You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Emotions are central in psychoanalysis and take an important place both in our theories and in clinical practice. For over a century, psychoanalysts have understood that emotions, even unconscious ones, can be highly complex states. Affective neuroscience has indeed confirmed that affect, to some extent, can be processed outside of awareness. However, an implicit assumption has been that the processing of these emotions is fairly automatic, fast, and somewhat coarse. Fine-grained details are subsequently elaborated in the cortex.
In a model known as the standard hypothesis, this fast and automatic type of emotional processing relies on a subcortical pathway converging onto the amygdala, an almond-shaped collection of nuclei located in the temporal lobe and long thought to play a central role in a variety of affect-related processes. This subcortical route, known as the low road, carries emotionally salient visual information from the superior colliculi (which control eye movements based on direct inputs from the retina) through the pulvinar (part of the thalamus) and into the amygdala. The low road circumvents the higher