<P> Even though these processes exist well under the surface of conscious awareness they are theorized to exert an impact on behavior . The term was coined by the 18th - century German Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling and later introduced into English by the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge . </P> <P> Empirical evidence suggests that unconscious phenomena include repressed feelings, automatic skills, subliminal perceptions, thoughts, habits, and automatic reactions, and possibly also complexes, hidden phobias and desires . </P> <P> The concept was popularized by the Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud . In psychoanalytic theory, unconscious processes are understood to be directly represented in dreams, as well as in slips of the tongue and jokes . </P> <P> Thus the unconscious mind can be seen as the source of dreams and automatic thoughts (those that appear without any apparent cause), the repository of forgotten memories (that may still be accessible to consciousness at some later time), and the locus of implicit knowledge (the things that we have learned so well that we do them without thinking). </P>

Who developed theories about the power of the part of the mind called the unconscious