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Subconscious
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The term subconscious is used in many different contexts and has no single or precise definition. This greatly limits its significance as a meaning-bearing concept, and in consequence the word tends to be avoided in academic and scientific settings.
In everyday speech and popular writing, however, the term is very commonly encountered. There it will be employed to refer to a supposed 'layer' or 'level' of mentation (or/and peception) located in some sense 'beneath' conscious awareness -- though, again, the notion's dependence upon informal 'folk-psychological' models that remain vague means that the precise nature and properties of this 'underlying' layer are either never made explicit or possess an ad hoc quality.
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The term subconscious is used in many different contexts and has no single or precise definition. This greatly limits its significance as a meaning-bearing concept, and in consequence the word tends to be avoided in academic and scientific settings.
In everyday speech and popular writing, however, the term is very commonly encountered. There it will be employed to refer to a supposed 'layer' or 'level' of mentation (or/and peception) located in some sense 'beneath' conscious awareness -- though, again, the notion's dependence upon informal 'folk-psychological' models that remain vague means that the precise nature and properties of this 'underlying' layer are either never made explicit or possess an ad hoc quality. At different times, references to the 'subconscious' as an agency may credit it with various abilities and powers that exceed those possessed by consciousness: the 'subconscious' may apparently remember, perceive and determine things beyond the reach or control of the conscious mind. The idea of the 'subconscious' as a powerful or potent agency has allowed the term to become prominent in the New Age and self-help literatures, in which investigating or controlling its supposed knowledge or power is seen as advantageous. The 'subconscious' may also be supposed to contain (thanks to the influence of the psychoanalytic tradition) any number of primitive or otherwise disavowed instincts, urges, desires and thoughts.
The word 'subconscious' is an anglicised version of the French subconscient as coined by the psychologist Pierre Janet. Janet himself saw the subconscient as active in hypnotic suggestion and as an area of the psyche to which ideas would be consigned through a process that involved a 'splitting' of the mind and a restriction of the field of consciousness.
The 'Subconscious' and Psychoanalysis
Though lay persons commonly assume 'subconscious' to be a psychoanalytic term, this is not in fact the case. Freud had explicitly condemned the word as long ago as 1915: "We shall also be right in rejecting the term 'subconsciousness' as incorrect and misleading".. In later publications his objections were made clear:
Thus, as Charles Rycroft has explained, 'subconscious' is a term "never used in psychoanalytic writings". And, in Peter Gay's words, use of '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 mentation taking place outside conscious awareness were das Unbewusste (rendered by his translators as 'the Unconscious') 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 Unterbewusst and Unterbewusstsein.
'New Age' and Other 'Fringe' Modalities Targeting the 'Subconscious'
There are a number of methods in use to try to directly affect the 'subconscious' mind, primarily the following:
See also
Transdisciplinary topics
External links
Further reading
- Hill, Napoleon. Think and Grow Rich (1937), Chapter XII "The Subconscious Mind".
- Powell, Robert Charles (1979). "The 'Subliminal' versus the 'Subconscious' in the American Acceptance of Psychoanalysis, 1906-1910." Journal of the History of the Behavioral Science, 15, 155-165.
- Murphy, Joseph Murphy (2001). The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, Bantam Books.
- How to Work Wonders With Your Subconscious Mind by Christian D. Larson, Aware Publishing.
- Everything You Should Know Perhaps Nothing(Dominate Subconscious Mind) by Todd Andrew Rohrer (2009), IUniverse Publishing
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