Put it this way, in the pop-culture sense, where liberty is taken with science on a daily basis, no, you can say 'subconsciously' as much as you like. When you start learning psych and realise 'subconscious' is a mistaken concept, it's annoying at first when you hear it everywhere, but you hear it so often you quickly resign yourself to the fact that the general public will probably always be saying it, and believing in the mistaken concept like other myths such as "you only use 10% of your brain" (you actually use pretty much all of your brain throughout the day).

On our first day of psych 101, we had a myth-busting session and it was pretty demoralising: say you know ten things about psychology - chances are that one of those things is correct. Unsurprisingly, many psych students drop out quite early, because we don't study what most people seem to think we study. Pretty depressing, huh?

So it depends, if you're happy enough with the myths of pop-psychology, and just want to weave a good story and don't mind talking down to your readers, knock yourself out. It's in the general English dictionaries, regardless of its incredible scientific inaccuracy. If on the other hand you want to be accurate and scientific, no. :-/

If you want to address things at different levels, the two correct terms are unconscious(ly) and subliminal(ly). Unconscious means something is completely out of conscious awareness, or incompatible with the conscious mind, and so on (more on that later). Subliminal on the other hand generally refers to attention and focus on stimuli - unlike something unconscious, something that is subliminal (such as a very subtle soundtrack that goes unnoticed) can generally be made aware of simply by conscious redirection of focus (ie. "Hey, go back to that last scene, did you notice the music in the background?).

To confuse your terminology even further (!!!), there's a difference between awake and conscious, and as noted above, asleep and unconscious. But I'm saving that for my larger reply to St_uck when I finish my assignment. As noted above, 'subconscious' and 'subconsciously' make things more convenient for English, but don't actually hold water in scientific sense; plus, they imply a structure of the psyche almost in reverse to its true form.

Actually, if I were a sci-fi writer, I'd love to popularise the proper terminology, because once looked at, the world of the unconscious and the conscious mind that grows from it is actually far more interesting. :)

Sure, nothing wrong with that; although if it feels strange, maybe with 'unconsciously' somewhere different in the sentence... other than that, yeah, all good.

While I'm beavering away on my assignment, in the meantime, if you're genuinely interested in the subject, check out Carl Jung's 'Man and His Symbols', available for a few bucks on paperback on Ebay, etc. It's an introduction to Analytical Psychology for the general public. Modern psychology is a pretty dismal and barren place as far as the unconscious mind is concerned; that book is from the '60s, which is one of psychology's coolest periods!

Stu_ck, I'm in the middle of an assignment and can't give a decent (read: long) answer for a few days, but don't worry, I will get back to you ASAP.

Renee, the opinion of a hypnotherapist is interesting here. I'm unaware of what a CCHT course consists of. In your training, did you decently cover the works of Freud, Jung, and so on, ie. was in depth coverage given to the psychodynamic founders? And I suppose most importantly, did your training cover the generally credited fathers of hypnotherapy with Charcot and Janet? It was the latter two who came up with subconsciente, or 'subconscious' in the 19th century, and the psychodynamic theorists who disproved it in the the early 20th, postulating instead the 'unconscious mind'.

If you've covered the material in depth - noting that they almost all used hypnosis themselves - do you feel Freud et al. were incorrect in their assertions and alternative models, and from a hypnotherapist's POV, have you a counter-argument of your own?

But what are we to do when it's a case of, "that's really not how it works"?

Snobbery aside, generally when a member of the public explains what they mean by their interpretation of 'subconscious', usually the explanation they give is precisely why we don't use the term (as we can see numerous times above, but for politeness' sake, I won't point out where). To use the least snobby analogy I can think of, using 'subconscious' in place of 'unconscious' is a bit like using 'white shoes' and 'black boots' interchangeably - it simply doesn't work and is completely misleading. And when you do learn about the structures of the psyche in psychology, you quickly realise that you really can't go on using the term in good conscience as it's like saying up is down, black is white, and so on.

I understand the reason people want to use 'subconscious', I really do, but it just doesn't work on any technical level, regardless of snobbery. It seems to me that subconscious makes things more convenient for English, but for as long as it stays around in our language like the thorn that is to therapists, it will continue to wreak damage to research and patients alike as their concept of the psyche is dangerously misled.

Or... we could all just get used to the idea of unconscious as a noun.

domingo, the problem isn't so much to do with sound or pedantry, but the idea that it creates in people's minds. If it were some random Latin word that had no meaning to the layman, this really wouldn't be an issue, but 'subconscious' instantly evokes connotations in the English speaker's mind. In psychology we need people to actually *understand* themselves, and when it comes to 'subconscious', it's genuinely impossible to properly understand the structure of the psyche (and I'd even dare venture that the erroneous term has actually done a lot of damage over the years in the way it misleads people).

Freud called for its rejection in his paper 'The Unconscious', largely to do with its ambiguity and misleading nature. In a later work, he said that when someone spoke of this so-called subconscious, that he had no idea whether they were speaking qualitatively or topographically, but chances are that neither would the very person saying it. The only clear distinction was conscious and unconscious, said Freud.

Jung further decried the term when he said that the unconscious is not only below consciousness (hence the 'sub' part), but can also be above consciousness too (but that explanation is too long to fit in this reply).

Indeed, so erroneous and misleading is this term that when I introduce someone to a map of the psyche and its dynamics, most of the time they say, "oh, so it's the opposite of what you'd think", in comparison to their erroneous conscious/subconscious paradigm. Unlike 'subconscious' would suggest, the unconscious exists prior to, during, and after consciousness. The conscious ego itself is merely a smaller complex that grows from the infinitely larger unconscious, and is entirely capable of being dissolved back into the soupy and primordial unconscious.

To use an astronomical example, 'subconscious' creates in people's minds a model much like the old idea that the Earth was at the centre of the universe and the Sun, stars, and other planets all revolved around it (with the Earth here representing the conscious ego). Whereas in reality, the Earth revolves around the Sun, which in itself is merely part of a much larger galaxy; much like the conscious ego is a tiny part of the psyche within the much larger unconscious. I guess you could subconscious is 'ego-centric'!

However I do understand people's hesitation to adopt 'unconscious' as a noun, due to the connotation of being comatose. I heard a psychotherapist side-step the issue beautifully by using the term 'non-conscious', which is really what the term 'unconscious' is implying in this case. If the emerging psychotherapeutic consensus was to adopt the term 'non-conscious', I for one would be happy to go along with it. However, I would never be happy with adopting 'subconscious', as it's so incredibly misleading and potentially damaging when people form philosophies of life around it.

Much of what has needed to be said academically has been said, however I would add a few things to the debate about *usage*. Unconscious is indeed the correct term, and unless for reason someone is talking about the 19th century works of Janet, Subconscious is never correct; things are either unconscious or subliminal.

However, perhaps in a cynical way, Subconscious is a useful way of differentiating between those who don't know of what they speak, and those that do. If I'm hearing some brand new psychology theory and want to know if the person has all their facts straight, if they say 'subconscious', it's generally a dead give away that they haven't done their study. Many in the general public would think that we're just being academic and pedantic, but a basic rule of psycholinguistics is that language shapes thought. And the ideas that Subconscious creates in the listener's head are usually the opposite to what psychology actually teaches, and much time during a process like therapy goes into undoing the rather damaging view of the psyche that Western man usually has for himself, propagated by such erroneous ideas like the so-called Subconscious.

In the end, none of my respected associates would ever use the term, but politely demonstrate the ideas of the unconscious mind instead. There are however fast-buck merchants with little regard for the reader/listener trying to sell their ideas with little regard for the impact they are creating. If I knew a practitioner who clearly understood the difference and the impact of language on thought and used 'subconscious' anyway, this is not someone I'd be comfortable about. But for those who are ignorant of the terminology, when you see claims like 'unlock the power of the subconscious mind', it's a sure-fire way of knowing these people don't know what they're talking about.