If we think about what it is that makes us who we are. It's our appearance. How we present ourselves to the outside world, how we interact and react to third parties and environmental factors and the basis of our understandings taken from all these interactions in-turn, makes up our identities.
Our presentable self, in it's entirety, is the sum of our years and the early formative period, according to Freud, makes up our id, ego and super-ego and the conscious mind. From this matured psychological state, we learn to take on conformative behaviours for better adjustment to social norms & ideals thus ensuring the urges and desires of the unconscious pleasure seeking mind are kept in check.
Conscious Delay
Many of us are living the day to day life at the mercy of our desires when the instilled defences are weakened. We believe everything our conscious minds is telling us to be the truth. The fact of the matter is - our conscious actions are merely reactions and our minds are deceiving us constantly as are we are deceiving others. We falsely believe we are consciously in control.
Many carry on this charade obliviously throughout their entire lives. Being aware of this situation can help us all to understand others and be more mindful of our trickster make-up to enable better pre-thought processes and evaluation stages before taking action - providing we allow the time to do so.
This is because, the reactionary time it takes for our conscious to catch up with our unconscious mind can be as long as ten seconds! Reading more on this topic in Robert Trivers' 'The Folloy of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life', will both surprise and educate us all to the findings contained within - that we as conscious beings, are merely a representative of our inner selves.
