious mind wants to keep hidden from awareness are repressed into the unconscious mind. While we are unaware of these feelings, thoughts, urges, and emotions, Freud believed that the unconscious mind could still influence our behavior.
Things in the unconscious are only available to the conscious mind in disguised form. For example, the contents of the unconscious might spill into awareness in the form of dreams. Freud believed that by analyzing the content of dreams, people could discover how the unconscious influences their conscious actions.
The Iceberg Metaphor
Freud’s concept of the conscious and unconscious mind is often illustrated an iceberg as a metaphor. The tip of the iceberg that extends above the water represents the conscious mind. As you can see in the image on top, the conscious mind is just the “tip of the iceberg.” Beneath the water is the much larger bulk of the iceberg, which represents the unconscious.
Interestingly, while the iceberg metaphor is ubiquitous, Freud never mentioned it or used it in his own writings. Research suggests that Gustav Fechner and G. Stanley Hall may have introduced the idea in relation to Freud’s theory.
While the conscious and preconscious are important, Freud believed they were far less vital than the unconscious.
The things that are hidden from awareness, Freud believed, exerted the greatest influence over our personalities and behaviors.
Conscious vs. Preconscious Differences
The conscious mind involves all the things you are currently aware of and are thinking about. It is somewhat akin to short-term memory and is limited in capacity. Your awareness of yourself and the world around you is part of your consciousness.
The preconscious mind, also known as the subconscious mind, includes things that we might not be presently aware of but that we can pull into conscious awareness when needed.
You might not presently be thinking about how to do long division, but you can access the information and bring it into conscious awareness when solving a math problem.
The preconscious mind is a part of the mind that corresponds to ordinary memory. These memories are not conscious, but we can retrieve them to conscious awareness at any time.
How the Preconscious Works
While these memories are not part of your immediate awareness, they can be quickly brought into awareness through conscious effort. For example, if you were asked what television show you watched last night or what you had for breakfast this morning, you would be pulling that information out of your preconscious.
A helpful way to think of the preconscious is that it acts as a sort of gatekeeper between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind. It allows only certain pieces of information to pass through and enter conscious awareness.
Phone numbers and social security numbers are also examples of information stored in your preconscious mind. While you do not walk around consciously thinking about this information all the time, you can quickly draw it out of your subconscious when you are asked to relate these numbers.
In the iceberg metaphor, the preconscious exists just below the water’s surface. If you focus and make an effort to see it, you can see the murky shape and outline of the submerged ice.
Like the unconscious mind, Freud believed that the preconscious could influence conscious awareness. Sometimes, information from the preconscious surfaces in unexpected ways, like in dreams or accidental slips of the tongue (known as Freudian slips). While we might not be actively thinking about these things, Freud believed they still served to influence conscious actions and behaviors.
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