Subconsciousness

In psychology, the word subconscious is the part of consciousness that is not currently in focal awareness. The word "subconscious" represents an anglicized version of the French subconscient as coined by the psychologist Pierre Janet (1859-1947), who argued that underneath the layers of critical-thought functions of the conscious mind lay a powerful awareness that he called the subconscious mind.

In the strict psychological sense, the adjective is defined as "operating or existing outside of consciousness".

Locke and Kristof write that there is a limit to what can be held in conscious focal awareness, so an alternative storehouse of one's knowledge and prior experience is needed, which they label the subconscious.

Sigmund Freud first used the term "subconscious" in 1893 and in the 1895 "Studies on Hysteria" and in 1926 he said:

In Freud's opinion the unconscious mind has a will and purpose of its own that cannot be known to the conscious mind (hence the term "unconscious") and is a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of mind by the mechanism of psychological repression.

Charles Rycroft explains that the subconscious is a term "never used in psychoanalytic writings". Peter Gay says that the use of the term subconscious where unconscious is meant is "a common and telling mistake"; indeed, "when [the term] is employed to say something 'Freudian', it is proof that the writer has not read his Freud".

Freud's own terms for thinking that takes place outside conscious awareness are das Unbewusste (rendered by his translators as "the Unconscious mind") and das Vorbewusste ("the Preconscious"); informal use of the term subconscious in this context thus creates confusion, as it fails to make clear which (if either) is meant. The distinction is of significance because in Freud's formulation the Unconscious is "dynamically" unconscious, the Preconscious merely "descriptively" so: the contents of the Unconscious require special investigative techniques for their exploration, whereas something in the Preconscious is unrepressed and can be recalled to consciousness by the simple direction of attention. The erroneous, pseudo-Freudan use of subconscious and "subconsciousness" has its precise equivalent in German, where the words inappropriately employed are das Unterbewusste and das Unterbewusstsein.

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