"We are effectively cognitive icebergs with most of our 'thoughts' occurring below the water line."
Treating neuroses
Frau Emmy von N. was one of the earliest patients to be treated with
the nascent techniques of psychoanalysis. Frau Emmy suffered from a
series of tics, some facial, the most obvious of which was a loud
'clacking' noise. To Freud the symptoms she showed were typical of
hysteria and he soon set about treating her with his strange new
methods.
"Talking to a patient? What good could that do?"And
what strange methods they were. He talked to her. Talking to a patient?
What good could that do? He hypnotised her and soon she began to speak
of her frightening experiences - being a maidservant in an asylum,
nursing her dying brother. Then Freud did something more unusual. He let
her give full vent to her emotion. Later, after she had calmed down a
little, she seemed better...
What then did these past events in Frau Emmy's life signal to Freud?
What was the connection to her current symptoms? At this time Freud had
begun to develop a theory that physical symptoms could be caused by
thoughts not available to the conscious mind. His treatment - the
talking, the hypnosis, the hand on the forehead, the free association,
the couch - all were designed to try and access this so-called
'unconscious' world, to find the root-cause of distress. Once this
root-cause could be identified and explained, Freud thought, the
physical and psychological symptoms would be alleviated (Breuer &
Freud, 1893).
The cognitive unconscious
"We are effectively cognitive icebergs with most of our 'thoughts' occurring below the water line."It
was in Freud's work 'Project for a Scientific Psychology' (Freud, 1895)
that he first laid down the radical (at the time) idea that cognitive
processes are intrinsically unconscious. We are effectively cognitive
icebergs with most of our 'thoughts' occurring below the water line, out
of conscious perception.
The fact that this idea is no longer considered radical is testament
to the last few decades of research which have shown the importance of
unconscious processes. We now have abundant evidence for unconscious
processes in the operation of memory, affect, attitudes and motivation (Westen, 1998).
And so, far from being unscientific and untestable, Freud's
theory of unconscious mental processes was incredibly prescient. It laid
the ground for some of the most important lines of research in
psychology today. Research that tells us more and more about what it
means to be human.
These videos are from a documentary about his work and life:
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