Freud Always Said He Was Proving “The Unconscious,” But He Was Really Proving Dual Consciousness (the Simplest Form of Multiple Personality)

In my post earlier today, I quoted Freud as acknowledging that “the unconscious” was discovered by others before his time. The illustration he gave was post-hypnotic suggestion. That is, if you give someone who is hypnotized a suggestion to do something after they come out of hypnosis, and they come out of hypnosis and do it without knowing why they do it, or perhaps even without even noticing that they are doing it, then they are, Freud would have us believe, demonstrating their “unconscious.” But that, I will explain, is ridiculous.

Let’s say you hypnotize someone and suggest to them that, after they come out of hypnosis, every time you say the word “blue” they will raise their right thumb and cross their left leg over their right leg, and every time you say the word “red” they will raise their left index finger and cross their right leg over their left leg. And after they come out of hypnosis, while you engage them in casual conversation about current events, you use the cue words and they behave as suggested. After this goes on for some time, you ask them about the odd behavior, and they either hadn’t noticed it, or they noticed it and didn't care, or they come up with some ingenious explanation for the behavior having nothing to do with hypnosis. It was this type of scenario that Freud was talking about as being a demonstration of “the unconscious.”

However, people can carry out such behavior only if they 1. remember what you told them to do while they were in hypnosis, then 2. listen very carefully for the cue words, and then 3. purposely carry out the behavior. This complex scenario requires conscious attention from start to finish. The fact that the part of the mind which was “asleep” during the hypnosis is unaware of it, means only that the person’s mind has two segregated and independent states of consciousness, with one of them unaware of the other; in other words, dual consciousness.