Joseph Murphy

The Power of Your Subconscious Mind Joseph Murphy

In psychology, the subconscious is the part of the mind that is not currently in focal awareness.

Sigmund Freud used the term "subconscious" in 1893 to describe associations and impulses that are not accessible to consciousness. He later abandoned the term in favor of unconscious, noting the following:

"If someone talks of subconsciousness, I cannot tell whether he means the term topographically - to indicate something lying in the mind beneath consciousness - or qualitatively - to indicate another consciousness, a subterranean one, as it were. He is probably not clear about any of it. The only trustworthy antithesis is between conscious and unconscious."

In 1896, in Letter 52, Freud introduced the stratification of mental processes, noting that memory-traces are occasionally re-arranged in accordance with new circumstances. In this theory, he differentiated between Wahrnehmungszeichen ("Indication of perception"), Unbewusstsein ("the unconscious") and Vorbewusstsein ("the Preconscious").

From this point forward, Freud no longer used the term "subconscious" because, in his opinion, it failed to differentiate whether content and the processing occurred in the unconscious or preconscious mind.