Most of our decisions, emotions and behaviors are controlled by unconscious mechanisms. Zoom on the unconscious.

The conscious and the unconscious designate spheres of activity of the mind, or psyche, which are studied by psychoanalysis.

Consciousness is a state of the individual who knows who he is, where he is, what he can or cannot do in the context in which he finds himself. More generally, it is the faculty to “see” oneself and to recognize oneself in one’s thoughts and actions. The unconscious is that which escapes consciousness.

The unconscious designates that which relates to real processes which we do not have the feeling, which we do not know that they are taking place in us, at the moment when they are taking place. 

It is the birth of psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud which is associated with the hypothesis of the unconscious: a part of our psychic life (that is to say of the activity of our mind) would respond to unconscious mechanisms of which we, conscious subjects, would have no clear and immediate knowledge. 

Sigmund Freud wrote in 1915 in Metapsychology: “[The unconscious hypothesis] is necessary, because the data of consciousness are extremely incomplete; In healthy man as well as in the patient, psychic acts frequently occur which, to be explained, presuppose other acts which, for their part, do not benefit from the testimony of conscience. […] Our most personal daily experience puts us in the presence of ideas which come to us without our knowing their origin and of thought results whose development has remained hidden from us. “

For Freud, the unconscious is the repressed memories which undergo censorship, itself unconscious, and which seek at all costs to manifest themselves to consciousness by bypassing the censorship thanks to processes of disguise which make them unrecognizable (failed acts , slip, dreams, symptoms of the disease). 

Many psychology experiments show that the unconscious is very powerful and that unconscious mechanisms are at work in most of our behaviors, choices, decisions. We cannot control this unconscious. Only psychoanalysis allows us to understand our internal conflicts. Psychoanalysis proceeds by uncovering the source of the “repressed” unconscious conflict that causes disturbances in existence. 

Trying to analyze our dreams, slip-ups, failed acts… is important because it allows us to hear our repressed desires, without necessarily having to satisfy them! Indeed, if they are not heard, they can turn into a physical symptom.