What is Subconscious?
According to psychological studies, the Subconscious refers to the part of the mind that exists out of focal awareness at any specific time. The word Subconscious symbolizes an anglicized version of the French word subconscient.
The term ‘Subconscious’ was coined by the psychologist Pierre Janet (1859-1947) in 1889. This word was first mentioned in his doctoral thesis called De l’Automatisme Psychologique. In this thesis, Janet argued that the Subconscious mind is a powerful awareness. According to him, this awareness lies underneath the layers of critical thought, analyses, and functions of the conscious mind. If used as an adjective in a strictly psychological sense, this term can be defined as one that ‘operates or exists outside of a person’s consciousness.
Famous psychologists and scholars Locke and Kristof have written that an individual’s conscious focal awareness is always limited in terms of capacity. Therefore, an alternative storehouse of knowledge and the prior experience becomes critical for an individual. An individual’s Subconscious fulfills this need for a storehouse.
Psychoanalysis
Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and an Austrian Neurologist, was the first to use the term ‘Subconscious’ in 1893. He utilized this term primarily to describe associations and impulses in a distinguished realm. This realm is known for being inaccessible to consciousness. However, he later abandoned this term and worked with the word ‘unconscious’ because of the following reasons —
Firstly, Freud explains that if someone talks of Subconsciousness, he is never sure if they mean to use the term topographically or qualitatively. In a topographical understanding, the term can indicate something that lies in mind beneath consciousness, while qualitatively, the term indicates another subterranean consciousness. Considering that he was not clear about any of this, he understood that the only trustworthy antithesis is between conscious and unconscious.
Freud elaborated on the stratification of mental processes in his Letter 52, written in 1896. Here, he noted that memory traces can occasionally re-arrange themselves in accordance with new circumstances. According to this theory, he was able to distinguish between Unbewusstsein (‘the unconscious’), Wahrnehmungszeichen (‘Indication of perception’), and Vorbewusstsein (‘the Preconscious’).
From this point on in history, Freud no longer used the term ‘Subconscious’ mainly because it failed to distinguish whether content and the processing happened in the unconscious or preconscious mind.
Charles Rycroft, a British psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, further explained that the Subconscious is a term that can “never be used in psychoanalytic writings” because Freud refused to use it.
Peter Gray, an American psychology researcher, and scholar, stipulates that using the term Subconscious in the place of the unconscious is meant to be a “common and telling mistake.” This mistake hints at a scenario “where the term is employed to say something ‘Freudian.’ It is proof that the writer has not read his Freud at all”.
Subconscious as a target for the “New Age” and other modalities
The notion of the Subconscious has become a potent agency in New Age and self-help literature. It has allowed the term to become crucial in the contemporary world, where investigating or controlling its supposed power and knowledge is seen as beneficial.
Some techniques used in the New Age community for harnessing the power of the Subconscious are autosuggestion and affirmations. These techniques are believed to influence an individual’s life and their life’s real-world outcomes, even curing sickness.
The lack of falsifiability and testability of these claims has been criticized by several sources, such as the Skeptical Inquirer magazine. For example, Physicist Ali Alousi criticized the influence of these techniques as unmeasurable. He further questioned the likelihood of the assumption that thoughts can affect anything outside the head.
Additionally, several other critics have asserted that most of the evidence to testify these claims is usually anecdotal. They stipulate that the subjective nature of any results and the self-selecting nature of the positive reports hint at these reports being susceptible to a specific selection bias and confirmation bias.
In most traditional practices, the term ‘unconscious’ is utilized by psychologists and psychiatrists, while on the other hand, metaphysical and New Age literature is known to use the term Subconscious. However, this stipulation should in no way infer that the concept of the unconscious is equivalent to the idea of the Subconscious.
Even though both these concepts are primarily based on the warrant consideration of mental processes of the brain, their treatment has been a lot different throughout. While psychologists and psychiatrists take a much more limited view of the capabilities of the unconscious, the New Age depiction of the Subconscious is much more versatile.
Several methods are utilized in the contemporary New Age and paranormal communities that affect the Subconscious. Some of these methods are -
- Affirmations
- Autosuggestion
- Binaural beats
- Hypnosis
- Subliminal message