De Quincey’s Subconscious and the Cognitive Unconscious

Abstract

Subconscious is one of the crucial terms in the attempts to name the unconscious faculty of the mind in the early nineteenth century. Yet the coinage, its first appearance in print, and its early usage have received little critical attention. On the one hand, this may be partly due to the lack of clarity and the poorly defined popular usage of subconscious today, which obfuscates the historical relevance and necessity of the term as it emerged almost two hundred years ago. On the other hand, the first occurrences of the term are hard to fit into the prevalent literary theories of the unconscious, which are largely defined according to psychoanalysis. The received notion of the Romantic tradition is distinctly Freudian. The coinage and first usage of subconscious, however, provide evidence against this position and are better understood from a cognitive perspective. Historically, De Quincey’s subconscious represents what Alan Richardson calls the ‘emergent sense of the brain’s awesome complexity and capacity’ (Neural 37). In ‘Romanticism, the Unconscious, and the Brain’, Richardson discusses ‘romantic-era brain science’ in relation to ‘literary and theoretical formulations of the unconscious mind’ (350).

[T]he sphere of our conscious modifications is only a small circle in the centre of a far wider sphere of action and passion, of which we are only conscious through its effects.

William Hamilton Lectures on Metaphysics