Theory Of The Unconscious Mind example essay topic
Huxley's view was reinforced by the steady expansion of knowledge about the functions of the human brain. In the 19th century it was not possible to say with certainty how the brain carried out such functions as memory, emotion, perception and reason. This left the field open for substantia lists to argue for an autonomous mind, or for a metaphysical theory of the mind. But each advance in the study of the brain during the 20th century made this harder, since it became more and more apparent that all the components of the mind have their origins in the functioning of the brain. Huxley's rationalism, however, was disturbed in the early 20th century by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, who developed a theory of the unconscious mind, and argued that those mental processes of which humans are subjectively aware are only a small part of their total mental activity. Freudianism was in a sense a revival of the substantial view of the mind in a secular guise.
Although Freud did not deny that the mind was a function of the brain, he held the mind has, as it were, a mind of its own, of which we are not conscious, which we cannot control, and which can be accessed only though psychoanalysis (particularly the interpretation of dreams). Freud's theory of the unconscious, although impossible to prove empirically, has been widely accepted and has greatly influenced the popular understanding of the mind..