The unconscious

The unconscious is the part of mental life that escapes the subject's awareness: contents, processes and motivations that cannot be observed directly through introspection, yet shape thought, behaviour and feeling.

The term has a long history, although its present fame owes much to psychoanalysis. Its first appearance as a technical term is usually credited to the German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling in the early nineteenth century, and the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge later introduced it into English. Earlier, the idea of mental activity that goes on without awareness appeared in very different traditions, from the Vedic texts to reflections by philosophers such as Kant and Spinoza. Through the nineteenth century, thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann conceived the unconscious as a deep force beyond reason, while experimental psychologists like Fechner and Wundt studied the processes the mind organises without the person noticing.

Sigmund Freud made the unconscious a central concept of psychology. For him it was not simply whatever is absent from consciousness but a system with its own contents and laws. In his account, desires and memories incompatible with the subject's moral outlook are repressed and kept out of awareness, yet they keep pressing upon it. This pressure appears in disguised form in dreams, slips of the tongue, jokes and neurotic symptoms, which analysis can interpret in order to reach what has been repressed. Carl Gustav Jung extended the idea by distinguishing a personal unconscious, made of forgotten experience, from a collective unconscious, inherited and shared by the species.

The notion remains contested. Some critics question whether it can be studied rigorously and note that many of its claims are hard to test. Cognitive neuroscience now investigates unconscious processes such as subliminal perception and implicit learning, although most specialists distinguish these processes from the psychoanalytic idea of an unconscious mind full of repressed contents.