The term subconscious is used in many different contexts and has no single or precise definition. This greatly limits its significance as a meaning-bearing concept, and in consequence the word tends to be avoided in academic and scientific settings.
In everyday speech and popular writing, however, the term is very commonly encountered. There it will be employed to refer to a supposed 'layer' or 'level' of mentation (or/and perception) located in some sense 'beneath' conscious awareness -- though, again, the notion's dependence upon informal 'folk-psychological' models that remain vague means that the precise nature and properties of this 'underlying' layer are either never made explicit or possess an ad hoc quality. At different times, references to the 'subconscious' as an agency may credit it with various abilities and powers that exceed those possessed by consciousness: the 'subconscious' may apparently remember, perceive and determine things beyond the reach or control of the conscious mind. The idea of the 'subconscious' as a powerful or potent agency has allowed the term to become prominent in the New Age The New Age is a decentralized Western social and spiritual movement that seeks "Universal Truth" and the attainment of the highest individual human potential. It includes aspects of astrology, esotericism, metaphysics, alternative medicine, music, collectivism, sustainability, and nature. New Age spirituality is characterized by an and self-help Self-help, or self-improvement, is a self-guided improvement—economically, intellectually, or emotionally—often with a substantial psychological basis. There are many different self-help movements and each one has its own unique focus, techniques, associated beliefs, proponents and in some cases leaders literatures, in which investigating or controlling its supposed knowledge or power is seen as advantageous. The 'subconscious' may also be supposed to contain (thanks to the influence of the psychoanalytic tradition) any number of primitive or otherwise disavowed instincts, urges, desires and thoughts.
The word 'subconscious' is an anglicised version of the French subconscient as coined by the psychologist Pierre Janet Pierre Marie Félix Janet was a pioneering French psychologist, philosopher and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory[citation needed]. Janet himself saw the subconscient as active in hypnotic suggestion and as an area of the psyche to which ideas would be consigned through a process that involved a 'splitting' of the mind and a restriction of the field of consciousness.[citation needed]
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