Word: conscious
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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unconscious. The submerged part of the mind that contains urges, feelings and drives forgotten or ignored by the conscious part of the mind...
subconscious. "Transition" zone between the Conscious and Unconscious...
Most personality disorders are caused by conflicts-conscious or unconscious- between selfish desires (the Id), what society demands (the Ego), and what you think is right (the Superego). So Freud concluded, and so most psychiatrists agree...
...Will Menninger has a simple illustration of the Conscious v. Unconscious conflict. The mind, he says, is something like a clown act featuring a two-man fake horse. The man up front (the Conscious part of the mind) tries to set the direction and make the whole animal behave; but he can never be sure what the man at the rear end of the horse (the Unconscious) is going to do next. If both ends of the horse are going in the same direction, your mental health is all right. If they aren't pulling together, there...
...milder method of dredging the mind is narcosynthesis (with some such "truth serum" as sodium amytal). In a twilight state between wakefulness and deep sleep, the patient often says things he cannot or will not say when fully conscious. Narcosynthesis works best when the patient's difficulties are recent (as in some "war neuroses"). The most desperate treatment of all, for the patient who fails to respond to anything else, is a drastic brain operation, like lobotomy (TIME, Dec. 23, 1946). Lobotomy may relieve the more troublesome symptoms, but it may also leave the patient so irresponsible or lumpish...