patients, Freud concluded that the conscious constitutes only a small part of the human mind. The conscious is like the tip of the iceberg above sea level. Below sea level—or below the threshold of the conscious—is the ‘subconscious,’ or the unconscious.”
“So the unconscious is everything that’s inside us that we have forgotten and don’t remember?”
“We don’t have all our experiences consciously present all the time. But the kinds of things we have thought or experienced, and which we can recall if we ‘put our mind to it,’ Freud termed the preconscious. He reserved the term ‘unconscious’ for things we have repressed. That is, the sort of thing we have made an effort to forget because it was either ‘unpleasant’,’improper,’ or ‘nasty.’ If we have desires and urges that are not tolerable to the conscious, the superego shoves them downstairs. Away with them!”
“I get it.”
“This mechanism is at work in all healthy people. But it can be such a tremendous strain for some people to keep the unpleasant or forbidden thoughts away from consciousness that it leads to mental illness. Whatever is repressed in this way will try of its own accord to reenter consciousness. For some people it takes a great effort to keep such impulses under the critical eye of the conscious. When Freud was in America in 1909 lecturing on psychoanalysis, he gave an example of the way this repression mechanism functions.”
“I’d like to hear that!”
“He said: ‘Suppose that here in this hall and in this audience, whose exemplary stillness and attention I cannot sufficiently commend, there is an individual who is creating a disturbance, and, by his ill-bred laughing, talking, by scraping his feet, distracts my attention from my task. I explain that I cannot go on with my lecture under these conditions, and thereupon several strong men among you get up and, after a short struggle, eject the disturber of the peace from the hall. He is now repressed, and I can continue my lecture. But in order that the disturbance may not be repeated, in case the man who has just been thrown out attempts to force his way back into the room, the gentlemen who have executed my suggestion take their chairs to the door and establish themselves there as a resistance, to keep up the repression. Now, if you transfer both locations to the psyche, calling this consciousness, and the outside the unconscious, you have a tolerably good illustration of the process of repression.’ “
“I agree.”
“But the disturber of the peace insists on reentering, Sophie. At least, that’s the way it is with repressed thoughts and urges. We live under the constant pressure of repressed thoughts that are trying to fight their way up from the unconscious. That’s why we often say or do things without intending to. Unconscious reactions thus prompt our feelings and actions.”
“Can you give me an example?”
“Freud operates with several of these mechanisms. One is what he called parapraxes—slips of the tongue or pen. In other words, we accidentally say or do things that we once tried to repress. Freud gives the example of the shop foreman who was to propose a toast to the boss. The trouble was that this boss was terribly unpopular. In plain words, he was what one might call a swine.”
“Yes?”
“The foreman stood up, raised his glass, and said ‘Here’s to the swine!’ “
“I’m speechless!”
“So was the foreman. He had actually only said what he really meant. But he didn’t mean to say it. Do you want to hear another example?”
“Yes, please.”
“A bishop was coming to tea with the local minister, who had a large family of nice well-behaved little daughters. This bishop happened to have an unusually big nose. The little girls were duly instructed that on no account were they to refer to the bishop’s nose, since children often blurt out spontaneous remarks about people because their repressive mechanism is not yet developed. The bishop arrived, and the delightful daughters strained themselves to the utmost not to comment on his nose. They tried to not even look at it and to forget about it. But they were thinking about it the whole time. And then one of them was asked to pass the sugar around. She looked at the distinguished bishop and said, ‘Do you take sugar in your nose?’ “
“How awful!”
“Another thing we can do is to rationalize. That means that we do not give the real reason for what we are doing either to ourselves or to other people because the real reason is unacceptable.”
“Like what?”
“I could hypnotize you to open a window. While you are under hypnosis I tell you that when I begin to drum my fingers on the table you will get up and open the window. I drum on the table—and you open the window. Afterward I ask you why you opened the window and you might say you did it because it was too hot. But that is not the real reason. You are reluctant to admit to yourself that you did something under my hypnotic orders. So you rationalize.”
“Yes, I see.”
“We all encounter that sort of thing practically every day.”
“This four-year-old cousin of mine, I don’t think he has a lot of playmates, so he’s always happy when I visit. One day I told him I had to hurry home to my mom. Do you know what he said?”
“What did he say?”
“He said, she’s stupid!”
“Yes, that was definitely a case of rationalizing. The boy didn’t mean what he actually said. He meant it was stupid you had to go, but he was too shy to say so. Another thing we do is project.”
“What’s that?”
“When we project, we transfer the characteristics we are trying to repress in ourselves onto other people. A person who is very miserly, for example, will characterize others as penny-pinchers. And someone who will not admit to being preoccupied with sex can be the first to be incensed at other people’s sex-fixation.”
“Hmm.”
“Freud claimed that our everyday life was filled with unconscious mechanisms like these. We forget a particular person’s name, we fumble with our clothes while we talk, or we shift what appear to be random objects around in the room. We also stumble over words and make various slips of the tongue or pen that can seem completely innocent. Freud’s point was that these slips are neither as accidental nor as innocent as we think. These bungled actions can in fact reveal the most intimate secrets.”
“From now on I’ll watch all my words very carefully.”
“Even if you do, you won’t be able to escape from your unconscious impulses. The art is precisely not to expend too much effort on burying unpleasant things in the unconscious. It’s like trying to block up the entrance to a water vole’s nest. You can be sure the water vole will pop up in another part of the garden. It is actually quite healthy to leave the door ajar between the conscious and the unconscious.”
“If you lock that door you can get mentally sick, right?”
“Yes. A neurotic is just such a person, who uses too much energy trying to keep the ‘unpleasant’ out of his consciousness. Frequently there is a particular experience which the person is desperately trying to repress. He can nonetheless be anxious for the doctor to help him to find his way back to the hidden traumas.”
“How does the doctor do that?”
“Freud developed a technique which he called free association. In other words, he let the patient lie in a relaxed position and just talk about whatever came into his or her mind—however irrelevant, random, unpleasant, or embarrassing it might sound. The idea was to break through the ‘lid’ or ‘control’ that had grown over the traumas, because it was these traumas that were causing the patient concern. They are active all the time, just not consciously.”
“The harder you try to forget something, the more you think about it unconsciously?”
“Exactly. That is why it is so important to be aware of the signals from the unconscious. According to Freud, the royal road to the unconscious is our dreams. His main work was written on this subject—The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900, in which he showed that our dreams are not random. Our unconscious tries to communicate with our conscious through dreams.”
“Go on.”
“After many years of experience with patients—and not least after having analyzed his own dreams—Freud determined that all dreams are wish fulfillments. This is clearly observable in children, he said. They dream about
