How to talk about the unconscious?

I've started thinking about how to talk about the unconscious mind within the framework that I've been developing here on this blog (understanding psychology as the intersection of phenomenology and biology). The struggle that I've been having has to do with the fact that, on one hand, the unconscious mind plays a role in our conscious life insofar as our conscious life is not like some notebook that we periodically take up, write things in, and then put down, leaving it unchanged until the next time we encounter it. Rather, our impressions of things change both within our conscious experience, and beyond that experience. Therefore, unconscious processes are something that have to be dealt with.

But how can we talk about these unconscious events? They don't occur in conscious experience, so its automatically suspect to speak of them in phenomenological terms. When we do this, we're inferring phenomenological content onto unconscious events based on the effects that they've had on our thought processes. While doing this may not seem completely objectionable, I am not strongly in favor of it because it seems to me that if we could really talk about these events as phenomenological processes, then they would be phenomenological processes. The fact that they're not clearly implies that something is different, or perhaps just intervening, to prevent them from becoming phenomenological.

Now, it's entirely possible that whatever is preventing unconscious thoughts from being conscious is inconsequential and these thoughts are just being "blocked" from appearing consciously because of the lack of some other, outside process.

But, I think that this is not a very important concern because the question remains of how to talk about unconscious activity once it gets down to a low enough level. The question is not just at what level do psychological explanations break down, but how they break down.