Unconscious Mind

In the 18th century a German romantic philosopher Sir Christopher Riegel coined the word unconscious mind and later on introduced into the English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The unconscious mind may be defined as “that part of the mind which gives rise to a collection of mental phenomena that manifest in a person's mind but which the person is not aware of at the time of their occurrence.”

These phenomena take account of the following factors:

• unconscious or automatic skills,
• unconscious feelings, unconscious thoughts,
• unnoticed perceptions, unconscious habits and automatic reactions,
• complexes, hidden phobias and concealed desires.

The unconscious mind can be seen as the foundation of the dreams in night and routine feelings (those that come into view with no obvious cause); the storehouse of memories that have been forgotten but that may however not be easy to get to consciousness at some later time; and the locus of implied knowledge, (i.e. each and every one of the things that we have well-read and so well that we perform them without thinking.)

One of the well-known examples of the function of the unconscious mind is the occurrence where the individual fails to straight away resolve a given problem and after that all of a sudden has a spark of insight that provides the solution to the problem perhaps days later on at some unusual instant during the day.

Observers all the way through the history have argued that there are influences on realization from other parts of the mind. These observers are at a variance in the use of correlated terms, together with: unconsciousness as a personal habit; being uninformed and being instinct. Conditions related to semi-consciousness include: implicit memory, awakening, trances, subliminal messages, hypnagogia, and hypnosis.

Even though dreaming, sleep, sleep walking, delirium and coma may perhaps signal the presence of the process of unconsciousness, but these processes are not the unconscious mind, but they are more of a symptom. Freud separated mind into the conscious mind or ego and two parts of the unconscious mind: the id or instincts and the superego.

Questions:

• What is meant by id, ego and superego?
• What is meant by hypnosis?