what if your conscious experience in your daily life is influenced by hidden unconscious processes? This mystery is one of the many that continue to confound our understanding of ourselves. We do not know how it does work regarding impulses, desires or motives become unconscious or, how unconscious impulses, desires or motives suddenly become conscious.

The technologies said such a functional magnetic resonance imaging permit scientists to directly measure brain activity. This ability has led to a revival and reconceptualization of key psychoanalytic concepts, based on the idea of inner forces outside our awareness that influence our behavior. According to psychodynamic theory, unconscious dynamic processes remove anxiety-provoking thoughts and impulses from consciousness in response to our conflicting attitudes. The processes that keep unwanted thoughts from our consciuos sphere, is called the defensive mechanism.

First interpretation

Sigmund Freud defined Suppression as the voluntary form of repression . It is a conscious process of pushing unwanted thoughts, memories, emotions, fantasies and desires out of awareness. Suppression is more amenable to controlled experiments than is repression, thoughts and impulses from consciousness.

If you are grieving over the death of a loved one or the breakup of a relationship, you may consciously decide to suppress thinking about the situation to get on with your life. Or, in another word, you may have an impulse to tell your boss what you really think about him and his abysmal behavior, but you suppress this thought because you need the job. In both cases, the desire is conscious but is thwarted by the exercise of willpower resulting from a rational decision to avoid the action. you can develop a nervous cough around your boss even though you are not sick. Or a suppressed sexual desire may resurface in a careless phrase or slip of the tongue. In general, “forgotten” thoughts, memories and urges can influence behaviors, conscious thoughts and feelings and can express themselves as symptoms.

some claim that suppression is a myth with no scientific support, but the Psychologist Michael C. Anderson and his colleagues carried out what they call a “think/no-think” experiment to explore the brain basis of memory suppression. Two dozen volunteers had to memorize 48 word pairs (for example, ordeal-roach or steam-train). Subsequently, while lying in a scanner, subjects were shown the first cue word and had to either recall the second, associated word or prevent it from entering consciousness . Actively suppressing the matched word while lying in the scanner had the effect of reducing recall of the word afterward. this result is not just simple forgetting that occurs with the passage of time.

the feedback that Anderson and his colleagues collected showed that the volunteers suppressed the words by recruiting parts of the brain involved in ” control,” those are areas in the prefrontal cortex, to disengage processing in sectors of the brain important for memory formation and retrieval, in particular the hippocampus. This finding is noteworthy because earlier experiments showed that the amplitude of activity in the hippocampus is proportional to memory recall—the stronger the activity, the higher the likelihood of remembering. A second intriguing observation is that the brain is more active when avoiding recalling a memory than during recall itself. People suppress unwanted memories by exerting willful effort that can be tracked in the nervous system in ways only dreamed.

Evidence of Suppression

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suppression to widely accepted brain mechanisms involved in behavioral control moves this concept from the domain of the psychoanalyst’s couch to the physical area of the brain.

A different form of suppression, occurs when an object is not consciously seen even though the image is always clearly visible.

Another example of visual suppression is binocular rivalry. Here two ifferent images are simultaneously present, one in each eye. Say a photograph of a smiling girl is projected into your left eye and an image of a car is projected into your right eye. Rather than appearing as the girl superimposed on the car, the two pictures rival for conscious access, and one will suppress the other briefly. For a few seconds you will see the girl’s face; suddenly, patches of the car begin to shine through until the face is entirely gone, and you’ll see only the car. Subsequently, the smiling eyes will break through the automobile, and it will disappear to be replaced by the girl’s face, and so on in a never-ending pas de deux.

So although the physical input to the eyes always remains the same, your conscious perception of it changes from one moment to the next and back again. Bistable percepts are ideal for tracking the footprints of consciousness in the human brain using functional brain ­imaging.

Thus, from the point of view of psychoanalysis, it would be more proper to call this perceptual repression rather than perceptual suppression. Whether the neural mechanisms underlying visual perceptual suppression and repression are related to those underlying psychodynamic suppression or repression remains to be determined.

Emotions role

Dissociation can occur in healthy individuals such as when you blank out for a mile or two while driving along a freeway, become completely absorbed by a book or movie, or find yourself walking into a room in your house only to forget why you ventured there in the first place.

More extreme forms of dissociation manifest themselves in mental diseases such as dissociative identity disorder , known as multiple personality disorder which involves the presence of two or more distinct identity states. These are characterized by different emotional responses, thoughts, moods and perceived self-images that recurrently and alternately take control of a patient’s behavior and consciousness. So patients do not have more than one personality, but rather they have less than one .

Dissociative identity disorder is often associated with severe and prolonged childhood trauma (such as neglect or emotional or sexual abuse) and develops as a way to cope with an overwhelming situation that is too painful or violent to assimilate into one’s conscious self. The person literally “goes away” in his or her head to flee from the anxiety-producing experience from which there is no physical escape. This dissociative process allows traumatic feelings and memories to be psychologically separated off so that the person can function as if the trauma had not occurred. While in one mental state, the patient has access to traumatic autobiographical memories, say of a rape, and intense emotional responses to them. But when in her other state, she claims not to recall anything related to her rape.

the psychology influence the sight

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Sometimes the difference between the personalities can be different. Psychoanalysts Bruno Waldvogel and others in Munich have reported a dissociated patient who gradually regained sight during psychotherapy after 15 years of diagnosed blindness. During the experiment reported here, one personality state had essentially normal eyesight, whereas a younger, male personality—which could be summoned momentarily by calling out his name—was blind. This phenomenon could be construed as hysterical ranting were it not for the electrical activity recorded by electroencephalographic scalp electrodes. But visually evoked activity was much reduced in her blind personality state. There is no known mechanism that allows someone to consciously block vision with open eyes. This finding implies that the brain can rapidly intervene at a very early stage of the visual system, preventing visual information from reaching the patient’s cortex. How it does so remains a mystery.

The way the brain is connected and the way different parts of the brain communicate with one another are important. Dissociation may be the result of a disruption of certain connections among brain regions. Hence, dissociative disorders may result from the failure of coordination or integration of the distributed neural circuitry that represents subjective self-awareness.

New advances in neuroscience and technology are revealing the neurobi­ology of the dynamic unconscious that Freud have mentioned centuries ago, so ther’s a hope to find a proper solution to this phenomen.

see you soon,

sal.