Consumer Psychology: Conscious and Unconscious Competing Desires
Sure, sure. I know Freud is dead. American psychoanalysis had its 100th birthday last year and Sigmund Freud died back in 1938. The trend in contemporary psychology has been away from anything that has its roots in psychoanalysis. Hardly anyone mentions anymore the three classic parts of the mind posited by Freud: Id, Ego, and Superego.
However, a resurrection of these ideas is occurring in contemporary neuropsychology. Modern brain research actually validates the most important and core psychoanalytic concepts:
- We humans actually have different brain structures… completely different areas of the brain… that operate at the same time and process information in very different ways. So maybe the Id, Ego and Superego are actual neurological structures and not just theory after all.
- Neuroscience research using brain scans reveals that our motivations are mostly unconscious and that consciousness is only the tip of the iceberg of what is going on in our heads when we process information and make decisions.
The brain is in constant conflict. We all live in a dynamic balance of the tensions between our conscious awareness and our brain’s efforts to keep our simultaneously occurring unwanted or unacceptable emotions, memories and desires out of our awareness and hidden in the shadows of the unconscious mind. This is normal! This is how the human brain functions.
RealityCheck psychological interviews are designed to explore and reveal the hidden conflicting motives of individuals. Our proprietary process makes segmentation studies come to life dramatically and clearly. We teach researchers how to listen in a deeper way… the way clinical psychologists and psychoanalysts listen. Our Attunement Training and specially designed psychological in-depth- interviews are conducted by our experienced clinical practitioners. These powerful IDIs deliver a felt experience of the inner conflicts, competing motives and core tensions of the people we interview. We do this in a workshop or retreat-like format which has the added benefits of team building and practical skills training. This produces a deeper, more engaging, and layered emotional research experience than the usual and same old stale methodologies.
And even though Freud is still dead, RealityCheck brings psychological research very much to life. More importantly, the insights gained are not just abstract theories. Instead, they are highly actionable and yield a clear, strategic direction that speaks directly to the conscious and unconscious parts of the human brain.
