Sigmund Freud's Narrative Self-Consciousness

Level 4 describes the narrative self-consciousness, by which the function of language is essentially large. The narrative self-consciousness and functions of self-consciousness associate one another through language via inner or audible speech. The process of directing attention to the content allows for better remembrance and the verbalization of said same content will result in the same remembrance. (Talvitie & Tiitinen, 2006) The concept of the repression of contents was Freud’s theoretical cornerstone suggesting that absent contents and their emergence were pre-existing in a conscious form. (Talvitie & Tiitinen, 2006) He proposed the question, “How are we to arrive at a knowledge of unconscious? And answers, “It is of course only as something conscious that we know it, after it has undergone transformation or translation into something conscious.” (Freud, Repression, 1915/1957)

They suggest that Freud’s observational data consisted of a patient’s disorders and the absence of conscious contents which would appear during the psychoanalytic talking-cure. With this fundamental basis Freud formulated a theory which leads to the belief that the repressed unconscious thoughts in essence caused the disorders. (Talvitie & Tiitinen, 2006) Talvitie and Tiitinen modify the historical realm of psychoanalytic terms of repressed contents and the meta-psychology towards the present era using neurophysiological and empirical studies of consciousness, which focus more on the dynamic systems approach and one’s consciousness, memory, attention, and self. (Talvitie & Tiitinen,