Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories(^30) 2. Freud: Psychoanalysis © The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2009
unconscious proper and the preconscious.In Freudian psychology the three levels
of mental life are used to designate both a process and a location. The existence as a
specific location, of course, is merely hypothetical and has no real existence within
the body. Yet, Freud spoke of theunconscious as well as unconscious processes.
Unconscious
The unconscious contains all those drives, urges, or instincts that are beyond our
awareness but that nevertheless motivate most of our words, feelings, and actions.
Although we may be conscious of our overt behaviors, we often are not aware of the
mental processes that lie behind them. For example, a man may know that he is at-
tracted to a woman but may not fully understand all the reasons for the attraction,
some of which may even seem irrational.
Because the unconscious is not available to the conscious mind, how can one
know if it really exists? Freud felt that its existence could be proved only indirectly.
To him the unconscious is the explanation for the meaning behind dreams, slips of
the tongue, and certain kinds of forgetting, called repression.Dreams serve as a par-
ticularly rich source of unconscious material. For example, Freud believed that child-
hood experiences can appear in adult dreams even though the dreamer has no con-
scious recollection of these experiences.
Unconscious processes often enter into consciousness but only after being dis-
guised or distorted enough to elude censorship. Freud (1917/1963) used the analogy
of a guardian or censor blocking the passage between the unconscious and precon-
scious and preventing undesirable anxiety-producing memories from entering
awareness. To enter the conscious level of the mind, these unconscious images first
must be sufficiently disguised to slip past the primary censor,and then they must
elude a final censorthat watches the passageway between the preconscious and the
conscious. By the time these memories enter our conscious mind, we no longer rec-
ognize them for what they are; instead, we see them as relatively pleasant, non-
threatening experiences. In most cases, these images have strong sexual or aggres-
sive motifs, because childhood sexual and aggressive behaviors are frequently
punished or suppressed. Punishment and suppressionoften create feelings of anxi-
ety, and the anxiety in turn stimulates repression,that is, the forcing of unwanted,
anxiety-ridden experiences into the unconscious as a defense against the pain of that
anxiety.
Not all unconscious processes, however, spring from repression of childhood
events. Freud believed that a portion of our unconscious originates from the experi-
ences of our early ancestors that have been passed on to us through hundreds of gen-
erations of repetition. He called these inherited unconscious images our phyloge-
netic endowment(Freud, 1917/1963, 1933/1964). Freud’s notion of phylogenetic
endowment is quite similar to Carl Jung’s idea of a collective unconscious (see Chap-
ter 4). However, one important difference exists between the two concepts. Whereas
Jung placed primary emphasis on the collective unconscious, Freud relied on the no-
tion of inherited dispositions only as a last resort. That is, when explanations built on
individual experiences were not adequate, Freud would turn to the idea of collec-
tively inherited experiences to fill in the gaps left by individual experiences. Later we
will see that Freud used the concept of phylogenetic endowment to explain several
important concepts, such as the Oedipus complex and castration anxiety.
24 Part II Psychodynamic Theories