When Freud was asked to explain his theory of conscious and unconscious, he often compared the human psyche to an iceberg floating in the ocean.

This famous metaphor effectively illustrated that our conscious thoughts and behaviors were merely the visible outcropping of the submerged portion of the iceberg – our unconscious.

The unconscious was depicted as the deeper and largely unknown dimension of ideas and memories stemming all the way back to the earliest stages of our childhood.

In this video, presenter Frederick Tamagi explores Freud’s iceberg metaphor explaining the conscious and unconscious.