Concept

Unconscious mind

Overview

In psychoanalysis and other psychological theories, the unconscious mind (or the unconscious) is the part of the psyche that is not available to introspection. Although these processes exist beneath the surface of conscious awareness, they are thought to exert an effect on conscious thought processes and behavior. The term was coined by the 18th-century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The emergence of the concept of the unconscious in psychology and general culture was mainly due to the work of Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. In psychoanalytic theory, the unconscious mind consists of ideas and drives that have been subject to the mechanism of repression: anxiety-producing impulses in childhood are barred from consciousness, but do not cease to exist, and exert a constant pressure in the direction of consciousness. However, the content of the unconscious is only knowable to consciousness through its representation in a disguised or distorted form, by way of dreams and neurotic symptoms, as well as in slips of the tongue and jokes. The psychoanalyst seeks to interpret these conscious manifestations in order to understand the nature of the repressed.

The unconscious mind can be seen as the source of dreams and automatic thoughts (those that appear without any apparent cause), the repository of forgotten memories (that may still be accessible to consciousness at some later time), and the locus of implicit knowledge (the things that we have learned so well that we do them without thinking). Phenomena related to semi-consciousness include awakening, implicit memory, subliminal messages, trances, hypnagogia and hypnosis. While sleep, sleepwalking, dreaming, delirium and comas may signal the presence of unconscious processes, these processes are seen as symptoms rather than the unconscious mind itself.

Some critics have doubted the existence of the unconscious altogether.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Unconscious mind is discussed.

I greatly doubt, on the contrary, whether the fundamental attitude is either a fear of death in the literal sense or a desire for death. The conscious mind has difficulty enough in encompassing in the imagination the conception of absolute annihilation, and there is every reason to think that the unconscious mind is totally incapable of such an idea. When the idea of death reaches the unconscious mind it is at once…
Sándor Ferenczi, Psycho-Analysis and the War Neuroses
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The desire strains and presses in a direction which it feels to be right but towards a point which it is unable to see. In short, the _absence of an item_ is a determinant of our representations quite as positive as its presence can ever be. The gap becomes no mere void, but what is called an _aching_ void. If we try to explain in terms of brain-action how a thought which only potentially exists can yet be…
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1
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The relatively uniform elements of touch and organic sensations are distributed among the sensations of pressure, warmth, cold, and pain. In contra-distinction to these, the special senses of hearing, seeing, smelling, and tasting present an abundance of sensations, each of which, according to its peculiar constitution, is called a quality of sensation. Each such quality is besides variable in its intensity. We can…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology Translated from the Second German Edition
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Now beings which, like plants, have no faculty for representation, are called unconscious, and we conceive this condition as only slightly differing from non-existence; since the only existence such beings have, is in the consciousness of others, as the representation of those others. They are nevertheless not wanting in what is primary in existence, the will, but only in what is secondary; still, what is…
Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and On the Will in Nature
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The casual and undifferentiated way in which the word ‘love’ is employed by language has its genetic justification. In general usage the relation between a man and a woman whose genital desires have led them to found a family is called love; but the positive attitude of feeling between parents and children, between brothers and sisters in a family, is also called love, although to us this relation merits the…
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its discontents
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Unconscious mind

Overview

In the original texts

Philosophers who discussed Unconscious mind

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