This is a psycholgical model of the mind that i got from a book i was reading years ago.
A is the spotlight of attention shining upon a tankful of water. The sides of this lap a1 and a2 can, by methods which teach the art of mental concentration, be lengethened so that they nearly touch the water. In that case the attention is not wandering bt concentrated. The lamp, we will imagine, can be moved on a swivel, to shine on anything gloating in the tank, but in the case of concentration it is at rest. The area B is the focus of consciousness. The material floating on the surface of the water which is in the area B is the material on which attention is being concentrated. The areas c1 and c2 are the fringe of consciiousness. Matierial floating there is in consciousness, but not in the focus of consciousness, and not under bright concentrated rays of attention.
The Line D1-D2, the level of the water, is the level of consciousness. But just under the surface of the water is a mesh. We could like it to fine, wire netting the mesh of which we can to some extent control. Below is the area of water marked E, which we call the subconcious or, as some psychologists call it, the fore-cosciousness or pre-conscious. This is the area of the mind from which we can bring into consciousneess memories or impressions if we want to do so. (example your not thinking at the moment of what you had for dinner last night, unless, indeed it has been giving u many happy returns ever since - yet you can easily bring that memory to consciousness, and probably have already done so after reading this. The memory was in the area E, and quite easily slipped through the mesh to the area B, or perhas reached the surface at C (dimly remembereed) and the floated along till it entered B.)
Below the sub-concious area is the uncosios Of course actually no one can pretend to draw a line and say "here the subconcious ends and the unconscious begins." All areas of the mind shade off, one into another. But for the sake of clarity, we may suppose a line separting the areas. At F1 - F2 is the line, imagine here another mess, a seive stretching across the tank and in this case the size of the holes is not controllable by the normal personality.. This mesh is called by some psychologists the edo-psychic censor. Below it is the vast depth of unconscious, in which area are all the impressions, knowledge, memories, ideas which the mind has ever had and which are not conscious or subconscious. This area G is normally accessible. Below the level G is what jung has called "the race mind" (H in the diagram). It is conjecturerd - and of course all these levels are in the realm of conjecture- that in teh depths of of the mind are race memories: Memories which we bring over from our ancesotors. This is an area where human nature and instict is planted.
Anyway we only use 10% of our mind at any time, but alot of it is still accessible which stores and archives everything we go through. Just because we forget it doesn't mean that it's not still there. This is where hypnosis and other stuff comes in. My best friend is a neuro-psychologist and she's been able to hypnotise people and retrieve memories as early as when they were a year old. These memories are in the G section which are brought back up to the surface.
