FREE ESSAY ON HOW DOES UNCONSCIOUS DIFFER FROM CONSCIOUSNESS?

HOW DOES UNCONSCIOUS DIFFER FROM CONSCIOUSNESS?

The QUESTION:
How Does Unconscious Differ From Consciousness ?
Consciousness and unconscious are two psychological terms that are commonly used in this
field of study. Their importances mainly appear when psychologists deal with their
patients because they will surely think about these two terms. To understand these two
terms we must know their definitions. This step can enable us to recognize the difference
between them.
Consciousness is a psychological condition defined by the English philosopher John Locke
as the perception of what passes in a man's own mind. While unconscious in psychology is
the aspect of mental life that is separated from immediate consciousness and is not
subject to recall at will.
The history of consciousness is interesting because it was recently known just in the
early 19th century the concept was variously considered. Some philosophers regarded it as
a kind of substance, or mental stuff, quite different from the material substance of the
physical world. Others thought of it as an attribute characterized by sensation and
voluntary movement, which separated animals and men from lower forms of life and also
described the difference between the normal waking state of animals and men and their
condition when asleep, in a coma, or under anesthesia, the latter condition was described
as unconsciousness. Other descriptions included an analysis of consciousness as a form of
relationship or act of the mind toward objects in nature, and a view that consciousness
was a continuous field or stream of essentially mental sense data, roughly similar to the
ideas of earlier empirical philosophers.
The method employed by most early writers in observing consciousness was introspection
looking within one's own mind to discover the laws of its operation. The limitations of
the method became apparent when it was found that because of differing preconceptions,
trained observers in the laboratory often could not agree on fundamental observations.
The failure of introspection to reveal consistent laws led to the rejection of all mental
states as proper subjects of scientific study. In behaviorist psychology, derived
primarily from work of the American psychologist John B. Watson in the early 1900s, the
concept of consciousness was irrelevant to the objective investigation of human behavior
and was doctrinally ignored in research. Neobehaviourists, however, adopted a more
liberal posture toward mentalistic states such as consciousness.
Neurophysiological mechanisms that consciousness depends on the function of the brain has
been known from ancient times. Although detailed understanding of the neural mechanisms
of consciousness has not been achieved, correlations between states of consciousness and
functions of the brain are possible. Levels of consciousness in terms of levels of
alertness or responsiveness are correlated with patterns of electrical activity of the
brain waves recorded by an electroencephalograph. During wide-awake consciousness the
pattern of brain waves consists of rapid irregular waves of low amplitude or voltage. In
contrast, during sleep, when consciousness can be said to be minimal, the brain waves are
much slower and of greater amplitude, often coming in periodic bursts of slow waxing and
waning amplitude.
Both behavioral levels of consciousness and the correlated patterns of electrical
activity are related to the function of a part of the brainstem called the reticular
formation. Electrical stimulation of the ascending reticular systems arouses a sleeping
cat to alert consciousness and simultaneously activates its brain waves to the waking
pattern. It was once supposed that the neurophysiological mechanisms subserving
consciousness and the higher mental processes must reside in the cortex. It is more
likely, however, that the cortex serves the more specialized functions of integrating
patterns of sensory experience and organizing motor patterns and that the ascending
reticular system represents the neural structures most critically related to
consciousness. The brainstem reticular formation should not, however, be called the seat
of consciousness. It represents an integrative focus, functioning through its widespread
interconnections with the cortex and other regions of the brain.
Unconscious also called Subconscious, the complex of mental activities within an
individual that proceed without his awareness. Sigmund Freud, the founder of
psychoanalysis, stated that such unconscious processes may affect a person's behavior
even though he cannot report on them. Freud and his followers felt that dreams and slips
of the tongue were really concealed examples of unconscious content too threatening to be
confronted directly.
Some theorists denied the role of unconscious processes, defining psychology as the study
of conscious states. Yet, the existence of unconscious mental activities seems well
established and continues to be an important concept in modern psychiatry.
Freud distinguished among different levels of consciousness. Activities within the
immediate field of awareness he termed conscious; e.g., reading this article is a
conscious activity. The retention of data easily brought to awareness is a preconscious
activity; for example, one may not be thinking of his address but readily recalls it when
asked. Data that cannot be recalled with effort at a specific time but that later may be
remembered are retained on an unconscious level. For example, under ordinary conditions a
person may be unconscious of ever having been locked in a closet as a child; yet under
hypnosis he may recall the experience vividly. Because one's experiences cannot be
observed directly by another efforts to study these levels of awareness objectively are
based on inference; i.e., at most, the investigator can say only that another individual
behaves as if he were unconscious or as if he were conscious.
Efforts to interpret the origin and significance of unconscious activities lean heavily
on psychoanalytic theory developed by Freud and his followers. For example, the origin of
many neurotic symptoms is held to depend on conflicts that have been removed from
consciousness through a process called repression. As knowledge of psychophysiological
function grows, many psychoanalytic ideas are seen to be related to activities of the
central nervous system. That the physiological foundation of memory may rest in chemical
changes occurring within brain cells has been inferred from clinical observations that:
(1) direct stimulation of the surface of the brain (the cortex) while the patient is
conscious on the operating table during surgery has the effect of bringing long-forgotten
(unconscious) experiences back to awareness; (2) removal of specific parts of the brain
seems to abolish the retention of specific experiences in memory; (3) the general
probability of bringing unconscious or preconscious data to awareness is enhanced by
direct electrical stimulation of a portion of the brain structure called the reticular
formation, or the reticular activating system. Also, according to what is called brain
blood-shift theory, the transition from unconscious to conscious activities is mediated
by localized changes in the blood supply to different parts of the brain. These
biopsychological explorations have shed new light on the validity of psychoanalytic ideas
about the unconscious. 
To be more able to understand unconscious we can take a look to what is psychoanalysis
theory. It is a highly influential method of treating mental disorders, shaped by
psychoanalytic theory, which emphasizes unconscious mental processes and is sometimes
described as depth psychology. The psychoanalytic movement originated in the clinical
observations and formulations of the Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, who coined the
term. During the 1890s, Freud was associated with another Viennese, Josef Breuer, in
studies of neurotic patients under hypnosis. Freud and Breuer observed that, when the
sources of patients' ideas and impulses were brought into consciousness during the
hypnotic state, the patients showed improvement.
Observing that most of his patients talked freely without being under hypnosis, Freud
evolved the technique of free association of ideas. The patient was encouraged to say
anything that came to mind, without regard to its assumed relevancy or propriety. Noting
that patients sometimes had difficulty in making free associations, Freud concluded that
certain painful experiences were repressed, or held back from conscious awareness. Freud
noted that in the majority of the patients seen during his early practice the events most
frequently repressed were concerned with disturbing sexual experiences. Thus he
hypothesized that anxiety was a consequence of the repressed energy attached to
sexuality; the repressed energy found expression in various symptoms that served as
psychological defense mechanisms. Freud and his followers later extended the concept of
anxiety to include feelings of fear, guilt, and shame consequent to fantasies of
aggression and hostility and to fear of loneliness caused by separation from a person on
whom the sufferer is dependent.
Freud's free-association technique provided him with a tool for studying the meanings of
dreams, slips of the tongue, forgetfulness, and other mistakes and errors in everyday
life. From these investigations he was led to a new conception of the structure of
personality: the id, ego, and superego. The id is the unconscious reservoir of drives and
impulses derived from the genetic background and concerned with the preservation and
propagation of life. The ego, according to Freud, operates in conscious and preconscious
levels of awareness. It is the portion of the personality concerned with the tasks of
reality: perception, cognition, and executive actions. In the superego lie the
individual's environmentally derived ideals and values and the mores of his family and
society; the superego serves as a censor on the ego functions.
In the Freudian framework, conflicts among the three structures of the personality are
repressed and lead to the arousal of anxiety. The person is protected from experiencing
anxiety directly by the development of defense mechanisms, which are learned through
family and cultural influences. These mechanisms become pathological when they inhibit
pursuit of the satisfactions of living in a society. The existences of these patterns of
adaptation or mechanisms of defense are quantitatively but not qualitatively different in
the psychotic and neurotic states.
Freud held that the patient's emotional attachment to the analyst represented
transference of the patient's relationship to parents or important parental figures.
Freud held that those strong feelings, unconsciously projected to the analyst, influenced
the patient's capacity to make free associations. By objectively treating these responses
and the resistances they evoked and by bringing the patient to analyze the origin of
those feelings, Freud concluded that the analysis of the transference and the patient's
resistance to its analysis were the keystones of psychoanalytic therapy. 
Early schisms over such issues as the basic role that Freud ascribed to biological
instinctual processes caused onetime associates Carl Jung, Otto Rank, and Alfred Adler to
establish their own psychological theories. Most later controversies, however, were over
details of Freudian theory or technique and did not lead to a complete departure from the
parent system. Other influential theorists have included Erik Erikson, Karen Horney,
Erich Fromm, and Harry Stack Sullivan. At one time psychiatrists held a monopoly on
psychoanalytic practice, but soon nonmedical therapists also were admitted.
Later developments included work on the technique and theory of psychoanalysis of
children. Freud's tripartite division of the mind into id, ego, and superego became
progressively more elaborate, and problems of anxiety and female sexuality received
increasing attention. Psychoanalysis also found many extraclinical applications in other
areas of social thought, particularly anthropology and sociology, and in literature and
the arts. 
Therefore, consciousness and unconscious are extremely different and here is an example
which can explain this difference: the nature of language as a system of signs is such
that each sign already bears the traces of all the other signs within it. This is the
feature of language, which allows for the possibility of puns and other forms of
understanding and misunderstanding. Applied to kinship relations, it is the feature,
which allows for confusion and proliferation of roles. Consciousness makes use of
conventional signs which are associated with fixed meanings this is why we are able to
understand one another, but the unconscious can, through language, signify something
quite other than what it says. It can be play as it likes on the sonic materiality of the
symbols of language without regard for their real meaning, and can use them to express a
quite unconscious meaning'. Thus, the unconscious can use the natural faults and fissures
in language as channels of desire a desire, which, if Freud is right, ultimately must be
the anarchical wish for the destruction of civilization.