The Collaborative International Dictionary
Preconscious \Pre*con""scious\, a. Of or pertaining to a state before consciousness.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Wiktionary
a. (context psychology English) (''of memories'') that one is not aware of, but can be recalled through conscious effort n. (context psychology English) The sum of these memories
Wikipedia
In psychoanalysis, preconscious are the thoughts which are unconscious at the particular moment in question, but which are not repressed and are therefore available for recall and easily 'capable of becoming conscious'—a phrase attributed by Sigmund Freud to Joseph Breuer.
Freud contrasted the preconscious (Psc.; ) to both the conscious (Cs.; das Bewusste) and the unconscious (Ucs.; das Unbewusste) in his so-called topographical system of the mind.
Preconscious can also refer to information that is available for cognitive processing but that currently lies outside conscious awareness. One of the most common forms of preconscious processing is priming (psychology). Other common forms of preconscious processing are tip of the tongue phenomenon and blindsight.
Usage examples of "preconscious".
It reflects his emotional and preconscious instinctive reactions as well as his rational thought processesif he must stop and consider the political implications of his every thought, it will cripple his performance!
I do think there are mysterious processes at work in fiction that have to do with connections made unconsciously or on some preconscious level that need to be allowed to happen.
If so, it seems plausible that repressed, unconscious, and preconscious mental processes that simply happen to be unconscious may, with training, be brought into the light of introspective awareness.
Norman caught himself humming as he headed for the door, and realized on some preconscious level that he was happy for the first time in a long while.
And yet it continued to circulate, like a widening gyre of bright-rippled eddies, in the bubbling preconscious of the heroine who lay, healing, in her arms.
The men at the pizza counter were uninterested: the event occurred at the teenage stratum, which they filtered at a preconscious level.
All but unknown to man except in the deep preconscious brain that houses the family album of the race.
The disease not only affected his body, but seemed to reach very deep into his preconscious mind as well.
Images had been drifting across his preconscious mind for days: DefCon.
His interpolated phrase, with its awkward internal rhyme and its pointlessness, bothered everybody, but in a subliminal, preconscious fashion.
It had, after all, been a pawn in the vicious divorce battle between Manfred and Pamela -- decades before his birth -- and either of them might have buried long-term instructions in its preconscious drives, never suspecting that, in the fullness of time, Aineko would become far more than a simple-minded toy.
They talked about preconscious flow and cultural memes and the ambient psychosexual subtext.