Unconscious Mind

by Saul McLeod

published 2009, updated 2015

Introduction
Sigmund Freud didn't exactly invent the idea of the conscious versus unconscious mind,
but he certainly was responsible for making it popular and this was one of his main
contributions to psychology.
Freud (1900, 1905) developed a topographical model of the mind, whereby he described
the features of the minds structure and function. Freud used the analogy of an iceberg
to describe the three levels of the mind.
Freud (1915) described conscious mind, which consists of all the mental processes of
which we are aware, and this is seen as the tip of the iceberg. For example, you may be
feeling thirsty at this moment and decide to get a drink.
The preconscious contains thoughts and feelings that a person is not currently aware of,
but which can easily be brought to consciousness (1924). It exists just below the level of
consciousness, before the unconscious mind. The preconscious is like a mental waiting
room, in which thoughts remain until they 'succeed in attracting the eye of the conscious'
(Freud, 1924, p. 306).
This is what we mean in our everyday usage of the word available memory. For
example, you are presently not thinking about your mobile telephone number, but now it
is mentioned you can recall it with ease. Mild emotional experiences may be in the
preconscious but sometimes traumatic and powerful negative emotions are repressed
and hence not available in the preconscious.
Finally, the unconscious mind comprises mental processes that are inaccessible to
consciousness but that influence judgements, feelings, or behavior (Wilson, 2002).
According to Freud (1915), the unconscious mind is the primary source of human
behavior. Like an iceberg, the most important part of the mind is the part you cannot
see.
Our feelings, motives and decisions are actually powerfully influenced by our past
experiences, and stored in the unconscious.
Freud applied these three systems to his structure of the personality, or psyche the id,
ego and superego. Here the id is regarded as entirely unconscious whilst the ego and
superego have conscious, preconscious, and unconscious aspect.

Unconscious Mind

While we are fully aware of what is going on in the conscious mind, we have no idea of
what information is stored in the unconscious mind.
The unconscious contains all sorts of significant and disturbing material which we need
to keep out of awareness because they are too threatening to acknowledge fully.
The unconscious mind acts as a repository, a cauldron of primitive wishes and impulse
kept at bay and mediated by the preconscious area. For example, Freud (1915) found
that some events and desires were often too frightening or painful for his patients to
acknowledge, and believed such information was locked away in the unconscious mind.
This can happen through the process of repression.
The unconscious mind contains our biologically based instincts (eros and thanatos) for
the primitive urges for sex and aggression (Freud, 1915). Freud argued that our primitive
urges often do not reach consciousness because they are unacceptable to our rational,
conscious selves. People has developed a range of defence mechanisms (such as
repression) to avoid knowing what their unconscious motives and feelings are.
Freud (1915) emphasized the importance of the unconscious mind, and a primary
assumption of Freudian theory is that the unconscious mind governs behavior to a
greater degree than people suspect. Indeed, the goal of psychoanalysis is to reveal the
use of such defence mechanisms and thus make the unconscious conscious.
Freud believed that the influences of the unconscious reveal themselves in a variety of
ways, includingdreams, and in slips of the tongue, now popularly known as 'Freudian
slips'. Freud (1920) gave an example of such a slip when a British Member of Parliament
referred to a colleague with whom he was irritated as 'the honorable member from Hell'
instead of from Hull.

Critical Evaluation
Initially, psychology was sceptical regarding the idea of mental processes operating at
an unconscious level. To other psychologists determined to be scientific in their
approach (e.g. behaviorists) the concept of the unconscious mind has proved a source
of considerable frustration because it defies objective description, and is extremely
difficult to objectively test or measure.
However, the gap between psychology and psychoanalysis has narrowed, and the
notion of the unconscious is now an important focus of psychology. For
example, cognitive psychology has identified unconscious processes, such as
procedural memory (Tulving, 1972), automatic processing (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999;
Stroop, 1935), and social psychology has shown the importance of implicit
processing(Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). Such empirical findings have demonstrated the
role of unconscious processes in human behavior.
However, empirical research in psychology has revealed the limits of the Freudian
theory of the unconscious mind, and the modern notion of an 'adaptive unconscious'
(Wilson, 2004) is not the same as the psychoanalytic one. Indeed, Freud (1915) has
underestimated the importance of the unconscious, and in terms of the iceberg analogy
there is a much larger portion of the mind under the water. The mind operates most
efficiently by relegating a significant degree of high level, sophisticated processing to the
unconscious.
Whereas Freud (1915) viewed the unconscious as a single entity, psychology now
understands the mind to comprise a collection of modules that has evolved over time
and operate outside of consciousness. For example, universal grammar (Chomsky,
1972) is an unconscious language processor that lets us decide whether a sentence is
correctly formed. Separate to this module is our ability to recognize faces quickly and
efficiently, thus illustrating how unconscious modules operate independently.
Finally, while Freud believed that primitive urges remained unconscious to protect
individuals from experiencing anxiety, the modern view of the adaptive unconscious is
that most information processing resides outside of consciousness for reasons of
efficiency, rather than repression (Wilson, 2004).

New Criticism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary
criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly
of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential
aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The
New Criticism. The work of English scholar I. A. Richards, especially his Practical
Criticism and The Meaning of Meaning, which offered what was claimed to be an empirical

scientific approach, were important to the development of New Critical methodology.[1] Also very
influential were the critical essays of T. S. Eliot, such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and
"Hamlet and His Problems", in which Eliot developed his notion of the "objective correlative".
Eliot's evaluative judgments, such as his condemnation of Milton and Shelley, his liking for the
so-called metaphysical poets and his insistence that poetry must be impersonal, greatly
influenced the formation of the New Critical canon.
Contents
[hide]

1History
2Criticism
3Important texts
4References
5Sources
6Further reading

History[edit]
New Criticism developed as a reaction to the older philological and literary history schools of the
US North, which, influenced by nineteenth-century German scholarship, focused on the history
and meaning of individual words and their relation to foreign and ancient languages, comparative
sources, and the biographical circumstances of the authors. These approaches, it was felt,
tended to distract from the text and meaning of a poem and entirely neglect its aesthetic qualities
in favor of teaching about external factors. On the other hand, the literary appreciation school,
which limited itself to pointing out the "beauties" and morally elevating qualities of the text, was
disparaged by the New Critics as too subjective and emotional. Condemning this as a version of
Romanticism, they aimed for newer, systematic and objective method.[2]
It was felt, especially by creative writers and by literary critics outside the academy, that the
special aesthetic experience of poetry and literary language was lost in the welter of extraneous
erudition and emotional effusions. Heather Dubrow notes that the prevailing focus of literary
scholarship was on "the study of ethical values and philosophical issues through literature, the
tracing of literary history, and . . . political criticism". Literature was approached and literary
scholarship did not focus on analysis of texts.[3]
New Critics believed the structure and meaning of the text were intimately connected and should
not be analyzed separately. In order to bring the focus of literary studies back to analysis of the
texts, they aimed to exclude the reader's response, the author's intention, historical and cultural
contexts, and moralistic bias from their analysis. These goals were articulated in Ransom's
"Criticism, Inc." and Allen Tate's "Miss Emily and the Bibliographers."
Close reading (or explication de texte) was a staple of French literary studies, but in the United
States, aesthetic concerns, and the study of modern poets was the province of non-academic
essayists and book reviewers rather than serious scholars. But the New Criticism changed this.
Though their interest in textual study initially met with resistance from older scholars, the

methods of the New Critics rapidly predominated in American universities until challenged by
Feminism and structuralism in the 1970s. Other schools of critical theory, including, poststructuralism, and deconstructionist theory, the New Historicism, and Receptions studies
followed.
Although the New Critics were never a formal group, an important inspiration was the teaching
of John Crowe Ransom of Vanderbilt University, whose students (all Southerners),Allen
Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren would go on to develop the aesthetics that came
to be known as the New Criticism. Indeed, for Paul Lauter, a Professor of American Studies
at Trinity College, New Criticism is a reemergence of the Southern Agrarians.[4] In his essay, "The
New Criticism," Cleanth Brooks notes that "The New Critic, like the Snark, is a very elusive
beast," meaning that there was no clearly defined "New Critical" manifesto, school, or
stance.[5] Nevertheless, a number of writings outline inter-related New Critical ideas.
In 1946, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published a classic and controversial New
Critical essay entitled "The Intentional Fallacy", in which they argued strongly against the
relevance of an author's intention, or "intended meaning" in the analysis of a literary work. For
Wimsatt and Beardsley, the words on the page were all that mattered; importation of meanings
from outside the text was considered irrelevant, and potentially distracting.
In another essay, "The Affective Fallacy," which served as a kind of sister essay to "The
Intentional Fallacy" Wimsatt and Beardsley also discounted the reader's personal/emotional
reaction to a literary work as a valid means of analyzing a text. This fallacy would later be
repudiated by theorists from the reader-response school of literary theory. Ironically, one of the
leading theorists from this school, Stanley Fish, was himself trained by New Critics. Fish criticizes
Wimsatt and Beardsley in his essay "Literature in the Reader" (1970).[6]
The hey-day of the New Criticism in American high schools and colleges was the Cold War
decades between 1950 and the mid-seventies, doubtless because it offered a relatively
straightforward and politically uncontroversial approach to the teaching of literature. Brooks and
Warren's Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction both became staples during this era.
Studying a passage of prose or poetry in New Critical style required careful, exacting scrutiny of
the passage itself. Formal elements such as rhyme, meter, setting,characterization,
and plot were used to identify the theme of the text. In addition to the theme, the New Critics also
looked for paradox, ambiguity, irony, and tension to help establish the single best and most
unified interpretation of the text.
Although the New Criticism is no longer a dominant theoretical model in American universities,
some of its methods (like close reading) are still fundamental tools of literary criticism,
underpinning a number of subsequent theoretic approaches to literature including
poststructuralism, deconstruction theory, and reader-response theory.

Criticism[edit]

It was frequently alleged that the New Criticism treated literary texts as autonomous and divorced
from historical context, and that its practitioners were uninterested in the human meaning, the
social function and effect of literature. [7][8]
Indicative of the reader-response school of theory, Terence Hawkes writes that the fundamental
close reading technique is based on the assumption that the subject and the object of study
the reader and the textare stable and independent forms, rather than products of the
unconscious process of signification," an assumption which he identifies as the "ideology of
liberal humanism, which is attributed to the New Critics who are accused of attempting to
disguise the interests at work in their critical processes.[8] For Hawkes, ideally, a critic ought to
be considered to [create] the finished work by his reading of it, and [not to] remain simply an
inert consumer of a ready-made product.[8]
In response to critics like Hawkes, Cleanth Brooks, in his essay "The New Criticism" (1979),
argued that the New Criticism was not diametrically opposed to the general principles of readerresponse theory and that the two could complement one another. For instance, he stated, "If
some of the New Critics have preferred to stress the writing rather than the writer, so have they
given less stress to the readerto the reader's response to the work. Yet no one in his right mind
could forget the reader. He is essential for 'realizing' any poem or novel. . .Reader response is
certainly worth studying." However, Brooks tempers his praise for the reader-response theory by
noting its limitations, pointing out that, "to put meaning and valuation of a literary work at the
mercy of any and every individual [reader] would reduce the study of literature to reader
psychology and to the history of taste." [9]
Another objection to the New Criticism is that it is thought to aim at making criticism scientific, or
at least bringing literary study to a condition rivaling that of science.[7] However,Ren
Wellek points out the erroneous nature of this criticism by noting that a number of the New Critics
outlined their theoretical aesthetics in stark contrast to the "objectivity" of the sciences (although
Ransom, in his essay "Criticism, Inc." did advocate that "criticism must become more scientific,
or precise and systematic").[7][10]
At times, Wellek defended the New Critics in his essay The New Criticism: Pro and Contra
(1978).

T.S. Eliot as a critic

Eliot is one of the greatest literary critics of England from the point of view
of the bulk and quality of his critical writings. His five hundred and odd
essays occasionally published as reviews and articles had a far-reaching
influence on literary criticism in the country. His criticism was revolutionary

which inverted the critical tradition of the whole English speaking work.
John Hayward says:
I cannot think of a critic who has been more widely read and discussed in
his own life-time; and not only in English, but in almost every language,
except Russian.
As a critic Eliot has his faults. At times he assumes a hanging-judge
attitude and his statements savor of a verdict. Often his criticism is marred
by personal and religious prejudices blocking an honest and impartial
estimate. Moreover, he does not judge all by the same standards. There is
didacticism in his later essays and with the passing of time his critical
faculties were increasingly exercised on social problems. Critics have also
found fault with his style as too full of doubts, reservations and
qualifications.
Still, such faults do not detract Eliots greatness as a critic. His criticism has
revolutionized the great writers of the past three centuries. His recognition
of the greatness of the Metaphysical poets of the 17th century resulted in
the Metaphysical revival of the 20th century. The credit for the renewal of
interest in the Jacobean dramatists goes to Eliot. He has restored Dryden
and other Augustan poets to their due place. His essay on Dante aroused
curiosity for the latter middle ages. The novelty of his statements, hidden in
sharp phrases, startles and arrests attention. According to Eliot, the end of
criticism is to bring readjustment between the old and the new. He says:
From time to time it is desirable, that some critic shall appear to review the
past of our literature, and set the poets and the poems in a new order.
Such critics are rare, for they must possess, besides ability for judgment,
powerful liberty of mind to identify and interpret its own values and category
of admiration for their generation. John Hayward says:
Matthew Arnold was such a critic as were Coleridge and Johnson and
Dryden before him; and such, in our own day, is Eliot himself.
Eliots criticism offers both reassessment and reaction to earlier writers. He
called himself a classicist in literature. His vital contribution is the reaction
against romanticism and humanism which brought a classical revival in art

and criticism. He rejected the romantic view of the individuals perfectibility,

stressed the doctrine of the original sin and exposed the futility of the
romantic faith in the Inner Voice. Instead of following his inner voice, a
critic must follow objective standards and must conform to tradition. A
sense of tradition, respect for order and authority is central to Eliots
classicism. He sought to correct the excesses of the abstract and
intellectual school of criticism represented by Arnold. He sought to raise
criticism to the level of science. In his objectivity and logical attitude, Eliot
most closely resembles Aristotle. A. G. George says:
Eliots theory of the impersonality of poetry is the greatest theory on the
nature of the process after Wordsworths romantic conception of poetry.
Poetry was an expression of the emotions and personality for romantics.
Wordsworth said that poetry was an overflow of powerful emotions and its
origin is in Emotions recollected in tranquility. Eliot rejects this view and
says that poetry is not an expression of emotion and personality but an
escape from them. The poet is only a catalytic agent that fuses varied
emotions into new wholes. He distinguishes between the emotions of the
poet and the artistic emotion, and points out that the function of criticism is
to turn attention from the poet to his poetry.
Eliots views on the nature of poetic process are equally revolutionary.
According to him, poetry is not inspiration, it is organization. The poets
mind is like a vessel in which are stored numerous feelings, emotions and
experiences. The poetic process fuses these distinct experiences and
emotions into new wholes. In The Metaphysical Poets, he writes:
When a poets mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly
amalgamating disparate experiences; the ordinary mans experience is
chaotic, irregular, fragmentary.
Perfect poetry results when instead of dissociation of sensibility there is
unification of sensibility. The emotional and the rational, the creative and
the critical, faculties must work in harmony to produce great work of art.
Critics stressed that the aim of poetry is to give pleasure or to teach
morally. However, for Eliot the greatness of a poem is tested by the order
and unity it imposes on the chaotic and disparate experiences of the poet.
Wimsatt and Brooks are right in saying:

Hardly since the 17th century had critical writing in English so resolutely
transposed poetic theory from the axis of pleasure versus pain to that of
unity versus multiplicity.
Eliot devised numerous critical concepts that gained wide currency and has
a broad influence on criticism. Objective co-relative, Dissociation of
sensibility, Unification of sensibility are few of Eliot clichs hotly debated
by critics. His dynamic theory of tradition, of impersonality of poetry, his
assertion on a highly developed sense of fact tended to impart to literary
criticism catholicity and rationalism.
To conclude, Eliots influence as a critic has been wide, constant, fruitful
and inspiring. He has corrected and educated the taste of his readers and
brought about a rethinking regarding the function of poetry and the nature
of the poet process. He gave a new direction and new tools of criticism. It is
in the re-consideration and revival of English poetry of the past. George
Watson writes:
Eliot made English criticism look different, but not in a simple sense. He
offered it a new range of rhetorical possibilities, confirmed it in its
increasing contempt for historical processes, and yet reshaped its notion of
period by a handful of brilliant institutions.
His comments on the nature of Poetic Drama and the relation between
poetry and drama have done much to bring about a revival of Poetic Drama
in the modern age. Even if he had written no poetry, he would have made
his mark as a distinguished and subtle critic.

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