Throughout this reading, Sigmund Freud was trying to justify the existence of unconscious. The main idea of the reading was that the assumption of unconscious is necessary and reasonable and that all the conscious acts remain unintelligible and disconnected if people believe that every psychical act occurs in them must also be experienced in them through consciousness. To support his claim, he provides the reason of it being necessary by saying that consciousness have gaps in them. He elaborated more by saying that psychical acts often occur due to presupposing acts, of which the consciousness …show more content…
Freud’s primary claim, as stated on page 13, is, “all conscious acts remain disconnected and unintelligible if we insist upon claiming that every mental act that occurs in us must all necessarily be experienced by us through consciousness.” What does Freud mean by this statement? Based on this statement and the entire reading, what is Freud’s view on the importance of the unconscious for understanding psychology?
In the statement stated above, Freud means to say that our most personal daily experiences happen to us with ideas that come to our head form who knows where. Many mental acts that occur to us do not have to necessarily be experienced by us through their consciousness. Sometimes, people do certain things and they don’t know how they did it or when they did it. Especially, if it’s something that they are doing for a long time. For example, driving a car every day, after a while people just push break peddle when it is red light, it does not have to be experienced by them through …show more content…
It is an illusion because consciously willing an action does not directly imply that the conscious will has caused the action. To prove this, Wegner perform some experiments. One of the experiment was to measure the event of moving an index finger in a number of people by putting electronic potential on the scalp before and after the voluntary movement. The conclusion of this experiment was that brain starts doing something first, then the person become conscious of wanting to do the action (experience of conscious will), and then finally the finger moves. From this experiment it was realized that conscious wanting is a mental event that is caused by prior events. Thus, it seems that conscious event is not what gets the voluntary movement started but rather it is one of the events in a force that eventually yields such movements. The second experiment of “acting quickly” suggested that the consciousness of stimulus that triggered action of rapid movements typically follows much of the action. The slowness of the consciousness suggests that much of what we see and do involve the preconscious mental