The hypostases of the psyche: conscious, subconscious, unconscious

Consciousness is often compared to our "SELF", it is the one through which we become aware of the surrounding reality, act on the basis of knowledge of the laws of nature, of social life, and achieve our goals.

Unlike "Conscious", "Unconscious" (super-Ego) designates all that information and psychic feelings that are inaccessible to us because they are stored in memory.

The subconscious is the one between the two spheres of the brain, respectively between the conscious and the unconscious.

What is the conscious?

Consciousness is the first level of consciousness and represents about 10% of the neural functions of the brain. It is directed toward the outside world and includes the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, but also the capacity for reflection and analysis.

The conscious is the one who deals with the rational and logical side of our mind. We consciously use all the daily activities that require reason, memory, and action. We use our conscience every time we eat when we think about something when we work when we analyze a situation when we read when we talk, or when we make decisions. The way we think depends on the conscious part of our brain and is directly responsible for our performance or failures in our various areas of life, our happiness or unhappiness. The conscious is used every time we have to think, to use our reason and it represents our will. The conscious person is the one who imposes mental and mental limits on us, he is the one who can suffer psychological blockages, due to which we can face difficulties and failures, and we can suffer depression.

What is the subconscious?

The subconscious makes the connection between the conscious (reason) and the unconscious (memory) and is also the one that makes the connection between the conscious (reason) and the collective unconscious (the infinite ocean of thoughts around us, the extrasensory world). The subconscious mind holds information absorbed by the conscious mind and when it is overloaded, it is stored in the subconscious mind for later use.

The subconscious is acquired, that is, what was once consciousness, moves under consciousness in the form of instinctual reflexes, memories, and phobias.

The subconscious is the one who puts into practice the thoughts that come from the conscious and depending on their strength, the subconscious tries to materialize them, that is, to carry them out; whether it is a good thought or a bad one, whether that thought is a wish of ours or just a thought out of control (a negative thought, an obsession, etc.).

It should be noted that the subconscious does not differentiate between positive and negative emotion or feeling and also does not distinguish between good and evil, it is neutral and does not think. Only our conscious one distinguishes between good and evil, between a positive and negative emotion.

The subconscious also manages all the automatic actions or reactions that we do spontaneously, without thinking about them, such as driving, swimming, cycling, washing dishes, or any other action that we do automatically, while we may be thinking of something else. The actions we take automatically do not require much concentration, which is why the brain operates at a lower frequency.

We can access the subconscious when we reduce the frequency of the waves on which the brain operates, respectively when the brain reaches the "alpha" waves, between 7-14 Hertz (cycles/second).

What is the Unconscious?

Unlike the conscious, the Unconscious is the one that constantly records all the information and thoughts around us, everything we learn throughout life, and also the emotions, sensations, images, sounds, and tastes, all of which are then archived. mental; in this respect the unconscious functions as "memory". These mental processes involve billions of operations that take place in a very short time. For example, a thirty-year-old person accumulates about three trillion pieces of information (thoughts), which are stored in the unconscious (memory). The unconscious includes everything that is not conscious and that comes from innate automatisms. He is also called the "inner child" and works as a five-year-old. His way of communicating is simple, sensitive, playful, and emotional. It is the one that sends us, for example, the sensation of butterflies in the stomach, or emptiness in the stomach when we are in love or stressed. The unconscious is therefore directed towards the inner world.

In psychological terms, the unconscious is the deepest stage of the mind. This stage is not easy to access and works as a layer of thoughts that absorbs repressed memories. According to Carl Jung, the unconscious mind is divided into two parts. One is the personal unconscious, which contains all personal memories, and the other is the collective unconscious, which contains ideas shared by everyone, in general, regardless of their culture. He also explains the unconscious mind as a storage space for socially unacceptable thoughts, painful memories, hidden desires and desires, and so on.

Our unconscious functions as a "hard disk" on which information is stored that can be recalled at any time, ie brought into the realm of consciousness. Various information or skills can be recalled through the unconscious, without necessarily being useful to us at the time of recall. Everything we learn throughout life is imprinted in the unconscious (through the subconscious), and when we need information we access the unconscious to bring it into the realm of consciousness, where we process or transmit it verbally, further.

The unconscious is also the one that ensures the control of all the biological functions of our body, such as respiration, digestion, food intake, and heartbeat.

The unconscious can only be accessed when we are in a state of deep relaxation, and this happens very rarely, as the brain frequency is extremely low, only 4-7 Hertz (cycles/second) - specific to Theta waves, and this usually happens when we are asleep or in an extremely deep state of meditation.

We need to keep in mind that the subconscious and the unconscious are responsible for at least 90% of our daily thoughts, emotions, and actions. Most of the time, our mind behaves like an “autopilot” that drives our life, as we use the conscious mind (conscious) in less than 10% of our daily actions.

The personal unconscious consists of things that have been repressed from the individual's consciousness. These can be a variety of memories and emotions that the individual has repressed or rejected. These usually cannot be consciously mentioned. Memories of bitterness, hatred, embarrassing moments, pain and forbidden urges can be repressed in an individual's personal unconscious. Jung believed that these could have a major impact on the individual.

For example, imagine a person who went through a traumatic experience as a child. After many years, that person would have fully recovered. His emotional torments of experience and unpleasant and painful memories could have been overshadowed. This is because the individual has repressed these emotions and memories. However, this repression does not indicate that information is being lost. On the contrary, these emotions are stored in the personal unconscious. Even if he is not able to remember them, they can manifest in the form of dreams and unusual reactions to daily events. This emphasizes that the personal unconscious is unique to the individual based on his or her life experiences.

The collective unconscious is quite different from the personal unconscious. This is not an individual aspect but applies to the entity of the human species. It is often defined as "the whole spiritual heritage of the evolution of mankind born again in the structure of the brain of each individual."

The collective unconscious transcends the cultural barriers of human beings and presents a common point to all people. This is inherited. It includes universal human experiences, such as love, hate, fear, anger, pain, and so on. Jung also spoke of a concept called "archetypes" in reference to the collective unconscious. He believed that archetypes such as persona, anima/animus, and shadow were all products of the collective experience of mankind. This highlights the fact that the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious are quite different from each other.

The collective unconscious is the structure of the psyche of all humanity, which has developed over time and can be divided into lower, middle, and upper. The lower one is related to the archaic roots, to the past of humanity; the environment is made up of the socio-cultural values ​​of this present moment; the superior, on the other hand, is relative to the values, potentials, and future goals of humanity.

Proponents of the Jungian model, characterized by less mysticism, argue that the collective unconscious can be adequately imagined as emerging in each individual from common instinct, common experience, and common culture. The process of natural generalization in the human mind unites these common traits and experiences into an almost identical substrate of the unconscious.

For example, one might expect the “mother” archetype to be the same, with little variation on all people, because all children share the inner expectation for an individual to take care of them (human instinct); every child survives because he or she had a mother or her surrogate, and almost every child is conditioned by society's idea of ​​what a mother should be (common culture). The combination of all these effects could be the source of the common figure or archetype, which seems to be the same in many people's dreams.

Whether the connection of the individual with the collective unconscious occurs for material or spiritual reasons, the term collective unconscious was introduced by Jung to refer to an explanatory model with which it was possible to describe an important common feature observed in the dreams of different individuals.

The family unconscious is the "dowry" that we take from the ancestors of the clan we belong to and contains both qualities or physical defects, as well as values, potential, or limitations derived from what they lived. The tools we can work with to become aware of the patterns we take on, which we unconsciously put into play in our lives, are the genogram and the family constellations.