Since the atom of the indivisible individual was cracked in the past 150 years there's been a couple of terms that have sprung up to give a name to that no-man's land beyond the white picket fence of consciousness. Out there in the wilderness beyond of our perfectly rational selves the two most common terms we come across are subconscious and unconscious.
Your average person on the street would find this difference in terminology to be a non-difference but for us, the philosophically minded, there is a very big difference and if you're not clear on your language then you may look silly to other philosophical snobs so let's head that right off at the pass by exploring the strange history of the terms subconscious and unconscious and see who's using each one and which one you should be using.
The French Connection: Janet and Freud
Pierre Janet is a name we should all know but who unfortunately has faded into obscurity. He was overshadowed by Freud — who he claimed (and not without some reason it should be noted) had plagiarised a lot of his work. Jung studied with him in 1902 and derived his idea of complexes from him and Adler also acknowledged that he had derived his concept of the inferiority complex from him.
Anyway this great founder of psychology was a Frenchman and his term for the great beyond was the French subconscient which our English subconscious is a direct translation of. Way back in 1893, Sigmund Freud used the terms subconscious (das Unterbewusst) and unconscious (das Unbewusste) interchangeably in his writings. Later, he settled on the term unconscious to avoid confusion. In 1927's The Question of Lay Analysis he explained this reasoning by saying:
"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."
Let's attempt to translate this into normal people speak. Freud is drawing a distinction between a hierarchical model of consciousness — think of his iceberg with the id beneath the surface. This is what he means by the topographical model.
On the other hand we have the qualitative variety which is more like Jung's archetypes or complexes. These can be relatively autonomous in the psyche and not merely hierarchically inferior (and there was me trying to translate this into everyday language).
The point is that Freud felt the word subconscious muddied the waters too much and he decided to simplify things by drawing the simple broad distinction between that which is conscious and that which isn't. That way it limited the impact of the topographical image that came packaged up with the term subconscious.
Jung and Adler followed Freud in this and so the bottom line is that when it comes to psychoanalysis and depth psychology using the word subconscious is wrong. And according to Freudian scholar Peter Gay, it’s something you’ll want to avoid. Gay calls the use of subconscious when the writer means unconscious a “common and telling mistake” and
“when [the term] is employed to say something ‘Freudian’, it is proof that the writer has not read his Freud.”
But the word subconscious didn't disappear in a puff of smoke when Freud chose the term unconscious so what gives? Who is using which term?
Who Uses What Where
A good rule of thumb for where you'll find unconscious and where you'll find subconscious is the context. ‘Unconscious’ is more common in professional contexts where mental functioning is the subject-matter. This applies beyond psychoanalytical circles in the fields of psychiatry, psychology and neuroscience. Unconscious is a technical term.
Subconscious, on the other hand, is more common in non-technical writings. It is a common term in spirituality and self-help writings. It is also the more common term in hypnosis and NLP which work primarily with this level of the mind.
It's a similar story to what happened with the word ego. There's Freud's technical use of the term which as we explored in the article on the Id, Ego and Superego is more of a heroic figure caught between the superego, the id and reality. In stark contrast to this ego there's the spiritual and self-help ego which is well...the enemy. It's the demonic selfish part of us that is the root of all evil in the world and must be destroyed.
This is more or less the same story as the unconscious/subconscious distinction. The psychoanalytical schools of Freud and Jung are more theoretical and analytical. They are more concerned with mapping out this new domain of the psyche and figuring out how it works. The spirituality and self-help gurus on the other hand are more pragmatic — they want to bring about transformation and so they are less concerned with a disinterested scientific exploration. And these different contexts lead to two different flavours.
In the psychoanalytic traditions, the unconscious has its own consciousness and agendas. That is to say that the ego-consciousness is not the only consciousness operating within the individual. This is particularly clear in Jung’s concept of the Self. You can also see it in Freud’s id. These are parts of the mind outside of the ego-consciousness which have their own consciousness. This consciousness has a separate centre. It is a different consciousness inhabiting the same body.
The subconscious, on the other hand, is not seen as a separate consciousness. The authors in these fields see the unconscious more like a machine. It is more like a computer than a consciousness. This computer collects all the data from your senses, and all of this is stored permanently in the mind. The spirituality and self-help crew are looking to reprogram this layer of the mind; they're concerned with changing their beliefs. These beliefs are what is keeping the individual from success and happiness. Change the beliefs, and you change the results. As well as this, these authors believe the subconscious connects to something beyond the individual. This is the mechanism by which the law of attraction is supposed to work. The subconscious taps into transpersonal universal frequencies. By harnessing the subconscious, you are tapping into this universal energy field, and it is out of this that manifestation occurs. The cosmic law is that like attracts like and so thoughts of love attract love and thoughts of abundance attract abundance and so on.
What emerges then is a distinction whereby the unconscious is a domain with its own autonomy in some ways — there are other desires aside from our own going on down there. The wholeness of the Enlightenment's rational self has been shattered and we see that we are not one self plotting our course but a host of competing drives and complexes with their own agendas.
By contrast the spiritual New Age self-help subconscious frame keeps this wholeness of a rational self. We are the only person at home in the psyche and it's only that we've got this computer keeping count of our previous habit patterns and beliefs. There's no need to form a relationship with this thing anymore than there is with Alexa or Siri. It's just a matter of reprogramming this subconscious machine so that it no longer holds us back from where we want to go. And if we are really good at reprogramming then we can hit the jackpot and align with the universe and manifest everything we want and live happily ever after.
Which one is right?
In conclusion then which one is correct: subconscious or unconscious? The answer is that it depends. If you are thinking of a neutral computer which you can reprogram for different results, subconscious is a better word. Chances are, if you want to talk about Freud and Jung, then you are thinking of the unconscious. The same goes for more technical, scientific schools of thought. At their origin towards the end of the 19th century, the words were almost synonymous. But as time has passed, the gap between the terms has grown greater. If you're talking to a philosopher or scientist you should probably use unconscious but if you're doing a talk at your local cult or hippie commune then you'd be better sticking to subconscious.
I find Freud more than laughable, he was a dangerous sellout. He could have stood up for something that really mattered but instead we got olympian gymnastics that victim blame the sufferers of childhood sexual assault, and protected and enabled it to keep happening. And I have a dissociative identity disorder which you are guaranteed to never be able to relate to. On Girard you wrote of cancel culture... what is your life like when you can't relate it to victims of violent crime, like needing to kill your rapist? Fucking cancel culture? Try living through the worst horrors of humanity and having it constantly minimised and ignored. Could you please help us with your wide-spreading words instead of reinforcing a dreadful status quo?
Semantics!! IpOV