Freud postulated the subconscious-yet I have never seen any scientific prof of its existance. If we accept that the subconscious exists, then why should it be in onflict with our conscious minds? I know , Freud had many insights-but the subconscious seems to be one of the more sillier ones.
Why is the subconscious mind such a bitch?
The existence of the subconscious mind is one of the least silly of Freud’s ideas. Much of Freud’s thought isn’t generally accepted today.
The subconscious mind is now a bitch to prefrontal cortex.
This is possibly the best possible username for this thread.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
I’m not sure if we’re talking about the same thing, but…
What do you call it when you’ve been thinking about a problem, and had little or no success at finding the right solution, so you set it aside for a while, and then, out of nowhere, the perfect answer pops in your head. Isn’t that an example of where the subconscious continued working on it? If so, it has been suggested to me that the subconscious came up with that answer because it was “in conflict with the conscious mind” (to use the OP’s wording), and was willing to explore ideas which the conscious had rejected.
Objectively, I “know” I shouldn’t take a second helping of meat or should skip dessert or shouldn’t snack between meals. What, if not some subconscious wish for immediate desire fulfillment causes me to do these things?
Isn’t that the ‘id’ talking to you? Mine is extremely loud around midnight, when it points out to me there is ice cream in the freezer.
Frankly, I think Freud gets too much credit for the subconscious. In the Bible (Romans 7), Paul talks about how he does the things he does not want to do and doesn’t do the things he wants to. He attributes it to the conflict between flesh and spirit or sin and holiness, but the ideas are direct parallels to Freud’s id (flesh), ego (free will or conscious thought) and superego (spirit). Freud just put a humanistic/scientific spin on a 2000 year old idea.
You also need a subconscious to really explain emotion and physical urges. I’m not happy or sad just because I say I should be. I don’t find women sexually attractive because I decided to when I was 12. People who fight addiction know there are powerful urges that can’t be expressed with words and can’t be fought just by saying what they want to do. We can call that flesh, id, habituated neural pathways, etc. but we’re still talking about the same phenomena - part of your brain that can’t talk wants you to do something.
As far as scientific proof goes, I’m not sure you can get it. Descarte may have been happy with “I think, therefore I am” but it’s hardly scientific. We can’t prove what people were thinking or whether it was conscious. Brain scans show activity, but we mostly have to ask participants what they were thinking about during the scan to get any correlation. Some current research suggests that we’re putting too much faith in brain scans when it comes to mapping thoughts to physiology.
Hope I don’t remember this wrong, but it wasn’t the “subconscious” he talked about, it was the “unconscious”.
One way of thinking about this is that the little narration that often drifts along in our heads, the thing I always assumed was meant by “I think, therefore I am”, isn’t in complete control. If you think of that as the conscious mind, then the unconscious mind is a catch-all for the elements of mind that exert some influence on our actions but don’t participate in that narration. Many mental health issues hinge on people doing things they don’t themselves think reasonable.
A favorite study used PET to identify which regions in the brain were metabolizing more blood sugar, while the subject did things like work out logical puzzles. Then they asked the subject how he or she was going to choose a car the next time they bought one, and the subjects all started explaining their reasoning before the logic centers kicked in, as though the logical and conscious minds were used more to project an appropriate rationalization to others than they were used to choose the car.
[Hijack]Why does everyone always say the concepts in the Bible are two millennia old? We got a lot of our social and moral philosophy from the Jews and Greeks,[/hijack]
Good point. In this case, I used the 2000 year number because I don’t know of a previous influence on that idea which is so close to Freud’s formulation. Paul does seem influenced by the Greek concept of “material=bad/imperfect, mind=good/perfect,” but I don’t know of an instance where they applied that directly to behavior.
That’s not to say it wasn’t groundbreaking when he did it. If you read Plato you’ll notice that almost every famous philosopher is building on his ideas one way or another. Plato came up with the concept of id, ego, and superego long before Freud.