CONSCIOUSNESS

In psychology, consciousness is the subject's immediate apprehension of mental activity. Although Freud thought that conscious processes are "the same as the consciousness of the philosophers and of everyday opinion" and "a fact without parallel, which defies all explanation or description" (1940a [1938], pp. 159, 157), he argued that they could not be considered the "essence" of mental life. Rather, consciousness has a fugitive quality and does not "form unbroken sequences which are complete in themselves" (p. 157). "The psychical, whatever its nature may be, is in itself unconscious and probably similar in kind to all the other natural processes of which we have obtained knowledge" (1940b [1938], p. 283). Freud stressed, however, that consciousness still plays an importance role; indeed, it is "the one light which illuminates our path and leads us through the darkness of mental life" (p. 286).

The work of psychoanalysis, as Freud saw it, is "translating unconscious processes into conscious ones, and thus filling in the gaps in conscious perception" (p. 286). Consciousness is the qualitative perception of information arising both from the external world and from the internal world: an external world that is unknowable in itself and to which we have access only via subjective elements collected by our sense organs and an internal world that consists of unconscious mental processes and that we are aware of solely through sensations of pleasure/unpleasure and revived memories. According to Freud, "A person's own body, and above all its surface, is a place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring" (1923b, p. 25).

From the beginning Freud treated consciousness and perception as indissolubly linked, indeed, so much so that throughout his work he deemed them to constitute a single structure, the perception-consciousness system. Freud also drew a distinction, within nonconscious phenomena, between latent states susceptible of becoming conscious at any moment and repressed psychic processes inaccessible to consciousness. This led him to differentiate the unconscious system proper from a preconscious system, cut off from consciousness by censorship but also controlling access to consciousness. In this sense, the preconscious and the conscious are very close: both are governed by secondary processes and both draw on a bound form of psychic energy. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), Freud spoke of the preconscious-conscious system, and in "The Unconscious" (1915e), he described the preconscious as "conscious knowledge" (p. 167), even though it provides access to unconscious contents and processes, provided that they have been transformed.

From his earliest writings on, Freud saw the link between consciousness and the ego as very close. And although by 1920 Freud viewed the ego as in large part unconscious in its defensive activities, he continued to attach consciousness to it as both the "nucleus" and the "surface of the mental apparatus" (1923b, p. 19).

By the early twenty-first century, the problem of perception had become increasingly complex. Freud's near conflation of perception and consciousness, which required him to postulate that perceptual phenomena and the laying down of memory traces are incompatible, has come in for serious reconsideration. It is worth noting, though, that Freud himself, in his last years, was given pause on this issue by the problem of fetishism, apropos of which it was apparent that perceptions and mnemic traces could be caught up in one and the same conflict. This line of thinking has led to a reevaluation of all psychopathologies where disavowal and splitting predominate, such as borderline conditions, and more generally, to a review of all states involving the relationship between perception and hallucination (see Donald W. Winnicott's notions of the subjective object and of transitionality [1953]).

Raymond Cahn

See also: Agency; Censorship; Conscious processes; Ego; Metapsychology; Mnemic trace/memory trace; "Note upon the 'Mystic Writing Pad,' A"; Perception-consciousness (Pcpt.-Cs.); Preconscious, the; Psychic apparatus; Psychoanalytic treatment; Topographical point of view; "Unconscious, The."

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1900a). The interpretation of dreams. SE, 4-5.

——. (1915e). The unconscious. SE, 14: 166-204.

——. (1923b). The ego and the id. SE, 19: 12-59.

——. (1940a [1938]). An outline of psychoanalysis. SE, 23: 139-207.

——. (1940b [1938]). Some elementary lessons in psycho-analysis. SE, 23: 279-286.

Winnicott, Donald W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena: A study of the first not-me possession. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34, 89-97.