The will and the unconscious mind

When I said "psychoanalysis", I was not joking.

First a little introduction. What am I talking about at all?

Have you ever had an experience like one of these?

- You have to get up every day at the same time. Then, you don't remember when it started, you automatically wake up 5 minutes before your alarm clock sounds, almost every morning.

- You have heard bad news or you have done something bad. Some days pass by and then, let's say a week later when you have already been distracted enough you try to remember what happened... But you realise that the details don't come to your mind. Or you have problems recalling.

- You really wanted something. You even didn't think about the possibility of failure. And finally, it worked.

- You lie about something. You lie about it many times, but one day they ask you about it and you say accidentally the truth. Quickly, you correct yourself, it was just like a slip.

What does intervene in these situations? God? Aliens? The drugs you took?

Assuming you're an atheist, you don't believe in aliens controlling our minds (maybe it's just me :P) and you're clean, there's is one thing left.

And I won't repeat it, just read the title.

Let's invite Sigmund Freud to our little essay. What can you tell us?

...

It seems they can only send us pictures from the other side... Pictures drawn with Paint...

Well, here you can see the famous iceberg metapher applied to our mind (the sun is really kind of unnecessary...).

You can see that it's divided into 3 parts:

Id (literally "it"): The unorganized part. Your will, what you want, your instinct. It's completely irrational, exclusively guided by your passion and lust.

Ego (literally "I"): The realistic part. Where our thinking takes place. The poor ego is the responsible one to combine the demands of all the other factors, the id, the superego and the external world and to take decisions which satisfy all of them.

Superego (literally "Over-I"): The perfectionist and moral part. Everything we learned by our idols (parents, teachers, friends...) is stored here. It acts against the id, it represses the wild side of our mind and reminds us of our obligations and the rules and the principles of what we should do and who we should be.

So... Our poor ego has a hard job. It has to decide between the things we want, the things we consider as correct and what the others think and say.

Oh, I'm getting a WhatsApp message.. Oh my god.. It is Freud.. So they have better connection on the other side than we have in Castelló -.-

"The ego is not sharply separated from the id; its lower portion merges into it.... But the repressed merges into the id as well, and is merely a part of it. The repressed is only cut off sharply from the ego by the resistances of repression; it can communicate with the ego through the id."

In other words, the thoughts we repress caterogically aren't so far from what we consider realistic, from the things we really do in the end. If our will, our passion gets strong enough it is able to convince our ego to consider the repressed things. Our moral "conscience" will try to argue that.

And, what's even more interesting, if you have another look at the picture, you can see that we are only partially conscious of our ego and the superego. That is, we only know about the decisions we finally take according to our realistic interpretations and the moral rules we follow as we can to choose the right actions.

And our id? Fully unconscious. So we don't really know about our intimate wishes. All we are aware of is what reaches our ego, what we take into consideration before we decide what we do.

So our will or our passion is able to regulate our actions from the unconsciousness. That means that we sometimes can do things we really want without actually knowing we do them.

Our will has a strong power and we should not underestimate it. In my opinion, the more we pressure our will the more it wants to take control of our actions. Its like a container where you introduce a lot of gas. The pressure in the container will be so high that the smallest stimulation, let's say a rock you throw at the container, can be the trigger to cause an explosion.

Think about that, or perhaps even better, don't think about it. Maybe your unconsciousness will remind you ;)