Online research in philosophy

A clarification of Husserl's changing conceptions of imaginary consciousness ( phantasy ) and memory, especially at the level of auto-affective time-consciousness, suggests an interpretation of Freud's concept of the Unconscious. Phenomenology of consciousness can show how it is possible that consciousness can bring to present appearance something unconscious, that is, something foreign or absent to consciousness, without incorporating it into or subordinating it to the conscious present. This phenomenological analysis of Freud's concept of the Unconscious leads to a partial critique of Freud's metapsychological determination of the Unconscious as a simple, internally unperceived representational consciousness. It also suggests an account of how a reproductive inner consciousness can free the subject from the experience of anxiety by allowing for possibilities of self-distanciation and symbolic self-representation that protect the subject from traumatic affection by and through its own instinctual drives.

Subjectivity is essential to consciousness. But though subjectivity is necessary for consciousness it is not sufficient. In part one I derive a distinction between conscious awareness and unconscious subjectivity from a critique of Block’s (1995) distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness. In part two I contrast two historically influential models of unconscious thought: cognitive and psychoanalytic. The widely held cognitive model does not cover, as it should, the class of "for me" mental states that remain unconscious. In particular, personalist approaches to emotion require a theory of unconscious subjectivity to handle the case of unconscious emotion.

This commentary suggests that there are two distinct types of interacting cognitive processes. Conscious processes emerge from unconscious processes. The key problem of SOC is that it uses an overly narrow notion of the “cognitive unconscious” to show that the “cognitive unconscious” is not necessary. Yet, it has little to say about the roles of conscious and unconscious processes in general.

In recent years, a number of contemporary proponents of psychoanalysis have sought to derive support for their conjectures about the _dynamic_ unconscious from the empirical evidence in favor of the _cognitive_ unconscious. It is our contention, however, that far from supporting the dynamic unconscious, recent work in cognitive science suggests that the time has come to dispense with this concept altogether. In this paper we defend this claim in two ways. First, we argue that any attempt to shore up the dynamic unconscious with the cognitive unconscious is bound to fail, simply because the latter, as it is understood in contemporary cognitive science, is incompatible with the former, as it is traditionally conceived by psychoanalytic theory. Second, we show how psychological phenomena traditionally cited as evidence for the operation of a dynamic unconscious can be accommodated more parsimoniously by other means.

Over the past two decades, a new picture of the unconscious has emerged from a variety of disciplines that are broadly part of cognitive science. According to this picture, unconscious processes seem to be capable of doing many things that were thought to require intention, deliberation, and conscious awareness. Moreover, they accomplish these things without the conflict and drama of the psychoanalytic unconscious. These processes range from complex information processing, through goal pursuit and emotions, to cognitive control and self-regulation. This collection of 20 original chapters by leading researchers examines the unconscious from social, cognitive, and neuroscientific viewpoints, presenting some of the most important developments at the heart of this new picture of the unconscious. The New Unconscious will be an important resource on the unconscious for researchers in psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience.