The Unconscious Mind Anxiety

The seeds of anger, like love, are sown in infancy. Frustrations evoking and nourishing anger begin at birth, when the human being is "continually encountenng the painful ex­perience that the world is no longer shaped so exactly to his subjective demands as was the maternal womb."

Infants are born with certain instinctual reactions which are sometimes called "fears."

However, the face and substance of fear changes as experience enlarges. For example, people get progressively more afraid of snakes as they grow older. One of the most pervasive human fears is that of loss of parental love, or, more abstractly, fear of rejection or social disapproval.

Fear is the emotion associated with flight from danger which threatens survival. Fear and cowardice are not the same thing; one can feel afraid and still act bravely, which is what most "heroes" do.

Personality   patterns,   it   should   now   be plain, reflect the constant interplay of posi­tive and negative emotions. In wholesome personality development the "loving" emo­tions are encouraged to blossom and modify the effects of the negative emotions. Techni­cally speaking, we seek to "eroticize our aggressions." We turn now to consider the un­conscious   mind,  where  these things occur.

The Unconscious Mind

The unconscious mind is a paradox. We become aware of it only when and to the ex­tent that it releases memories, thoughts, and feelings to consciousness. It holds and with­holds many secrets.

We assume the existence of an unconscious mind because it offers the most rational and scientific way of explaining human behavior. This hypothesis has super­seded the animistic explanation that a child is "bad" or his father an alcoholic because the Devil is in him.

There are those who cling to "free will" and reason as the fundamental determinants of human conduct. On this score it can be said that we must act as if our wills were free and as reasonably as our unconscious minds will allow us. But there can be little doubt today that individual reason and will are persistently limited by unconscious forces. We are fundamentally driven by our emo­tional reactions. We can do only what the structure of our personality permits.

For these and other reasons we must now examine the structure (or construct) of the unconscious mind in some detail. It is the major area of psychic processes and hence the central subject matter of mental health and mental hygiene. To use several figures of speech, the conscious mind is only the facade of the unconscious; it is the part of the iceberg that floats above the water; it is just the skin of the apple. The picture of the unconscious mind that we shall now try to paint in a few strokes is of necessity generalized and over­simplified. But it is not merely hypothetical; it corresponds with and explains how human beings actually behave.

The structuring of the unconscious mind here set forth is based on psychoanalytic theory, initiated and expounded principally by the Viennese physician, Sigmund Freud. It has acknowledged limitations, but it is far from being outmoded.