Subconscious vs. Unconscious: How to Tell the Difference 如何区分潜意识

Human beings are innately programmed for survival, but they often get it wrong.

人类天生就被编写了生存的代码，但这些代码却经常出错。

Posted December 4, 2019 |  Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

发布于2019年12月4日|由 Gary Drevitch审核

It’s similar to suppression vs. repression. And this fairly subtle contrast is worth expanding upon.

和潜意识与无意识一样，压制与抑制之间也有类似的区别，这种相当微妙的对比值得展开来讲。

When you suppress an impulse or desire you’re forcing it down, below the level of awareness. But when you push what feels too endangering to admit into consciousness even farther down, at some point it’s no longer recognizable. And that’s what repression is all about. It’s an involuntary reaction, in as much as it represents a psychological mechanism of defense, and all such self-protective workings are instinctual, operate autonomously, and (for better or worse) compel your behavior. Moreover, they typically take root when you’re still a child, with your mental capacity and judgment seriously limited.

当你压制冲动或欲望时，你在把它们压到了意识水平之下。但当你把那些过于危险的东西推到更远的意识深处，直到无法被识别的程度，这就是抑制。这是一种不自觉的反应，是一种心里防御机制，它就和所有的自我保护机制一样，是本能且自主运作的，并且（有好有坏地）迫使你行动。此外，他们通常在你仍是个孩子的时候，在你的心智、判断力极其受限的时候，就已经根深蒂固了。

Consider that human beings are innately programmed for survival—or, more accurately, anything that was perceived at a particular time as commensurate with survival. That is, quite on its own, your mind manages to remove from consciousness anything experienced as a mortal threat, whether physical, mental, or emotional.

考虑到人类天生就被编写了生存的代码——或者更准确的说，人类是为了任何，在特定时间，可以与生存相提并论的东西而存在。也就是说，我们的头脑会完全自主地设法从意识中去除我们经历过的致命威胁，无论是身体上的、精神上的还是情感上的。

But ultimately this biological blueprint carries unfortunate later-day ramifications. Back then, lacking the resources to effectively cope with, let alone overcome, a deeply felt hazard, you felt overwhelmed, maybe even paralyzed. Consequently, your “pre-programmed” psyche-protective apparatus (i.e., such Freudian psychological defenses as dissociation, denial, displacement, or projection) intervened to alleviate your intolerable distress. And it should be added that all your defenses reside in your unconscious mind, which is another way of saying they’re mentally repressed.

但是最终这种生理蓝图带来了不幸的后果。年幼时，由于缺乏资源去有效应对深切感受到的危难，更不用说去克服这些危难，你会感到不知所措，甚至麻痹瘫痪。因此，你的“预先设定好的”心理保护装置（比如弗洛伊德式的心里防御机制：分离、否认、转移或投射）会介入以减轻你无法忍受的痛苦。需要补充的是，你所有的防御机制都存在于你的无意识中，这也等于说，它们是被抑制在精神领域的。

So, to better understand your unconscious, it’s fundamental that you grasp that this is the part of your being that represses extremely unpleasant memories, or hides them away from you. As one author puts it, it’s that aspect of mind which “includes socially unacceptable ideas, wishes and desires, traumatic memories and painful emotions that have been repressed.” Again, in that self-regarded moment of crisis you hadn’t yet developed the ability to effectively deal with what was felt as gravely threatening your welfare.

因此，为了更好地理解你的无意识，你首先要明白，正是你自己的一部分在抑制或隐藏那些极其不愉快的记忆。正如一位作者所说，无意识是我们头脑的一部分，它“包括社会不接受的想法、愿望和欲望，创伤的记忆和被抑制的痛苦情绪。”再次强调，在那个自己认为的危机时刻，你还没有发展出相应的能力，来有效应对那些严重威胁到你身心健康的困境。

In a paradoxical sense, whatever defenses your inborn predispositions chose for you could be seen as “life-saving,” since they enabled you to absent yourself from whatever you experienced as unsustainable. And what you couldn’t deal with could relate to something painful, shameful, fearful, or deeply conflictual. Moreover, on a meta-level each of these feelings links to a turbulent reservoir of destabilizing anxiety.

令人感到矛盾的是，无论你的先天倾向为你选择了什么防御机制，因为它们能使你从你所经历的无法忍受的事物中脱离，都可以被视作是“救命的”。而这些你无法妥善处理的事物可能是痛苦的、可耻的、可怕的或充满矛盾的。并且，在根本上，这些感觉中的每一种都与动荡不安的焦虑有关。

Nonetheless, the ramifications of such repression—though, from a psychological perspective, absolutely essential at the time—can later carry exorbitant costs. For regrettably, your defenses don’t grow older as you do. They remain fixed in time and space. And possessing their own will and energy, in order to continue protecting you they’ll relate anything in the present reminiscent of an earlier disturbance as a prompt to make you react just as you did at, say, age 5.

但是，这些抑制——尽管从心理学的角度来看，在当时是绝对必要的——会在后来让我们支付高昂的代价。遗憾的是，你的防御机制并不会和你一起成长，它们会固定在时间与空间中，并拥有它们自己的意志与能量。为了继续保护你，它们会与早期动荡遗留至今的回忆联系起来，并促使你做出和自己五岁时一样的反应。

Further, distortedly seeing themselves as pivotal to your survival, these defenses actually prevent you from ever working through what back then you couldn’t possibly integrate. And without permitting into consciousness the actual origins of these unsettling experiences, you’re unable to assure yourself that, as the more mature individual you grew into, you now possess the resources to make emotional peace with what earlier overwhelmed you. So the unconscious but powerful influence of these out-of-date defense mechanisms can, however inadvertently, handicap you indefinitely (i.e., by causing you anxiety, they block you from doing what you’re now completely capable of).

更进一步地，由于扭曲地把它们视作你生存的关键，这些防御机制实际上阻止了你去处理那些你当时完全没有可能整合的问题。并且因为没有允许这些不安经历的实际源头进入到意识中，你就无法确信，随着你成长为一个更加成熟的个体，你现在已经拥有去和早期压垮你的事物进行和解的能力。所以这些过时的、无意识但强有力的防御机制能够在悄然间无限期地阻碍你（比如，通过使你焦虑，它们阻止你去做你现在完全有能力做到的事）。

For instance, people suffering from panic attacks can (usually when aided by a therapist) finally allow a “forbidden” memory into consciousness. And when they make final peace with it, these extremely upsetting attacks no longer have any “felt" reason for being, and so are alleviated.

举个例子，受恐慌症困扰的人们（通常在治疗师的帮助下）最终可以让“被禁止的”回忆进入到意识中。并且，当他们最终与它和解时，这些极度令人不安的恐慌就不再有任何“可以被感知的”存在的理由，因此得到了缓解。

Differentiating between the unconscious and the subconscious is tricky. And in fact it’s been noted by several authors that in common parlance they’re employed interchangeably—and by many professional writers as well. As in distinguishing between that which is repressed vs. suppressed, it’s useful to think of conscious awareness as analogous to the tip of an iceberg: It’s above the water, so completely visible. The unconscious and subconscious, while taken together are far larger than what the eye can see, both exist below what’s readily noticeable. So the only meaningful way they can be set apart is through understanding their relative inaccessibility.

区分潜意识和无意识很困难，事实上，两者在日常使用中经常可以互换——甚至一些专家作者也这么做。就和区分压抑与抑制一样，一个很好的方法是把意识比作冰山的一角：它在水面之上，也就是完全可见的。潜意识和无意识，两者加起来比可见的那些要多得多，同时也都存在于意识的水面之下。所以唯一区分两者的方式是通过理解它们难以进入的程度。

In short, with some introspection you can likely identify from where your thinking, impulse, or motivation is subconsciously derived. But with what’s unconscious to you—the bottom-most part of the iceberg—it will be much more difficult to ascertain the origins of present-day behavior that literally don’t make much sense to you. Potentially, you might discover its source through some form of self-therapy, dream analysis, free association, analyzing a slip of your tongue, or (by chance) witnessing someone else who experienced the same trauma you did (e.g., childhood molestation or rape). In general, though, it’s much more likely that you could successfully unveil its origins through the assistance of of a mental health professional.

简单地说，通过自省，你基本可以识别出你的思想、冲动或动机来源于潜意识的何处。但是，对于冰山最底部的无意识来说，查明那些今天对你来说毫无意义行为的根源是更加困难的。你有可能通过以下方式来发现它的来源：某种形式的自我治疗、梦境分析、自由联想、分析自己的口误或者（偶然间）见证别人经历了与你相同的创伤（比如儿时的性骚扰或强奸）。然而一般来说，在心理健康专家的帮助下，你更有可能成功地发现它的来源。

Here are a couple of examples to consider:

以下有一些例子供大家思考：

Subconscious: You dimly recognize that you feel a certain jealousy toward your teenage son. Yet you don’t know why. In reflecting about it, however, you begin to realize that where this feeling stems from is that (subconsciously) you begrudge the fact that he has so many more opportunities and privileges than you did at his age.

潜意识：你朦胧间辨认出自己对青少年的儿子怀揣着某种嫉妒，但你并不知道为什么。但通过反复思考，你开始意识到这个感觉的来源，那就是（潜意识里）你嫉妒孩子比当时的自己享有了更多的机会和特权。

Unconscious: You have an aversion toward asparagus. The very sight of it makes you nauseous. Still, you have absolutely no idea why. What, because it’s been repressed, isn’t available to your consciousness is that when you were 6, your father insisted you eat this (new to you) vegetable on your plate, although you protested, for its smell back then was repulsive to you. But because you weren’t permitted to leave the table until you consumed it, after a fidgety hour you tried to shove it down your throat. . . and promptly vomited. Even worse, you got screamed at for the mess you made and told you were “disgusting.”

无意识：你很厌恶芦笋，一看见它你就犯恶心，但你却完全不知道为什么。因为它被抑制了，所以你无法意识到的是，当你在6岁的时候，你的父亲逼着你吃这种蔬菜（当时你没试过）。尽管你很讨厌它的味道，你很抗拒，但是不吃完的话不准离开桌子，然后你在烦躁之中花了很久才吞下了芦笋，并很快就吐了一地。更糟糕的是，因为你弄的到处都是，你被大声地批评，并被称作“令人恶心”。

The distinctions I’ve been making are clearly not academic. If you’re to better understand and accept yourself, as well as the concealed motivations governing maladaptive behaviors, it’s critical that you access the internal forces dictating them. There’s no way that you can reach your full potential until you gain entry into much of what exists below your awareness—that is, make both the unconscious and subconscious conscious—and, at last, come to positive terms with what, unknowingly, has been sabotaging you.

我这里所做的区分明显不是学术上的。如果你想要更好地理解并接受自己，更好地理解并接受那些隐藏在不良行为背后的动机，你一定要了解这些主宰不良行为的内部驱动力。在你有能力进入意识之下的大部分自我之前，你不可能发挥自己的全部潜力——也就是说，你要使潜意识与无意识都成为意识的一部分——并且，最后，你还要与那些一直以来在不知不觉间蓄意破坏你的自我和解。

Once your hidden defenses are exposed, you can either moderate them or, at long last, surmount them altogether.

一旦你隐藏的防御机制被暴露出来，你就可以缓和它们，并在最后完全克服它们。

References 参考文献

Bargh, J. Before you know it: The unconscious reasons we do what we do (2017). New York: Atria. Retrieved from https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Before-You-Know-It/John-Bargh/97…

Cherry, K. (2019). Freud’s conceptualization of the unconscious, Sept. 14. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-unconscious-2796004

Cherry, K. (2019). Repression as a defense mechanism, Sept. 05. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/repression-as-a-defense-mechanism-4586642

Morsella, E. (2017). The unconscious mind in everyday life, June 05. Retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/consciousness-and-the-brain/201…

Solms, M. (2017). What is “the unconscious,” and where is it located in the brain? A neuropsychoanalytic perspective. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1406 (1), 90-97. doi: 10.1111/nyas.13437. Epub 2017 Jul 31.

Subconscious vs. unconscious: What’s the difference? (n.a. & n.d.) Retrieved from https://writingexplained.org/subconscious-vs-unconscious-difference

About the Author 作家介绍

Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D., is the author of Paradoxical Strategies in Psychotherapy and The Vision of Melville and Conrad. He holds doctorates in English and Psychology. His posts have received over 46 million views.

原文地址：

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/evolution-the-self/201912/subconscious-vs-unconscious-how-tell-the-difference