What was the role of the unconscious in structuralism, functionalism, and behaviorism?
The idea of unconscious forces was not accepted by many, including Wundt and Titchener; since, the method of self-analysis was impossible to be applied upon unconscious. Because the unconscious cannot be contemplated, its reduction to sensory elements was also not possible. The entire focus of functional psychologists was on the consciousness. According to them, there was no use of the unconscious mind; although some of them agreed with the view based on the unconscious mind.
Already occupied with the views of behaviorism, there was no more space for the unconscious in Watson’s system. He said that the concept of unconscious had not yet been verbalized by the individuals and dismissed this idea. However, the idea of unconscious was brought to psychology by Freud. Philosophical speculation about unconscious psychological phenomena was one of the primary sources of influence on the movement of psychoanalysis.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz developed the idea of monadology in the early eighteenth century. He believed that there are different levels of consciousness of the mental events, that ranks from entirely unconscious level to distinctly conscious one. After a century, Johann Friedrich Herbart modified the proposition of Leibnitz of the unconscious into the portal idea of consciousness.
In Herbert’s view, disagreement develops amid the ideas, as they scuffle for realizing conscious. The concept of unconscious was also hypothesized by Fechner. Using the idea of threshold, he suggested that a similarity exist between mind and an iceberg, which greatly affected Sigmund Freud.
Fechner proposed that similar to the major part of the iceberg, much ideas of the mind remain hidden beneath the outer surface, where it gets affected by forces that are unobservable. Thus, we observe that many people discuss the unconscious human mind very seriously. Philosophers had dealt with the notion of the unconscious before, but Freud was the first to discover a scientific way to study it.