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The title of Ken Eisold's new book cries out from the bookshelf in large, grabby black-on-white letters that run off the page, enticing your mind unconsciously to fill in the gaps. What You Don't Know You Know: Our Hidden Motives in Life, Business, and Everything Else has a scope that is startlingly vast (life and everything else?). The book describes the ways unconscious mental life is currently understood across various domains of thought, in an effort, as he puts it, to “rescue our thinking about the unconscious from the dying hand of psychoanalysis,” (p. 18). This is an impressive effort to weave together disparate strands of academic thought; if the result is sometimes more crazy quilt than tapestry, in that respect it is not unlike its subject matter.
While many of Freud's insights regarding hidden motives and meanings have been incorporated into common parlance and everyday understandings, the field of psychoanalysis is shrinking. Although he seems at first almost to embrace its decline, citing errors in the profession (arrogance, insularity) alongside the state of the modern world (which he is inclined to bemoan), Eisold's respect for psychoanalytic thought survives intact. In fact, in seeing Freud more as interlocutor than authority, he frees him from the dogmatism of the professions and joins him in the big conversation of people across the ages.
Eisold approaches the new unconscious through recent studies that reveal how fragile and ephemeral consciousness is, constructed on top of a dominant yet half unrecognized nonconscious. This new unconscious is more pervasive than Freud's old one, not limited to motivated repression, but involving everything from the autonomic nervous system to our embeddedness in society at large. We do things first and rationalize them later, apprehending the world according to our habits, our cultures, our emotions, our efforts to preserve self-esteem. This leads Eisold to contemplate the nature of the “self,” a term he finds misl