Category: Psychology

Subconscious or Unconscious. is there a difference?

Recently I have been revising some pages I have not looked at for a while. I noticed that sometimes I use the word 'subconscious' and sometimes I use 'unconscious'. I realized that I do not actually know when to use subconscious or unconscious. On looking into it, I discovered that no one else does either.

Consciousness is an emergent property

There are no shortages of definitions or prescriptions, but there appears to be as many different meanings for these words as there are people writing about them. Almost all of the meaning assigned is based on metaphor, or arguing by analogy. There appears to be virtually no scientific agreement on either term. The basic problem is that "consciousness" itself does not have a clear definition. If you dissect a brain you will not find "consciousness". Consciousness is an emergent property.

This is the same as your voice. You make the voice with your breath and the muscles of your throat. But you cannot investigate the voice itself. It is an emergent property. Your voice is not part of your body. In the same way, consciousness is not part of your brain. Therefore, trying to be exact about subconscious or unconscious is not possible. If you don't know what "consciousness" is, then you cannot really know what its opposite is.

According to Wikipedia, when used in general conversation the words subconscious or unconscious are interchangeable. You can use either of them to refer to the causes of behavior you are not aware of doing. For most purposes this is good enough.

Subconscious or unconscious

The term unconscious was introduced by Freud. He regarded the unconscious as a part of the mind in which primitive drives, demands, feelings and memories exist. The unconscious is different from the conscious because no amount of introspection, no amount of thinking, will allow you to access the contents of the unconscious. He believed that the contents of the unconscious could be hinted at through dreams, hypnosis or free association.

In psychology, the term subconscious is used to refer to whatever part of your consciousness you are not currently paying attention to. Psychologists today do not really accept Freud's view of the non-conscious part of the mind. Even the term "mind" is contentious and difficult to define. Modern psychology tends to avoid addressing or studying the "subconscious".

So the best technical definition would be at the unconscious is totally unknowable, while the subconscious is simply that part of the brain's normal function that you are not aware of at the moment, but which you can become aware of if you direct your attention to it.

The placebo effect

The original meaning of ‘placebo’ comes from the latin word placer – to please (in English "placate"). Placebos were inert substances given to patients to please them so that the patient felt that they were getting some sort of treatment when nothing else was available (Moerman, 2002 p11).
The common meaning of placebo is some inert substance, or some procedure that should not have any medical benefit, but does. 
Moerman (2013) argues that the placebo lies not in the substance, but in the meaning that the receiver takes from it. "I will argue that in most of these, the results usually make more sense if we try to determine how a meaningful interaction occurred, rather than trying to understand the effectiveness of … “nothing.” Whatever form the substance takes, in the mind of the patient it represents the whole of medical knowledge, and is imbued with power."

This has been known for centuries: the King’s touch was believed to cure scrofula, a visit to the doctor makes some people feel better, Chinese Americans born in years associated with ‘earth’, years ending in 8 or 9, disproportionately die of diseases such as lumps and tumours, traditionally associated with earth in Chinese culture.

The placebo effect has been tested extensively

Moerman (2013) cites ten different studies showing the placebo effect. In one, patients got more relief from headaches when they believed the aspirin was a heavily advertised branded version, as opposed to an identical unlabeled aspirin.

In dentistry, the dentists were told that their patients were or were not getting an active drug, but the patients weren’t told. The patients whose dentists were told they were using the active drug actually reported less pain, despite having no knowledge of the experiment at all. Another dentistry study proved that belief in the placebo caused measurable physiological changes in the brain, and produced active opiates to relieve pain.

IBS patients were told that they were getting placebo pills, containing only sugar, but that had proved effective in clinical trials in the past: 97% of the patients who knowingly took the sugar pills proved to be healthier on all measures a week later. In trials of depression drugs, placebos did almost as well and produced much the same results.

The placebo effect also exists with active drugs. After surgery all patients were given Tramadol, but some were injected with it and told what it was, while others had it delivered through their IV line without being aware of it. The injected patients reported much more pain relief from identical doses

The conclusion is that people do not respond to placebos, what they respond to is their own beliefs, to the beliefs for of the carers, to their cultural background and to the words that accompany the intervention. It is the totality of the experience that matters.

Placebo Effect and the cycle of healing

Of course there may be no psychological effect at all. One possible reason is regression to the mean. Many diseases get better on their own. The common cold for example takes about a week and a half to run its course if untreated, but if you get the finest treatment that medical science can provide, it will last only about ten days.

Whatever you do for a cold has no effect, but the cold does come to an end, so you can credit whatever you did as curing it. Many diseases are cyclic: you get unwell, then you get better on your own and then you feel unwell again, but there is no cure. The episodes may well be years apart.

The placebo effect comes in because patients seek help when they are unwell, when the cycle is at or near its peak. Left on its own, the symptoms will subside back to average, and whatever is done has no effect at all because the disease is just running along its cycle. The treatment seems to work, but actually has no effect, so whatever you do the outcome is a placebo effect.

This is most likely the reason for many of the strange folk remedies that people believe in. 

A paradoxical intervention is a non-hypnosis way of treating people. It seems to be the opposite of what you would think is needed.

Paradoxical Intervention for Smoking

For example, the late Alan Carr wrote a book about stopping smoking. One of the first rules in the book was that the reader was not to stop smoking now, and make no attempt to give up. They have to keep smoking until they have finished the whole book. Now, I have no idea what he intended with this instruction, but the result is that the smoker starts reading the book, and then feels pressured to keep smoking. They didn't want to smoke, but must. You can't stop until you have finished the book.

That means that every time you turn a page you are reminded that you are not allowed to stop smoking yet. That increases the desire to not be forbidden to stop, which increased the desire to want to stop. Which is precisely the feeling you want the smoker to have. So paradoxically, by ordering them to not stop, you increase their desire to stop.

Paradoxical Intervention theory

The basic idea in a paradoxical intervention to reduce the resistance of the client. Normally a client wants to do the problem behavior because they have some unconscious programming or need that needs to be fulfilled. Normally the unconscious need is outside of awareness. If you give the client permission to go on doing the problem behavior, then the client is able to get some awareness of why they want to do it. By thinking about that, the client becomes aware that they actually do have some control over their own behavior.

Paradoxical Intervention examples

The interventions can be anything. For example, telling a child that they should scream some more and see where it gets them. Or telling a person threatening suicide to go ahead. There is of course a danger in this, so in practice things are usually less dramatic. A typical paradoxical intervention would be to tell a procrastinator to set aside an hour a day to do procrastination. Tell them to get really good at it. This forces the individual to think about the consequences of their action, and possibly to reconsider its usefulness.

Milton Erickson Paradoxical Intervention

Milton Erickson described many paradoxical interventions. His best known is probably the case where a couple were having sexual problems. The wife didn't want to initiate sex. He told them to go home and to not have any sex, to never have sex again. The result was that the couple lay in bed and for the first time, didn't feel any pressure to have sex. Which soon resulted in them thinking about sex more, and in actually having sex again. Together they proved the therapist wrong.

Beware of the life coach 

I had a call today from someone asking if I could refer them to a life coach. I had to tell them that I did not know any life coach that I would inflict on anybody. All the ones I had ever met were losers trying to tell other people how to live their lives. There might be genuinely useful ones out there, but I have never met them.

I was once a member of the local Chamber of Commerce and it seemed to me that most of the membership was made up of Life Coaches and Personal Finance Advisors. They appeared to be there for the sole purpose of marketing to each other. It also seemed to me that not one of them knew the slightest bit about what they were talking about. When I asked those 'Life Coaches" how much money they had in the bank, or what kind of car they drove, it was immediately obvious that they were complete amateurs. In fact most them had taken up these 'professions' because they had lost their jobs in the downturn. They had to do something to make money so this seemed like a good way to make a living.

Your Life Coach and the Management Sciences Paradox

It reminds me about what is known as the Management Sciences paradox. This says that the people who go into professions are the ones who should never be in that profession. The basis of the paradox is that people are attracted to study the things they feel weakest about. For example, when I was doing my psychology degree it was clear that most of the students were secretly hoping to find out what they feared what is wrong with them. And in my estimation all of the staff had psychological issues of their own.

People who are chronically disorganized, for example, realize they have a problem and begin to search for ways to not be so disorganized. So they learn more and more about what makes people disorganized and how to be less disorganized. They end up knowing more about disorganization than anyone else, but they are still disorganized. But when it comes to selecting people to teach about disorganization, who gets the job? The person who has studied it most - the person who is in fact fundamentally disorganized.

In this way you end up with Behavioural Scientists who alienate everyone they meet, time managers who are always late, therapists who secretly believe they are no good, and life coaches who are hopeless losers.