What is Truth? Sacramental Vision of Freud

While Freud’s id, ego, and superego describe the personality of the person, his concepts of the conscious, the unconscious, and the preconscious mind explain mental awareness and show a similar relationship-centered balance needed for mental health and therefore knowledge of the authentic self, well, at least the material authentic self. The conscious, the unconscious, and the preconscious mind, to Freud, are elements of cognitive processing and memory. The conscious mind refers to the active or “awake” mind. In the conscious mind are readily accessible memories or ideas that may be verbalized and rationalized by the individual. When the individual is presented with various stimuli from their environment, the conscious mind makes sense of that stimuli by associating it, actively, with an accessible memory or idea. If there is no active memory with which to associate the stimuli, the mind seeks any memory it can with which to scaffold the new information. For Freud, any information gathered within a lifetime is stored somewhere, either consciously or unconsciously. I use the infant analogy so my students can understand this a bit more. For an infant, the rational ability to process data does not exist, but that data is stored somewhere. To Freud, that somewhere is the unconscious mind. Later in life, when the individual encounters stimuli that can be associated with the unconscious infant data, the mind automatically makes a connection. The human mind treats stimuli or new data in such a way that in order to make sense of it, it must find some prior knowledge with which to connect it. In psychotherapy, Freud would attempt to access the unconscious mind in order to determine what infant or prior memory is making the adult reaction to certain stimuli what it is. Continuing the infant analogy, if an infant or child experiences sickness when first eating pasta sauce, the mind stores that data in the unconscious as the child does not actively remember at a young age. Later in life, when they are offered pasta sauce, they experience a feeling of sickness as the brain attempts to make sense of the stimuli. The brain accesses the unconscious memory of pasta sauce and the adult behavior is explained. Psychoanalysis is the process by which a therapist attempts to use the preconscious memory of the individual to determine the unconscious memory driving the conscious behavior. The preconscious mind is that part of the mind that can bridge the conscious and the unconscious, although not in a conscious manner. Normally, psychoanalyst use dream therapy, hypnosis, or extensive therapy to activate the preconscious in order for the earliest memories to surface. For Freud, psychoanalysis is vital for determining the reason behind current behavior, for in determining the reason for any given behavior, one can gain control over that behavior, and if it is negative or hurtful behavior, it can be addressed or modified. It is within the relationship between the conscious, the unconscious, and the preconscious that one can determine a balance of self and therefore claim health.

West Rim Train at Big Bend National Park in west Texas. Through interior exploration, one can begin to understand their material Authentic Self. Freud argued that psychotherapy could help us in the process.

            It seems like this might be too complicated for high school students to fully grasp, but I have two things going for me. First, though many modern psychologist and psychiatrists reject most of what Freud taught, his language is still part of modern social vocabulary. So, these are not necessarily new words to them and my students do have some rudimentary understanding of what Freud is teaching. A hundred years of Western culture being influenced by Freud helps me to teach it. Second, I have already scaffolded for my students the idea of relationship as being integral to the Authentic Self. As I teach Freud, I remind students that Freud is really just trying to help patients to discover their Authentic Self, albeit through material means. Because they understand the Christian theological concept of Authentic Self and its connection to relationship, they can start to “see” Freudian Psychology through a lens of Sacramentality.