Unconscious or Subconscious?

Michael Craig Miller, M.D.

A dear friend got caught up in a debate about these terms during a holiday dinner some time ago. I wasn’t too surprised this past week when another friend asked me which term was the right one. It is hard to find two people who agree on “proper” definitions for these words.

The term “unconscious” or “unconscious mind” is most closely associated with Freud and psychoanalysis, but the general notion predates Freud by hundreds if not thousands of years. For Freud, however, the idea of memories, feelings, and other mental content outside conscious awareness took on a new, practical significance. It was a key element of the theory he was developing to explain the causes of mental disorders and how to treat them. Put in the simplest terms, Freud theorized that hidden mental contents were making people “ill.” As he understood it, these mental contents had been “repressed” and made unconscious. It was a broad and powerful idea—and if debates over dinner are any evidence—one that continues to be interesting.

As for the term “subconscious,” Freud used it interchangeably with “unconscious” at the outset. The words are similarly close but not identical in German (subconscious is das Unterbewusste; unconscious is das Unbewusste). But he eventually stuck with the latter term to avoid confusion. He couldn’t have predicted that the confusion would still exist after more than 100 years of discussion.







  1. Subconscious

    Thanks for the insight and clarification, this kept me reading through the end where I was so fortunate to see a list of related posts and articles and particularly ” Minfulness meditation improves connections in the brain” , just the topic I was looking to know more on.
    WOW , the subconscious at work . I found exactly what I was looking for!