# 3.6 The Freudian Sandwich
Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
I'd face it as a wise man would,
and train for ill and not for good.—A. E. Housman
Few textbooks of psychology discuss how we choose what to think about—or how we choose what not to think about. However, this was a major concern to Sigmund Freud, who envisioned the mind as a system in which each idea must overcome barriers. Here is how he once envisioned a mind:
"... a large anteroom in which the various mental excitations are crowding upon one another, like individual beings. Adjoining this is a second, smaller apartment, a sort of reception room, in which consciousness resides. But on the threshold between the two there stands a personage with the office of doorkeeper, who examines the various mental excitations, censors them, and denies them admittance to the reception-room when he disapproves of them. You will see at once that it does not make much difference whether the doorkeeper turns any one impulse back at the threshold, or drives it out again once it has entered the reception-room. That is merely a matter of the degree of his vigilance and promptness in recognition."[xviii]
Thus getting past that doorkeeper is not quite enough to reach consciousness. That only leads to the reception room, which he sometimes calls the "preconscious."
"The excitations in the unconscious, in the antechamber, are not visible to consciousness, which is of course in the other room, so to begin with they remain unconscious. When they have pressed forward to the threshold and been turned back by the doorkeeper, they are 'incapable of becoming conscious'; we call them then repressed. But even those excitations which are allowed over the threshold do not necessarily become conscious; they can only become so if they succeed in attracting the eye of consciousness."
Freud imagined the mind as obstacle course in which only ideas that get past all those bars are awarded the title of consciousness. In one kind of block that he calls "repudiation," an idea is deliberately condemned—and thus is rendered powerless—although one can remember rejecting it. In another type, which he calls "repression," an impulse is blocked at an earlier stage—without the thinker knowing this. However, repressed ideas can still persist, expressing themselves in clever disguises.
Inside Freud's three-part model of mind, many resources are working at once—but they don't always share the same purposes. Instead, that mind is a battleground between animal instincts and social constraints. These are frequently incompatible, so the rest of the mind must struggle to find acceptable ways to compromise—and that’s often accomplished by subterfuge. One way to deal with a constraint is to suppress the resource that imposes it. Another is to disguise or re-describe it so that it arouses no Censors or Critics. Freud used the term sublimation for this; we sometimes call it 'rationalizing'.
Few modern ‘cognitive psychologists’ appreciate Freud's architectural concepts. He was one of the first to recognize that we deal with everyday problems in ways that are more complex than any one centralized process could. Instead, he saw the human mind as the product of diverse activities, many of which become engaged when we face conflicts and inconsistencies. Resolving these will often involve many different processes—to all of which we give vague names like Conscience, Emotion, and Consciousness.