The subconscious mind is the sum total of our past experiences.

What we feel, think, or do forms the basis of our experience. These experiences are stored in the form of subtle impressions in our subconscious mind. These impressions interact with one another and give birth to tendencies. We become prone to react in a particular way to a particular situation or stimulus depending upon the tendencies in our subconscious mind. The resultant of these tendencies determines our character. Depending on the strength and nature of their character people respond to the same stimuli or the situation in differing ways. The reaction varies according to the character of the individual.

Id, ego, and superego are the three components of the human mind in the psychoanalytic model introduced by Sigmund Freud at the beginning of the 20th century. The id is the one that we are born with. The id is an important part of our personality because as newborns, it allows us to get our basic needs met. The id doesn't care about reality, about the needs of anyone else, only its own satisfaction. If you think about it, babies are not real considerate of their parents' wishes. Within the next three years the ego begins to develop. The ego is based on the reality principle. Its the ego's job to meet the needs of the id, while taking into consideration the reality of the situation.

By the age of five, or the end of the phallic stage of development, the Superego develops. The Superego is the moral part of us and develops due to the moral and ethical restraints placed on us by our caregivers. Many equate the superego with the conscience as it dictates our belief of right and wrong.

In a healthy person, according to Freud, the ego is the strongest so that it can satisfy the needs of the id, not upset the superego, and still take into consideration the reality of every situation. Not an easy job by any means, but if the id gets too strong, impulses and self gratification take over the person's life. If the superego becomes too strong, the person would be driven by rigid morals, would be judgmental and unbending in his or her interactions with the world.

What is hypnosis?

Hypnosis, also referred to as hypnotherapy or hypnotic suggestion, is an altered state of consciousness. This state of consciousness is usually achieved with the help of a hypnotherapist and is different from your everyday awareness. Under hypnosis, the objective or conscious mind is put in a dormant state, and the unconscious mind becomes very alert. Because of this, the slightest suggestion which the operator gives to the subject is carried out by the subject. "The subjective mind is constantly amenable to control by the power of suggestion." Usually, the subject believes everything that he is told, because the objective or reasoning mind is dormant

 Under hypnosis some patients were able to relate and reexperience repressed conflicts or emotion-producing incidents. Bringing these experiences to the surface enabled the patients to release tensions and reduce the symptoms of their illness.

Most people can be easily hypnotized, but the depth of the trance varies widely. A profound trance is characterized by a forgetting of trance events and by an ability to respond automatically to posthypnotic suggestions that are not too anxiety-provoking.

The depth of trance achievable is a relatively fixed characteristic, dependent on the emotional condition of the subject and on the skill of the hypnotist. Only 20 percent of subjects are capable of entering somnambulistic states through the usual methods of induction.

Hypnosis can produce a deeper contact with one's emotional life, resulting in some lifting of repressions and exposure of buried fears and conflicts. As people grow from infancy to adulthood, their conscious mind becomes stronger and acts as a censor, accepting or rejecting suggestions before they go into the subconscious mind. The conscious mind has a limited memory of experiences, but a more complete memory is available in the subconscious mind. Many adults have allowed too many negative suggestions to come through to their subconscious mind, and therefore have fears, inferiority feelings and more complex disturbances because of it.

 In order to establish the positive attitude you need for success in life, you must take a sustained effort to allow positive and only positive suggestions to pass through your conscious mind. Hypnotism teaches you how foolish it is to accept any suggestion of failure, and gives you the ability to remain calm and relaxed no matter how tense the situation may be.

 Hypnosis has been used to treat a variety of physiological and behavioral problems. It can alleviate back pain and pain resulting from burns and cancer. It has been used by some obstetricians as the sole analgesia for normal childbirth. Researchers have demonstrated that the benefit of hypnosis is greater than the effect of a placebo and probably results from changing the focus of attention.. Some behavioral difficulties, such as cigarette smoking, overeating, and insomnia, are also amenable to resolution through hypnosis. Few physicians, however, include hypnosis as part of their practice

Autosuggestion (or the related autogenic training) is a process by which an individual trains the subconscious mind to believe something, or systematically schematizes the person's own mental associations, usually for a given purpose.

This is accomplished through self-hypnosis methods or repetitive, constant selfaffirmations, and may be seen as a form of selfinduced brainwashing. The acceptance of autosuggestion may be quickened through mental visualization of that which the individual would like to believe.

Autosuggestion is most commonly accomplished by presenting one's mind with repetitive thoughts (negative or positive), until those thoughts become internalized. Autosuggestion is normally thought of as a deliberate tool, but it can also refer to an unintentional process.

Applications of deliberate autosuggestion are intended to change: the way one believes, perceives, or thinks; one's acts; or the way one is composed physically or physiologically. An example might be individuals reading nightly aloud a statement they have written describing how they would like to be, then repeating the statement in their mind until they fall asleep.

People have attributed changes to such a nightly routine or similar employment of autosuggestion, for example, increased confidence, the conquering of life-long fears, heightened mental faculties (e.g., ability to calculate mathematics or read at a quicker rate), eradication of diseases or infections from one's body, and even improved eyesight and growing taller.

It is not uncommon to hear people claim that they have been able to get rid of warts on their hands, simply by making a point of saying, "There go my warts!" every time they saw a garbage truck or a trashcan, but it is not clear whether such anecdotal reports should be taken as evidence of the power of autosuggestion.

The ability to fight sicknesses and infections, as well as many other things, shows that it may be a form of a placebo. Making yourself "believe" the body is curing the sickness by itself may affect what your cells and body do, although this hasn't been conclusively tested.

Most people are making autosuggestions to themselves everyday and are simply not aware of it. This process of autosuggestion is an extremely powerful tool whether it is used positively or negatively. So it is of the utmost importance to use autosuggestion to your benefit not your detriment. Since your subconscious mind begins to act on any suggestion your conscious mind accepts you can achieve remarkable results with autosuggestion when used properly.

Unfortunately too many people constantly make negative autosugesstion constantly making negative autosuggestions in the chatter of their minds, for example: I cannot do it, I am always late, I never have enough money, nobody loves me. These negative autosuggestions have tremendous power over the individual as they become embedded in the subconscious mind and then manifest in the persons life. So why use negative autosuggestion when you can replace it with positive autosuggestion. I am always on time, I always feel confident, people like me, I always feel happy. Your positive autosuggestion works just as well as the negative but has the added benefit of making you feel good.

The Use of Suggestion by Mental Healers

The credit for transforming the power of autosuggestion into a psychological treatment goes to French psychotherapist Emile Coue. He was born in 1857 and got training as a pharmacist. In 1900 he studied hypnotism and decided to develop a mental healing process with the help of simple formula of autosuggestion. In autosuggestion a positive statement is repeated several times a day for a long period. It goes into the subconscious of a person and starts the healing process.

Positive rays generated in the mind flows strengthen the immune system and cure the disease. A famous autosuggestion of Emile Coue is Day by day in every way I am getting better and better which he used to cure hundreds of patients. This autosuggestion is still widely used. Actually this free and very effective healing pill can be used by anybody, and it is without any side effect.

Faith Cures

"In all ages, unofficial healers have obtained remarkable results in cases where orthodox medical skill has failed. How do these healers effect their cures? They do not directly apply suggestion as ordinarily understood; but they are backed by a great reputation, due to chance or to legend; people believe in them; and they make use of fantastic methods, whose strangeness and illogicality arouse a sense of the marvelous, producing in the patient an emotional state which facilitates the working of autosuggestion. In these conditions, faith cures.

Dreams

What would we be without aspirations or dreams? Our real life is reflected in our dreams. Our thoughts, our hopes become an echo in our dreams.

What are dreams?

Dreams are mental activity (thoughts, images, emotions) that happen during the rapid eye movement (REM) stage of sleep. This stage of sleep takes up to 20-25% of the sleeping time.

The areas of the brain turned on during REM sleep seem to help learning and memory. Infants spend almost 50% of their sleep time in REM sleep (compared to 20% for adults), which may be explained by the tremendous amount of learning in infancy. If people are taught various skills and then deprived of REM sleep, they often cannot remember what they were taught.

In Ancient Greece, in two works of Aristotles, he mentions dreams and they are regarded as a matter of phychology. We are told that the dream is not god-sent , nor divine, nor of a demonic origin. He knew that a dream turns slight sensations perceived in sleep into intense sensations. For example, if one imagines that one is walking through fire, and feels hot soles, then this part of the body becomes only quite slightly warm.

Dreams may be a way by means of which the brain consolidates memories. The dream time could be a period when the brain can reorganize and review the days events and connect new experiences to older ones.

Some parapsychologists think that the dream state is a gateway to another world. The prophetic or clairvoyant dream is perhaps the strongest reason for believing that dreaming is a gateway to another world. Some dreams seem to foretell events. While it is admitted by most parapsychologists that a certain amount of coincidence is to be expected between what a person dreams and what actually happens, it is also argued that there are too many cases of seemingly prophetic dreams to reasonably explain them all as due to coincidence.

Types of dreams:
Nightmares. The distinction of a nightmare is its frightening and/or emotional content. You tend to wake up in fear in the midst of a nightmare. Because of its frightening nature, you tend to remember your nightmares and the vivid details. They have a bigger impact upon your waking mind and its images stay with you throughout the day. One reason for nightmares may be a way of our unconscious to get our attention about a situation or problem that you have been avoiding. Recurring dreams repeat themselves with little variation in story or theme. These dreams may be positive, but most often they are nightmarish in content. Dreams may recur because a conflict depicted in the dream remains unresolved or ignored. Once you have found a resolution to the problem, your recurring dreams will cease.

Healing dreams serve as messages for the dreamer in regards to their health. Many dream experts believe that dreams can help us avoid potential health problems and help us to heal when we are ill. Our bodies are able to communicate to us through our dreams to "tell" us that something is not quite right with our bodies even before any physical symptoms show up. Prophetic dreams, also referred to as precognitive or psychic dreams, are dreams that seemingly foretell the future. One rational theory to explain this phenomenon is that our dreaming mind is able to piece together bits of information and observation that we normally overlook or that we do not seriously consider. In other words, our unconscious mind knows what is coming before we consciously piece together the same information.

Psychologists and most people look for greater meaning and insight in dreams. Here are some common dreams with interpretations:
Falling: Dreams of falling are said to indicate insecurity. Flying: Dreams of flying are said to indicate feeling in control or on top of a situation. The Naked Dream: Dreams of being naked are said to indicate that you are ashamed about something or have something to hide.

The standard definition of art is that it is a product of human activity, made with the intention of stimulating the senses as well as the mind and imagination by transmitting emotions and ideas.

Art is a way of confession, of expressing the depths of the inner part of a person through a code of images, sounds, shapes or written ideas (literature).
According to Plotinus, the last great Neo-Platonist philosopher, art raises the soul to contemplation of the universal, reveals truths that connect him with divinity. The whole of art is an appeal to a reality which is not without us but in our minds. Desmond McCarthy

The most fundamental ideas that create our personality are stored in the most mysterious part of our mind, the subconscious mind. It is the source of all human manifestations, including the forms of art. Carl Jung, after a lifetime of studies above mind and human psychology, concluded in a more lyrical approach that the subconscious mind is the connection path between human being and its Creator. This idea suits very well with the beliefs of the Renaissance that the artist and his products are the manifestations of the divine realm into our world.

From Antiquity to Middle Ages, art had been regarded as a skill (the ethimology of art comes from Latin language, meaning hand made art) and its main goal was decorating religious assemblies .
Later on, the Renaissance brought the human being in the center of all activities, including art which evolved to a more laic approach, focusing all its themes on the human beauty as conceived by Vitruvius ( the ideal being had certain proportions). Romantic and Modern art have an obvious approach to reality, trying to represent it more objective.

Pierro Lorenzetti

Christ Entering Jerusalem

Michelangelo Buonarotti, David (detail)

Jean Millet Woman with a Rake

Peter Paul Rubens

Portrait of a Boy

The 20th century artists are interested in the unknown side of life, their art express the attempt to find the absolute truths of existence. They try to revolutionize the stiffly canonical values of the society, provoking the audience at free thinking. The attempt of art to reach the most simple essence of life, its fundamental shapes, abandoning decorative elements.

In the process of searching for simple shapes that hide the most complex ideas of human being, some artists appealed at principles and practices developed by a new branch of science: psychology (the study of human mind, that developed extraordinary in this period with the contribution of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung). They tried to express through art the ideas hid in the depths of their mind inducing hallucinatory states, hypnosis or depicting dreams.

 it was a cultural movement that began in the 1920s, as a result of the Dada influence (the artistic revolution against the general accepted values in art) Its center was in Paris and it spread very fast world wide

Surrealism keeps the principles of Dada in a fainter manner. The revolution against canonic art is mitigated, the movement being focused on the studies of psychology, especially on Freuds theory above dreams and subconscious thinking.
Freuds work with free association, dream analysis and the hidden unconscious was of the utmost importance to the Surrealists in developing methods to liberate imagination. However, they embraced idiosyncrasy (for the personal way a given individual reacts, perceives and experiences a common situation), while rejecting the idea of an underlying madness given by these temperamental changes. Its leader was Andre Breton, a French psychiatrist who worked in a neuropsychiatry hospital using the theories of Sigmund Freud

Although he had been very harsh criticized by his contemporary of making art for the sake of money, he is the most popular personality of surrealism.

He started painting landscapes, but he discovered very soon that it was not the best way of expressing his inner ego.
Being a non-conformist young artist, he took part at the movement leaded by Andre Breton.

In one of his autobiographical books, Salvador Dali shares his methods of finding themes for his paintings. Dali began to induce hallucinatory states in himself by a process he described as paranoiac critical. Using this method, he practically brought images from his subconscious mind as seen in dreams in paintings. Once Dali hit on this method, his painting style matured with extraordinary rapidity, and from 1929 to 1937 he produced the paintings that made him the world's best-known Surrealist artist.

Les Automatistes, group of Canadian abstract artists who painted automatically, or spontaneously, without having a plan of the painting they are executing. The founder of this movement was Paul-mile Borduas . He had organized an exhibition in 1942 at the Ermitage Thtre in Montral. Afterwards, a group of followers had gathered around Paul Borduas, creating the group of Automatistes who lasted from 1942 to 1950. According to Borduas, the automatic painter begins each painting without a subject in mind, without even a definite idea about the composition. The subconscious guides the painters brush. Upon completion, when a theme or idea can be discerned, the work can be titled.

The Black Star Paul-Emil Borduas

The Bottled Condor Paul Emile Borduas

Bibliography
Sigmund Freud - The Interpretation of Dreams www.psychology.com www.sfn.com Encarta Reference Library www.visualdali.com Art Gallery (may 2007) Carl Jung Life after Death The Art, Rao Publishing Press www.webmuseum.com Gil Boyne Hypnosis