The Unconscious: History, Research, Neurocognitive Models, and Clinical Implications

This article offers an overview of unconscious processes. We begin with factors that delayed their scientific study within academic psychology, which we trace to Cartesian identification of the mind with conscious awareness, later reinforced by behaviorism's dismissal of internal processes altogether. Although psychoanalysis, by contrast, emphasized unconscious processes from its inception, its isolation from academia and its general aversion to empirical science limited its impact on academia. In turn, Popper's (1959, first published in German in 1934) rejection of psychoanalysis led to a complementary disregard in academic psychology for psychoanalysis. Academic psychology eventually came to recognize the ubiquity and adaptive nature of unconscious processes, seeing them as intrinsic to how the mind/brain evolved to process information. We review several domains of academic research and link their findings to clinical theory and practice. We conclude by examining three major neurocognitive models from a metapsychological perspective. All of these models have unconscious, parallel, and associative processing at their core. They also all require contradiction, conflict, and compromise. We argue for a reconceptualization of the unconscious as a normative, adaptive, and essential dimension of psychological functioning that mostly works well but that contains processes that can go awry.