FINE.
The following material you're about to read is from a lovely essay Demony wrote.
When we are born, all we do is want. We want food, we want sleep, and we want comfort. This is an example of the id. The id is the part of your mind that wants, it holds your desires. This is the first thing we develop. Later in life we develop the ego, and after that, the super ego. The ego is the decision-making part; it mediates between the id and the super ego to carry out your choices. The super ego is your morality, it is formed by family and society, and it is basically your ‘conscience.’ Freud’s theory of behavior is that these are a big factor in personality. They lie within the levels of consciousness. There are different levels of consciousness: the conscious, the preconscious, the subconscious, and the unconscious. These lie mostly in the conscious, but parts of them are found in the other states of consciousness as well.
According to Freud, the conscious is all that we are aware of at a given moment. He says emotions and thoughts pass through it all the time. As stated earlier, the id, ego, and super ego are mostly located in the conscious. We think about our decisions, about the cause and effect of them, so they are consciously made.
Subconscious is the level of awareness below that. Most of your mind’s contents are in the subconscious, it is split into two levels: preconscious and unconscious. The preconscious contains emotions, memories and thoughts that we are not aware of but that can be accessed and brought into the conscious, all the information the conscious can use if prompted. It may take a minute to remember the information but it is accessible. The unconscious is content of your mind that is inaccessible to the conscious directly. It is blocked by repression, but some content tends to leak into the conscious in pieces, it can get there in symbolic form, these take the shape or random thoughts or images from dreams, or in direct form.
These states can affect how a person acts because contents of the unconscious can cause pathology. Also, situations in which someone acts unconsciously make affect decisions and performance based on what they are told. For example if someone was playing basketball with their father and saw ‘Beating Dad is okay’ would perform better than someone presented with ‘beating dad is wrong’. Thoughts and feelings can cause physical symptoms and these thoughts and feelings have the power to distort and shape behavior.
Human behavior is affected by many things, the id, ego, and super ego is one theory of what affects behavior and the levels of consciousness is another. These are both theories of Freud and there are many more out there.
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