UNCONSCIOUS, THE

a term employed by the followers of Freud, the founder of the psycho-analysis school of psychology, in designating that part of the human mind known variously as the subconsciousne , the subliminal or the subjective mind. Its existence was first demonstrated by the experiments of the early Mesmerists, and later by the hypnotists, but it was the founders of the London Society of Psychical Research, during the middle eighties of last century, who made the first attempt to mark out its boundaries and to analyze its operations. While every modern psychologist and the great majority of the members of the medical profe ion recognize its existence, no physical base in the brain has yet been a igned to it. According to the psychoanalysts, it is the storehouse of suppre ed desires, which there accumulate and later in life create mental disorders, especially of a sexual nature, the cure being in discovering and exposing them to the patient himself, and thus liberating them. This is done by various methods, but chiefly through a careful study of dreams, since the Freudians, in agreement with a great many other modern psychologists, hold that dreams are the natural medium of expre ion of the unconscious, of which a certain percentage percolate into tha conscious mind and are by it retained after waking. The same result is obtained more directly by the hypnotists, the conscious mind being suspended during the hypnotic sleep, giving the unconscious the opportunity to manifest itself. A more direct contact with the unconscious is made by the auto-suggestionists, a French school of hypnotists under the leadership of Emile Coue (q.v.), without the employment of the hypnotic sleep, who supplement the methods of the psycho-analyists with conscious autosuggestion, thereby counteracting the evil effects of what the latter term suppre ed desires, and the former term unconscious auto-suggestion.