Understanding human motivation and behavior

¶ … girlfriend's house a couple weeks ago, her little brother Tommy got sent home from middle school for "inappropriate behavior" (fighting). We were surprised because he never gets in fights. When their parents came home from work, he had to tell them what happened. He was in the lunchroom when a friend of his, for a joke, took his glass which had a little bit of water in the bottom of it and threw it in Tommy's face. Tommy was suddenly so angry that he knocked his friend down on the floor and had to be pulled off of him! When he told his parents, he started to cry and said he didn't know why he reacted like that over something so stupid.

People used to believe that conscious awareness was all there was to a person. But then Sigmund Freud came along in the early 20th century and changed this whole view. He discovered that conscious awareness is not all there is, that there is another deeper layer of consciousness, which he named the unconscious mind. He said it contains all our repressed impulses and desires. Usually, we "repress" things (feelings and experiences) that are painful or unacceptable. We don't know we are repressing, we just forget and then forget that we forgot. But what we forgot isn't gone -- it is stored in the unconscious part of our mind. Although the waking mind is unaware of what lies in the unconscious, the unconscious mind is actually quite powerful, and the things we do are often determined by what's in the unconscious. A lot of what is stored there is early childhood experiences. Freud made up a metaphor to picture the unconscious. He said it is like an iceburg in the ocean with only the tip (or upper 10%) visible. The rest (the unconscious) is "under water" and hidden. But the hidden part is always active and trying to make sense of everything.

When Tommy said he didn't know what came over him, his mother got a funny look on her face. She said, "I think I know." Then she told him that when he was a baby, between two and a half (he was learning to talk), one day he wanted her to get him a drink of water. She was on the other end of their house, working on a drawing that she was going to get paid for, and it had to be done that night so she was under pressure. She told little Tommy to ask his daddy to get him a drink because his dad was nearer the kitchen and wouldn't mind anyway. But the baby kept insisting it had to be her. He whined and complained and kept it up; finally, he started screaming and pulling on her. She got fed up. She went out in the kitchen and poured a big glass of cold water and said, "You want water? I'll give you water!" And she threw the water that in the glass over the baby's head. She said he screamed and threw himself on the floor and had a full-fledged tantrum. She was ashamed because she had acted like a child herself instead of an adult. Tommy said he didn't remember the event at all. She said every now and then it came back to her that she had done that and how sorry she was. She had tears in her eyes when she told it and asked Tommy to forgive her. He did. He kissed her and told her not to cry. I thought of it as I was thinking about the unconscious.