The Conscious and the Unconscious Mind
The conscious human mind, as witnessed by behaviors and thoughts, is a factor of the unconscious mind. Research studies continue to unearth the reality of the relations between the two minds to derive useful inferences that assist in understanding a man in much finer ways. In these writings, a synthesis is made of the contents of The Allegory of the Cave, The Oedipus Complex, and The Personal and Collective Unconscious in the pursuit of understanding the conscious and the unconscious minds.
The unconscious mind entails the processes that are present in the mind that automatically occur and that are not accessible to introspection. They include the memories, thoughts, processes, affection, and motivation (Dougherty). On the other hand, the conscious mind consists of the awareness that is present now, and can include the alertness to body activities, the environment, touch, smell, voice, and feelings. Historically, psychologists have tried to conceptualize on standard concepts that can be used to decipher how both the conscious and unconscious minds operate. Some of the scholars, those whose writings forms the basis of this synthesis, include Sigmund Feud, and Carl Jung, and Plato, who speaks through Socrates.
According to Plato, the writer of the Allegory of the Cave, the perception of a human being can be held captive by the things they have grown used to perceiving as reality. For instance, in the cave, the prisoners decipher the dark shadows on the wall as the authenticity of the world. Socrates says, “Generally speaking,… those who were in chains would believe nothing above and beyond the silhouettes of the artifacts as the unhidden” (Plato 2). Hence, the physical limitation that describes the world of the prisoners as seen curtails their understanding of anything that goes beyond the "usual". Such as when the slaves shun away the sort of “stupidity" of the enlightened comrade upon him returning to help them see the reality (Plato 4).
Sigmund Freud, in his paper, Oedipus complex, tries to go deeper into his account. He believes that when humans explain themselves or others (conscious mind activity), they rarely provide an accurate account of their motivation (Jakovljevic and Matai 352). To illustrate this, Sigmund describes the case of a boy child who is undergoing alterations in behavior similar to the Oedipus complex. The juvenile is likely to misinterpret his relations to both parents. That is, the boy child, driven by an illusion of active competition, supposes his father as a competitor to the attention of the mother, whom he sees as fitting the description of the “girl” in his life. Sigmund says, “The boy believes that his father, a strong rival, is the one who will castrate him" (Jakovljevic and Matai 352). Even so, substantial differences exist in the concepts put forth by Sigmund and Jung, the writer of the paper The Personal and Collective Unconscious.
Freud divides the unconscious mind into the id, referring to drive and instincts, ego, and superego, which is the …
