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Look at any introductory psychology book that covers psychoanalysis, and you are likely to find an image of an iceberg floating in the sea. Only a small portion of the iceberg pokes out above the surface of the water, while the bulk of it is hidden below. The image serves as an illustrative metaphor for Freud’s theory of the mind: Only a fragment of our ideas and feelings are conscious or “visible” to us, while the vast bulk of our mental content is unconscious or “invisible” to everyday introspection. A simple Internet search of the terms “Freud iceberg” will bring forth hundreds of examples.

Images of this kind are regularly attributed to Freud. Some even cite Freud’s writings when describing the iceberg metaphor. The problem is that Freud never mentioned the iceberg in his published writings. It is a metaphor that has become ubiquitous in (English-language) writings about Freudian theory, but that does not find its source in his work. So the question is, where did it come from? Who was the first person to liken the relative portions of conscious and unconscious mental content to the portions of an iceberg that lie above and below the surface of the ocean?

For many years, I was a subscriber to an e-mail list called Teaching In Psychological Science (TIPS), which was created and long managed by Bill Southerly at Frostberg State University (Maryland). The question of the origin of the Freudian iceberg was a recurrent topic there, particularly in 2006. Many different people took part in these discussions and I wish to credit them with sparking my interest in the topic—David Hogberg, Ken Steele, Rick Froman, Allen Esterson, Michael Scoles, Michael Donnelly, Stephen Black, Annette Taylor, among others. Probably the most determined participant was Mike Palij of New York University.