The Unconscious vs. “The Subconscious”

Let’s clear this up right away: psychoanalysis has no such thing as “the subconscious.” It’s hard to even picture where, in the psyche, “above” and “below” would be, or where you’d draw a line between such regions.

In his writing, when Freud spoke of the psychical, he used a specific set of terms: the Conscious, the Preconscious, and the Unconscious.

The conscious raises no real questions. The unconscious, though, has been an inexhaustible subject of study for centuries. Almost everyone has seen it pictured as an iceberg — the tip visible above the water, and beneath it, invisible, a mass several times larger.

It’s impossible to define or picture the true scale of this psychical “storehouse,” where there is no logic and no time.

In its most general sense, the term refers to whatever content is not present in the field of consciousness. Freud writes that “the unconscious consists of contents that have not been admitted into the system Preconscious–Conscious, as a result of repression.”

And it’s exactly this unconscious material that an analyst’s attention is aimed at over the course of therapy. Slips, bungled actions, dreams — these are precisely the moments when the unconscious manifests itself.