What is the Unconscious?
“Unconscious” is often portrayed as a dark basement in the mind where secrets, fears, and hidden desires live. Pop culture turns it into a mysterious force, shaping our behaviour without our permission. But what does the unconscious really mean?
In reality, the unconscious is practical. It’s the mind’s backstage: the part that works quietly, but efficiently. The front stage is everything we are aware of: our thoughts, decisions, and intentions. The backstage is the unconscious, where feelings, memories, and conflicts sit quietly but still affect the show.
The unconscious shows itself through everyday slip-ups. Sigmund Freud wrote about slips of the tongue: when we accidentally say one thing when we meant another. For example, you are talking to your friend about their “promotion,” but you accidentally say “problem.” Maybe you are feeling envious, pressured, or worried, and your unconscious gives a hint of that feeling into your words. Or you call your teacher “mom,” or our boss “dad.” It’s not strange; it just shows your mind connecting feelings of authority, comfort, or fear from your past to someone in the present.
The unconscious isn’t logical; it’s emotional. Whereas our conscious mind likes logic, plans, and reasons, the unconscious speaks in images, emotions, gut reactions, symbols, impulses, and memories from early life. It works this way because the unconscious develops very early in life. Babies feel but can’t explain. Babies can’t form clear memories yet, but they form emotional memories, such as the feeling of being held, the sense of being ignored, the fear of loud arguments, the calm of a predictable routine, etc. These emotional “imprints” shape how they later react, relate, trust, and soothe themselves. This is why adults sometimes react strongly to situations without knowing why: the roots go back to early, unconscious memories. Around ages 3–5, children develop language, logic, self-awareness, and memory that they can describe. But by then, the unconscious already has years of emotional learning!
This is why dreams look strange and symbolic: they are the unconscious speaking its own language. Often, dreams feel like movies with no plot, or conversations that make no sense, or familiar people in odd places, or animals, objects, or events that stand in for feelings. A dream might show drowning when we are overwhelmed, missing a flight when we fear losing control, teeth falling out when we feel insecure, or an old home when we long for safety.
In psychodynamic counselling, dreams are not treated like magical predictions. Instead, they are seen as a natural way the mind processes feelings we don’t fully notice during the day. For example, dreams can show emotions we are avoiding: you dream you are being chased, but the chaser is faceless/unclear. This might reflect feelings you are running from in real life: maybe stress, a conflict, or a truth about yourself that feels uncomfortable. A dream character isn’t always about the person themselves. It can be about the feeling they represent for you. For example, your strict teacher appears in a dream when you are anxious about disappointing someone. So the dream uses that old figure to express a familiar emotional pattern.
There are plenty of examples of how people discovered ideas through the unconscious. For example, Paul McCartney said the melody for “Yesterday” came to him while he was asleep. He woke up, ran to the piano, and played what he had heard in his dream. It shows that creativity often appears when the thinking brain is quiet. Another good example is Albert Einstein. He said that the idea that led to his theory of relativity started with a childlike daydream: “What would it be like to ride on a beam of light?” Einstein often described imagination as more important than logic because it let his unconscious make connections before he could explain them.
Making the unconscious conscious is the heart of psychodynamic work. The goal is to become more aware of the patterns that silently run our lives so we can understand ourselves better and feel more freedom in how we think, love, and behave. In short, when unconscious feelings become conscious, we get more choices.
