User:Jahsonic/The most popular visual illustration of the mind is the iceberg  

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The most popular visual illustration of the mind is the iceberg[1]. The tip of the iceberg is the conscious mind, the bottom half of the iceberg, submerged and massive, is the unconscious mind.

In the philosophy of Schopenhauer, man is divided in "will to live" and reason whereby the will is the "strong blind man" and the intellect (reason) is the "lame seeing man." Reason and intellect are the conscious mind, the will to live is the unconscious mind.

Consequently, Schopenhauer has frequently been cited as a forerunner of Freud, who presented us with the most detailed and precise of the various notions of unconscious mind.

In Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, Rüdiger Safranski confirms this:

Nearly a century before Freud... in Schopenhauer there is, for the first time, an explicit philosophy of the unconscious and of the body." Safranski pg. 345, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy.

Leaving the iceberg for what it is (a overused metaphor, thus a cliché), my favorite illustrations to the unconscious mind are The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters[2] and The Heart Has its Reasons (illustration, above) by Odilon Redon.

But I am repeating myself.