The unconscious
Mental activity that shapes feeling, perception and action without the person being aware of it. In the depth sense, some of it is kept out of awareness because knowing it would hurt.
What drives it
Explains why people act against their stated intentions and why their explanations of themselves are often confident and wrong. For identification it moves attention from what someone says about their motives to what they repeatedly do, avoid and react to.
How it shows
Work
The gap between account and pattern: the manager who says 'I'm fine with dissent' and goes cold every time he is contradicted; the director who 'forgets' the same meeting with the same peer three times. Slips of the tongue, strong reactions to small things, and a reason that arrives too quickly and too polished.
Relationships
Repeated choices of the same kind of partner despite insisting they want something different. Rows that are reliably about something other than the stated topic. Things everyone in the family can see about a person except that person.
Self
Surprise at your own reaction: 'I don't know why that got to me.' Dreams, slips and the urge to change the subject are data. So is the explanation you reach for too fast.
What tells it apart
Repression: Repression is one route into the unconscious, an active pushing away of specific content; much unconscious processing is simply automatic and nobody is defending against it. Look for anxiety, joking or a change of subject when the material is named: if there is none, it is probably automatic rather than repressed.
Dual-process thinking (System 1 and System 2): System 1 thinking is fast and intuitive but readily available on reflection, and people accept it when shown; the dynamic unconscious holds material the person resists even when it is pointed out to them.
A test
Compare what the person says drives them with what they do over many occasions; where the two diverge consistently in one direction and the person gets defensive when it is pointed out, an unconscious motive is likely.
Questions to carry
- Over many occasions, where does what the person says drives them part ways with what they do?
- Which of my own explanations for myself am I most confident in, and least able to check?
How strong the research is
moderate. Unconscious processing in the cognitive sense (implicit memory, automatic evaluation, goals activated outside awareness) is well established, though some social priming findings have failed to replicate; Freud's dynamic unconscious, kept out of awareness by defence, has clinical and partial experimental support (Westen, 1998).
Where it comes from
Sigmund Freud, 1900 and 1915; cognitive reformulation by John Kihlstrom, 1987, and Drew Westen, 1998
On the family tree: Sigmund Freud
Sources
- Pierre Janet, L'Automatisme psychologique (1889)
- Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1895)
- Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)
- Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923)