Whose Unconscious is it Anyway?

Psychoanalysts and historians have written prolifically on the history of the unconscious mind in Western thought, particularly on the unique contribution of Freud and psychoanalysis. How the psychoanalytic unconscious relates to the unconscious described by contemporary cognitive science remains, however, an unwritten story. Given the critical mass of research into the unconscious that is building in cognitive science, the role of psychoanalysts in contributing to this important piece of intellectual history will likely be determined in the next several years.

The confusion often begins in the attempt to establish distinct “psychoanalytic” and “cognitive” definitions of the unconscious. Some assign those concepts that involve unconscious motivation, affect, and self-representation to psychoanalysis, whereas those that deal with less emotional and complicated processes are given to cognitive science. This categorization is inadequate in both the historic and contemporary literatures. The “cognitive revolution” in academic psychology of the 1960s was more a reaction against radical biology and behaviorism than against the conflict and affect-laden models of psychoanalysis. Cognitive theories, in their focus on thinking, were intentionally different from biological theories that limited themselves to structures and processes of the brain and from behavioral theories that treated the organism as a “black box” whose internal workings are unknown and theoretically unimportant. Thus cognitive science, in its attempt to carve out a psychological domain with causal power (potentially including conscious and unconscious processes, affect, motivation, and meaning), was far more compatible with psychoanalysis than either was with pure neurobiology or behaviorism.

How the psychoanalytic unconscious relates to the unconscious described by contemporary cognitive science remains, however, an unwritten story.

In fact, the emphasis in early experimental cognitive science on conscious perception, memory, and cold rational processing emerged not from a lack of interest in other more unconscious, emotional, and subjective workings of the mind, but from the practical fact that experimental methods and task designs had not yet been invented to adequately deal with these more elusive concepts. John Kihlstrom reminded cognitive science about the importance of the unconscious in his 1987 Science article entitled “The Cognitive Unconscious.” Marshaling evidence from empirical work on subliminal perception, implicit memory, hypnosis, and even an attempted taxonomy of the unconscious (which he subdivided into unconscious, preconscious, and subconscious), Kihlstrom called on empirical scientists to develop new methods for studying unconscious processes with all their complexities. Still, it took time before methods were worked out to give the more dynamically interesting elements of the unconscious their due. By 2005, in a book called The New Unconscious, cognitive scientist James Uleman wrote, “The new unconscious is much more concerned with affect, motivation, and even control and metacognition than was the old cognitive unconscious. Goals, motives, and self-regulation are prominent, without the conflict and drama of the psychoanalytic unconscious. And the new unconscious includes the causes of the phenomenal experience of having intentions and free will, of attributing these to oneself and others.” Uleman, too, is guilty of seeing more of a division between the psychoanalytic and cognitive concepts of the unconscious than actually exists. Conflict is inherent in the new cognitive unconscious and, as much as some may wish otherwise, where conflict exists, drama soon follows.

The last objections to concepts of the “new cognitive unconscious” are currently falling away in the cognitive science literature. Lau and Passingham described in the May 2007 Journal of Neuroscience just how complex unconscious cognitions can be. In their work, volunteers were shown a series of words and, for each word, were given an instruction to perform one of two tasks: either to say whether or not the word corresponded to a concrete object (a semantic task) or whether the word had two syllables (a phonological task). If subjects were shown a square prior to the word, they knew to perform the phonological task, and if shown a diamond, they knew to perform the semantic task. However, unbeknownst to the subjects, they were also exposed to a subliminal (33 millisecond) “priming” symbol immediately prior to the instruction symbol. The priming symbol was displayed so briefly that no subject reported consciously seeing it. However, the results of the experiment unequivocally showed that when the priming symbol was different from the instruction symbol, subjects performed the task more slowly. Furthermore, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the subjects' brains during

the task showed that they were not just performing more slowly because of a distraction but rather were partially engaged in the “wrong” task (i.e., that was being suggested to them subliminally). The authors conclude that “the cognitive control system…is not exclusively driven by conscious information, as has been believed previously.”

This may not sound immediately like it has a lot to do with psychoanalysis. But the notion that the unconscious mind affects higher-order thinking (conscious or not) is a central piece of the psychoanalytic worldview, and one about which analysts have much to contribute. Cognitive science's rising interest in the unconscious provides a new and precious opportunity for psychoanalytic theorists and clinicians to influence research and theories that will shape our society's scientific understanding of the mind and brain (even if this occurs outside of psychoanalysis proper).

In addition, progress in a cognitive science approach may well help analysts learn more about properties of the mental apparatus and to interpret experimental findings in ways that will enhance our own theories. This potential exists whether or not we believe that the cognitive science perspective can help us learn about the contents of unconscious fantasy and thought. The kind of complexity and abstraction processed by the unconscious mind at various stages of development is of crucial importance to various schools of psychoanalytic theory and even differentiates major schools from one another. Anna Freud and Melanie Klein argued much over the role of fantasy/phantasy in early life, and this debate would benefit from data that help establish how and what the infant's mind encodes. More recently, the debate over the role of implicit memory in transference, therapeutic change, and other core analytic processes, as proposed by the Boston Change Process Study Group, as well as Westen and Gabbard, relates directly to how we understand the nature of unconscious memory and learning. The possibility of adding to our understanding of such phenomena using a cognitive neuroscience framework is an exciting one.