Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche
Experience in analytical psychology has amply shown that the conscious and the unconscious seldom agree as to their contents and their tendencies.
This lack of parallelism is not just accidental or purposeless, but is due to the fact that the unconscious behaves in a compensatory or complementary manner towards the conscious.
We can also put it the other way round and say that the conscious behaves in a complementary manner towards the unconscious.
The reasons for this relationship are:
(1) Consciousness possesses a threshold intensity which its contents must have attained, so that all elements that are too weak remain in the unconscious.
(2) Consciousness, because of its directed functions, exercises an inhibition (which Freud calls censorship) on all incompatible material, with the result that it sinks into the unconscious.
(3) Consciousness constitutes the momentary process of adaptation,” whereas the unconscious contains not only all the forgotten material of the individual’s own past, but all the inherited behaviour traces constituting the structure of the mind.
(4) The unconscious contains all the fantasy combinations which have not yet attained the threshold intensity, but which in the course of time and under suitable conditions will enter the light of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 232