Feist−Feist: Theories of
Personality, Seventh
EditionII. Psychodynamic
Theories- Freud: Psychoanalysis © The McGraw−Hill^31
Companies, 2009
Unconscious drives may appear in consciousness, but only after undergoing
certain transformations. A person may express either erotic or hostile urges, for ex-
ample, by teasing or joking with another person. The original drive (sex or aggres-
sion) is thus disguised and hidden from the conscious minds of both persons. The un-
conscious of the first person, however, has directly influenced the unconscious of the
second. Both people gain some satisfaction of either sexual or aggressive urges, but
neither is conscious of the underlying motive behind the teasing or joking. Thus the
unconscious mind of one person can communicate with the unconscious of another
without either person being aware of the process.
Unconscious, of course, does not mean inactive or dormant. Forces in the un-
conscious constantly strive to become conscious, and many of them succeed, al-
though they may no longer appear in their original form. Unconscious ideas can and
do motivate people. For example, a son’s hostility toward his father may masquerade
itself in the form of ostentatious affection. In an undisguised form, the hostility
would create too much anxiety for the son. His unconscious mind, therefore, moti-
vates him to express hostility indirectly through an exaggerated show of love and
flattery. Because the disguise must successfully deceive the person, it often takes an
opposite form from the original feelings, but it is almost always overblown and os-
tentatious. (This mechanism, called a reaction formation,is discussed later in the
section titled Defense Mechanisms.)
Preconscious
The preconscious level of the mind contains all those elements that are not conscious
but can become conscious either quite readily or with some difficulty (Freud,
1933/1964).
The contents of the preconscious come from two sources, the first of which is
conscious perception. What a person perceives is conscious for only a transitory pe-
riod; it quickly passes into the preconscious when the focus of attention shifts to an-
other idea. These ideas that alternate easily between being conscious and precon-
scious are largely free from anxiety and in reality are much more similar to the
conscious images than to unconscious urges.
The second source of preconscious images is the unconscious. Freud believed
that ideas can slip past the vigilant censor and enter into the preconscious in a dis-
guised form. Some of these images never become conscious because if we recog-
nized them as derivatives of the unconscious, we would experience increased levels
of anxiety, which would activate the final censor to repress these anxiety-loaded im-
ages, forcing them back into the unconscious. Other images from the unconscious
do gain admission to consciousness, but only because their true nature is cleverly
disguised through the dream process, a slip of the tongue, or an elaborate defensive
measure.
Conscious
Consciousness, which plays a relatively minor role in psychoanalytic theory, can be
defined as those mental elements in awareness at any given point in time. It is the
only level of mental life directly available to us. Ideas can reach consciousness from
two different directions. The first is from the perceptual conscioussystem, which is
Chapter 2 Freud: Psychoanalysis 25