Conscious and Unconscious Mind

In my time studying holistic health, one of the things that has struck me the most is how powerful the unconscious mind is and how it can so strongly affect your life. Before I was interested in holistic health, the unconscious mind was something I never thought about all, and certainly something I didn't understand. So lets begin with some definitions...

Conscious Mind: This "includes everything we are aware of."^[1] The conscious mind includes your rational thinking and what's in your easily accessible memory.

Preconscious Mind: This is the part of your memory that is not immediately in your consciousness but can be easily retrieved at any time.^[1] You don't always remember your phone number while you're going about your daily life but as soon as I mention your phone number, you remember it - it is in your preconscious mind.

Unconscious Mind: This "is a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that [are] outside of our conscious awareness."^[1] Some believe that the unconscious mind holds everything a person has ever experienced. Some believe that the unconscious mind holds even more than that - more on that coming up. The unconscious mind also takes care of your autonomic nervous system and other body processes (breathing, heart rate, body temperature, digestion etc.).

Subconscious Mind: There is a lot of controversy over this word. It has been used interchangeably with "unconscious mind" and others are beginning to use it to mean "preconscious mind" but it looks like it's basically a popular term that has no real basis in psychology. That's enough reason for me not to use the term!

Okay, so we have the basic psychological definition of the unconscious mind but there's a lot more to it than that. Most of these terms above were defined by Sigmund Freud, but his once-student Carl Jung had a particular interest in the unconscious mind. Jung worked to uncover his unconscious mind through a variety of methods including hallucination and dream analysis. He believed that the unconscious mind also included the collective unconscious - a library of human consciousness that is structured in the form of archetypes (see my previous post on archetypes). Perhaps as an extension of Jung's theories, some people believe the unconscious mind is a person's link to God.

Perhaps the unconscious simply benefits from not being restricted by the filter that limits the information that reaches the conscious mind, thereby keeping us sane. As if full knowledge of your past and the past of humanity is not enough, recent mind-boggling and fascinating experiments have shown that the mind is able to "anticipate future experiences."^[2]

So if your unconscious mind knows all this, shouldn't it be your best friend and ally? Well, it can be... but it can also cause you problems. There is so much more to be said about the unconscious mind, I'll have to save it for next time.

What do you think the limits of the unconscious mind are?

[1] Kendra Cherry. "The Conscious and Unconscious Mind." About.com Psychology. Accessed December 1, 2010 from http://psychology.about.com/od/theoriesofpersonality/a/consciousuncon.htm.
[2] Dr. Melissa Burkley. "Have Scientists Finally Discovered Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?!" Psychology Today, October 11, 2010. Accessed December 1, 2010 from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-social-thinker/201010/have-scientists-finally-discovered-evidence-psychic-phenomena