Therefore, preconscious thoughts are available for recall and easily 'capable of becoming conscious'—a phrase attributed by Sigmund Freud to Josef Breuer.
[3] 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.
This leaves the unconscious area of mental life to contain all the more primitive drives and impulses influencing our actions without our necessarily ever becoming fully aware of them, together with every important constellation of ideas or memories with a strong emotional charge, which have at one time been present in consciousness but have since been repressed so that they are no longer available to it, even through introspection or attempts at memory".Freud's original German term for the preconscious was das Vorbewusste,[7] the unconscious being das Unbewusste.
Freud saw the preconscious as characterised by reality-testing, recallable memories, and (above all) links to word-presentations—the key distinction from the contents of the unconscious.
[9] In 1923, in addition to these spatial dimensions, Freud introduced three distinct, interacting agents of the mind: the id, ego, and superego.
[10] The ego is the coherent organizational of mental processes, often to which consciousness is attached, but it can also exist in the preconscious by censoring content in the unconscious.
[12] Eric Berne considered that the preconscious covered a much wider area of the mind than was generally recognised, a 'cult' of the unconscious leading to its over-estimation by both analyst and analysand.