Preconscious

In psychoanalysis, preconscious is the loci preceding consciousness. Thoughts are preconscious when they are unconscious at a particular moment, but are not repressed. Therefore, preconscious thoughts are available for recall and easily 'capable of becoming conscious'—a phrase attributed by Sigmund Freud to Josef Breuer. Freud contrasted the preconscious (Pcs.; das Vorbewusste) to both the conscious (Cs.; das Bewusste) and the unconscious (Ucs.; das Unbewusste) in his topographical system of the mind. The preconscious can also refer to information available for cognitive processing but that currently lies outside conscious awareness. One of the most common forms of preconscious processing is priming. Other common forms of preconscious processing are tip of the tongue phenomena and blindsight. In 1900, in his book, Interpretation of Dreams, Freud introduced the notion that the unconscious mind is not merely used to describe the opposite of consciousness. Instead, he insisted that there exist two spheres in the unconscious: unconscious and preconscious. He reserved the term unconscious for thoughts that are inadmissible to consciousness, while the term preconscious was used to denote the screen between the unconscious and conscious. The preconscious restricts access to consciousness and is responsible for voluntary movement and attention. Freud further explained the distinction as follows: ". . . two kinds of unconscious—one which is easily, under frequently occurring circumstances, transformed into something conscious, and another with which this transformation is difficult and takes place only subject to a considerable expenditure of effort or possibly never at all. [...] We call the unconscious which is only latent, and thus easily becomes conscious, the 'preconscious', and retain the term 'unconscious' for the other". As explained by David Stafford-Clark, "If consciousness is then the sum total of everything of which we are aware, pre-consciousness is the reservoir of everything we can remember, all that is accessible to voluntary recall: the storehouse of memory.