The unconscious

Mental processes that shape what a person does while remaining outside awareness.

Theme: Mind, self and consciousness
Tradition: Modern
Term fixed: 1900

In plain terms

A great deal of what your mind does is not available to you. You do not decide how to parse a sentence, recognise a face, or keep your balance. Those are mental achievements, they are difficult, and you have no access to how they are done.

That much is uncontroversial. The contested claim is stronger: that there are wishes, motives and conflicts operating outside awareness, shaping what you choose and how you explain it, and that they are hidden not because they are technical but because they are unwelcome.

The two ideas are often run together and they are not the same. One is about processing; the other is about motivation. Evidence for the first is overwhelming and evidence for the second is contested, and a great deal of confused argument follows from treating them as one claim.

As a philosopher would put it

Freud's unconscious is a system, not a region: it has content, obeys its own logic, and is kept from awareness by repression, which is itself unconscious. Evidence is indirect by construction - dreams, slips, symptoms, transference - which is why the account has been attacked as unfalsifiable, most influentially by Popper.

The cognitive unconscious is a different and better-evidenced notion. Most information processing is inaccessible in principle rather than defended against, and Kihlstrom's formulation deliberately separates it from the psychodynamic claim.

The philosophical difficulty is whether an unconscious mental state is a coherent notion at all. If a belief is a state with content, why should awareness be required? But if intentionality is bound up with consciousness, as Searle argues, then unconscious states are dispositions to conscious ones rather than mental states in their own right. Sartre's objection is different and sharper: repression requires a censor that knows what to hide, which is bad faith described as a mechanism, and he takes it to be self-contradictory.

Where you meet it

In 1974 Lawrence Weiskrantz and colleagues reported on a patient with damage to the primary visual cortex, producing a blind field in which he reported seeing nothing at all.

Asked to guess whether a light had appeared in that field, or to reach toward it, he performed far above chance while insisting he was guessing and that there was nothing to see. Subsequent work established the same pattern for motion, orientation and some emotional expressions. The phenomenon is called blindsight, and it has been replicated for fifty years.

What it demonstrates is precise. Visual information is being processed, is available to guide action, and is unavailable to the person as experience. Nothing is being repressed and nothing is unwelcome; the information simply does not reach whatever makes experience. It is the clearest demonstration that mental work and awareness come apart, and it does none of the work that Freud's version of the claim requires.

What is actually disputed

Whether the psychodynamic unconscious exists.

The case against is that repression as Freud described it has poor experimental support, that the theory's flexibility lets it accommodate any outcome, and that the clinical evidence is generated inside a setting that shapes what it records. The case for is that some version of motivated non-awareness is very hard to do without - self-deception, rationalisation and the confabulation observed in split-brain and choice-blindness studies all look like it - and that Freud's specific mechanisms failing does not mean the phenomenon is absent.

Separately, the philosophical question stands regardless of the empirical one. If mental states are individuated by content and function rather than by availability to a subject, unconscious mental states are unproblematic. If awareness is part of what makes a state mental, then most of what psychology studies is not mental, which is a strange result.

Commonly confused with

Intuition 1641 Intuition is a conscious impression arrived at without conscious reasoning. The unconscious is the processing, not the impression it delivers.

Defined against

Consciousness The pair defines the boundary of the subject, and the question is how much of the mind falls on each side

Philosophers

Sigmund Freud The unconscious as a system with its own logic
Arthur Schopenhauer Will beneath intellect, before Freud and acknowledged by him
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Petites perceptions below the threshold of notice
Carl Gustav Jung A collective as well as a personal unconscious
Jean-Paul Sartre The charge that repression is incoherent, and bad faith in its place

Works

The World as Will and Representation Will as prior to and hidden from intellect
Monadology Perceptions we have without noticing them
Being and Nothingness The attack on the censor, and bad faith as the alternative
The Logic of Scientific Discovery Where psychoanalysis is used as the example of unfalsifiability

Schools

Lacanian Psychoanalysis Where the unconscious is structured like a language
Lebensphilosophie Where life and will precede consciousness
Existentialism Where the whole apparatus is rejected as evasion
Frankfurt School (Critical Theory) Where it is joined to a theory of society

Related concepts

Consciousness 1641 · Mind c. 450 BC · Self 1694 · Desire c. 380 BC · Authenticity 1927

Leibniz argued for petites perceptions below the threshold of notice, and Schopenhauer for a will beneath the intellect; Freud made the unconscious a system with its own rules rather than a dim margin of the conscious.