Contents
The unconscious is that which is not seen by consciousness, the unconscious area of the mental.
The word «unconscious» in the current practice refers to a variety of things, some of which are present in everyone, some characterize only a certain contingent. There is no one unconscious common to all people. When talking about the unconscious, it is always necessary to clarify what it is about, which of the «unconscious» it is. In this article, we will name only some types of the unconscious that are most often mentioned in the works of practicing psychologists.
natural base
The natural unconscious is a bank of innate or acquired associative connections and emotional reactions in infancy. These are all mental processes that proceed without conscious control, but naturally interact and determine both our behavior and the work of its service mechanisms, gu.e.x and fine tuning. This, in particular, is the work of the preconscious, the mechanisms and processes of subthreshold perception of objects. In order to see the faces of people in spots, the work of the natural unconscious is needed. We perceive people similar to us as rather good, we like praise, criticism provokes protest, the unconscious does not perceive the “not” particle, a low voice seems to be more status — thousands of such laws and patterns known and little known to us are the product of the work of this natural unconscious. Sleep, hypnosis, trance, affect, drug and alcohol intoxication, etc. remove conscious control and manifest a wide variety of unconscious processes that are usually not visible. It seems that all other types of the unconscious are based on the existence of this natural unconscious. See →
The unconscious as an acquired experience
The memory of successes and failures, right and wrong decisions, joyful and sad events and experiences, various life decisions that we once made (not necessarily consciously) and in any case either forgot or do not remember. An experience of achievement, learning, overcoming and winning that starts from our childhood and continues to accumulate throughout life. A familiar variety of this unconscious is our habits and automatisms, in particular the fixed set mechanism. Everything that becomes a habit and is performed automatically gradually leaves the field of our consciousness. Another important and interesting variety of this unconscious is the operation of emotional anchors. What we captured in some situation against the background of a positive or emotional outburst is associated with various details (anchors) of that situation, after which a joyful state or fears pop up automatically, as soon as we see or hear again what we met once upon a time. Apparently, the mechanisms of creative processes also belong to this type of the unconscious, the results of which are perceived as artistic images, scientific discoveries, manifestations of intuition, inspiration, creative insight, etc. See →
The Unconscious as a Product of Repression
The unconscious as a product of repression is the content of the field of consciousness, by some forces (power centers) for one reason or another, hard or softly repressed from the realm of awareness. According to Freud, these forces have one source — the Super-I, the representative of society in consciousness. And the primary children’s inclinations, undesirable for the Super-I, are repressed. As a result, the content of the unconscious, according to Freud, is the primary children’s drives that live in us, but are not recognized because of their social unacceptability or mismatch with other needs, motives and attitudes of the individual. In some cases, repression does not occur according to Freud, but in the other direction: it is not the Super-I, as a representative of society, that represses anti-social drives, but the “It”, as an area of the anti-social, represses the social that he does not want to remember and unpleasant. See →
The Unconscious as a Product of Faith
Whoever believes in what — this belief, without his awareness, knowledge and control, leads him. If a woman believes that a dreaming rooster means that it is time to act, she will most likely do so. Also, we can always assume that our behavior is not controlled by us, but by someone in us, some internal characters of our soul, our personality. For children, this is Caprice living in the soul, for adults — the voices of Parent-Adult-Child, the subpersonality Critic, Saboteur, and so on, the list is always open … See →
public unconscious
The structures of the social unconscious are unconscious linguistic, cultural, ideological and other schematisms, myths and social norms that determine the worldview of people belonging to a given culture. According to K. Jung, the collective unconscious is only one of the possible varieties of the social unconscious. See →
Perhaps there are other types of the unconscious. In particular, see Types of the Unconscious from Ken Wilber’s The Atman Project.