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.
Heather Berlin's review is an insightful analysis of the cognitive neuroscience behind unconscious processes at the level of “semantic or inferential processing,” although there are some minor points that are worth re-evaluating. The article seems to conflate the concepts of dissociation put forward by Pierre Janet (the “unconscious compartmentalization of normally integrated mental functions”), the concept of “splitting” (presumably in the Freudian sense), and dissociative disorder as defined by the DSM-IV-TR, despite strong evidence that these are not unitary processes either conceptually and neuropsychologically. Furthermore, the championing of Freud as the figurehead of the dynamic unconscious is perhaps a little misplaced, as the main contribution of Freud was not the concept of unconscious processing, which had a long history before his work and has been well studied since, but the fact that these influences are supposedly interpretable at the level of personal meaning—something that is hard to reconcile with either the majority of evidence from cognitive neuroscience or indeed its conceptual basis. Despite these minor points of contention, the article remains a perceptive and revealing examination of the science of the unconscious.