Sigmund Freud described several components which have been very

influential in understanding personality.

Three levels of awareness

Freud identified three different parts of the mind, based on our level of
awareness.

• Conscious mind: includes everything that we are aware of. This is

the aspect of our mental processing that we can think and talk
about rationally.
The conscious mind is where we are paying attention at the moment. It
includes only our current thinking processes and objects of attention, and
hence constitutes a very large part of our current awareness.

• Unconscious mind: is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and

memories that outside of our conscious awareness. Most of the
contents of the unconscious are unacceptable or unpleasant, such as
feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. According to Freud, the
unconscious continues to influence our behavior and experience,
even though we are unaware of these underlying influences. For
Freud, the unconscious is the storehouse of instinctual desires,
needs, and psychic actions. While past thoughts and memories may
be deleted from immediate consciousness, they direct the thoughts
and feelings of the individual from the realm of the unconscious.
Freud divided mind into the conscious mind or Ego and two parts of the
Unconscious: the Id or instincts and the Superego. He used the idea of the
unconscious in order to explain certain kinds of neurotic behavior. He
believed that significant psychic events take place "below the surface" in
the unconscious mind.

• Preconscious mind: is part of the conscious mind and includes our

memory. These memories are not conscious, but we can retrieve
them to conscious awareness at any time. the word preconscious is
applied to thoughts which are unconscious at the particular moment
in question, but which are not repressed and are therefore available
for recall and easily capable of becoming conscious .'Preconscious'
thoughts are thus 'unconscious' in a merely 'descriptive' sense, as
opposed to a 'dynamic' one.
The preconscious includes those things of which we are aware, but where
we are not paying attention. We can choose to pay attention to these and
deliberately bring them into the conscious mind. We can control our
awareness to a certain extent, from focusing in very closely on one
conscious act to a wider awareness that seeks to expand consciousness to
include as much of preconscious information as possible.

• Subconscious mind: the latent content of a dream is the hidden

psychological meaning of the dream. Freud believed that the
content of dreams is related to wish fulfillment and suggested that
dreams have two types of content: manifest content and latent
content. The manifest content is the actual literal subject-matter of
 the dream, while the latent content is the underlying meaning of
these symbols.

Freud believed that the latent content of dreams is suppressed and

hidden by the subconscious mind in order to protect the individual
from thoughts and feelings that are hard to cope with. By
uncovering the hidden meaning of dreams, Freud believed that
people could better understand their problems and resolve the
issues that create difficulties in their lives.

At the subconscious level, the process and content are out of direct reach
of the conscious mind. The subconscious thus thinks and acts
independently. One of Freud's key findings was that much behavior is
driven directly from the subconscious mind. This has the alarming
consequence that we are largely unable to control our behavior, and in
particular that which we would sometimes prefer to avoid.

More recent research has shown that the subconscious mind is probably
even more in charge of our actions than even Freud had realized.
Although later theories have improved understanding, Freud's ideas still
provide a useful model for the more complex actions that are really going
on.