Introduction to Weinberger and Smith

For anyone who reads the cognitive neuroscience literature or even gets a glimpse at the raft of recent New York Times articles and popular science books on this subject, it is increasingly obvious that the idea of the unconscious mind is as mainstream now in psychology and cognitive science as it has ever been. John Kihlstrom's 1987 article “The Cognitive Unconscious,” appearing in Science, the most mainstream of American professional science journals, led the way for an ever increasing number of empirical studies over the next decades. Collectively they have shown that unconscious processing (a) influences memory and perception (Fisk and Haase in press), (b) influences motivation (Custers and Aarts 2010), (c) involves emotion (Tamietto and de Gelder 2010), and (d) has the complexity to involve multiple simultaneous and competing sources (Lau and Passingham 2007). Of course the content of these findings comes as no surprise to psychoanalytic clinicians and researchers. However, the fact that the fields of psychology and cognitive science, so often thought of these days as hostile to and ignorant of psychoanalysis, are doing these experiments and considering them important may surprise some who had given up hope.

What then remains for cognitive science and psychoanalytic thinking to collaborate on next? A lot, as it turns out. While research on the unconscious proliferates, it remains a challenging task to design studies that might change the practice of even experienced clinicians. The all-too-common refrain from psychoanalysts reading the cognitive science literature is, “Well, it's nice that they're now doing that, but we're known that for decades!” Or even more worrisome, a cursory reading of the literature might lead some to conclude that it is unlikely or even impossible that experiments of the kind cognitive science designs tell us anything sufficiently nuanced and subtle about the unconscious to be beyond what we already know as psychoanalytic theorists and c