Subconscious

In psychology, the subconscious is the part of the mind that is not currently in focal awareness. '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 psychology, the subconscious is the part of the mind that is not currently in focal awareness. The word subconscious represents an anglicized version of the French subconscient as coined by the psychologist Pierre Janet (1859–1947), who argued that underneath the layers of critical-thought functions of the conscious mind lay a powerful awareness that he called the subconscious mind. In the strict psychological sense, the adjective is defined as 'operating or existing outside of consciousness'. Locke and Kristof write that there is a limit to what can be held in conscious focal awareness, an alternative storehouse of one's knowledge and prior experience is needed, which they label the subconscious. In the social sciences, the term subconscious, was resurrected in an article by Stajkovic, Locke, and Blair (2006) who referred to subconscious motivation as occurring 'without intention, awareness, and conscious guidance.' A review of early research on the subconscious can be found in Latham, Stajkovic, and Locke (2010). Scholars have used other adjectives with similar meanings, such as unconscious, preconscious, and nonconscious, to describe mental processing without conscious awareness. The distinctions among these terms are subtle, but the term subconscious refers to both mental processing that occurs below awareness, such as the pushing up of unconscious content into consciousness, and to associations and content that reside below conscious awareness, but are capable of becoming conscious again.