The healing potential of psychoanalysis depends entirely on how one defines the unconscious. To understand the psychoanalytic definition, we must first distinguish it from more popular concepts of the unconscious. For instance, Daniel Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating how “unconscious” operations like cognitive biases compromise rational decision-making. This usage of the word unconscious is not what Freud meant by the “repressed unconscious.” The psychological sciences are full of examples of mental processes that elude our consciousness. These mental processes of which we are unaware are called the “descriptive unconscious” because we can describe them as legitimately non-conscious. But Freud’s repressed unconscious is fundamentally different from the descriptive unconscious. The repressed unconscious is a very particular type of unconsciousness—the unconsciousness that is produced by repression. See the glossary entry for repression on this website for a better understanding of that concept.
The descriptive unconscious—often called the “non-conscious” or “preconscious”—is a relevant factor in most psychotherapies (as distinguished from psychoanalysis) and some diluted versions of psychoanalysis. A typical example of the descriptive unconscious would be when a therapist helps you see how your childhood relationship with your mother is affecting your current relationships. This is an example of making the descriptive unconscious conscious, but it is not an example of working with the repressed unconscious. The repressed unconscious is unrepresentable by definition—it has been banished from representational consciousness and yet maintains a significance that drives desire. “The repressed unconscious is not an “other text” but a disruptively meaningful domain of psychic reality that is otherwise than the law and order of representationality.