On the Conception of the Unconscious.

American Psychologist, 1994

Cognitive-experiential self-theory integrates the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious by assuming the existence of two parallel, interacting modes of information processing: a rational system and an emotionally driven experiential system. Support for the theory is provided by the convergence of a wide variety of theoretical positions on two similar processing modes; by real-life phenomena-such as conflicts between the heart and the head; the appeal of concrete, imagistic, and narrative representations; superstitious thinking; and the ubiquity of religion throughout recorded history-and by laboratory research, including the prediction of new phenomena in heuristic reasoning.

Pro Edu, 2019

The psychic is not homogeneous, uniforms, undifferentiated, linear, but it is present in various forms. It has a great functional and existential differentiation and uniformity. It manifests itself in the form of conscious psyche, subconscious and unconscious. The relationship between them, their harmony or conflict, determines the originality of human nature. The unconscious as a form of the psyche constitutes the most controversial level of organization of psychical life. It is stated that psychology stopped placing the notion of conscience in the center of its theoretical and practical preoccupations, making place for the unconscious. The unconscious is not only whatever became automatism, but also what I suppress. Freud explains suppression by a conflict between Superego (which represents the childhood interdictions which became interiorized) and Id, the natural pulsations which we were taught in childhood to blame. Freud urges us, through this, to regain the conscience of what is unconscious. The Superego is a necessary stage in the forming of moral conscience, but it should not be mistaken for the moral conscience itself. The genuine moral conscience does not reduce itself to the Superego. A psychological explanation of the origin of the Superego does not replace the foundation of the moral conscience. Psychoanalysis cannot account for values.

2003

The turn to discourse in psychology restores to the discipline an interest in human life as it is lived by human beings, thus fulfilling an interpretative role that in the past was met by depth psychology. However, social constructionist criticisms of the Freudian unconscious tend to overlook the function of the concept in the theoretical description of the experiential realm, misconstruing the “problematic” of depth psychology as that of body/mind dualism. Depth psychology is disregarded, in part, due to its divergent praxis and as a legacy of behaviourist criticisms. Yet the impasse of social constructionism, as identified here, invites a restatement of the original problematic of depth psychology. In particular, Bakhtin’s and Mead’s philosophies of the act, which converge with Jung’s concept of “psychological value”, could indicate a direction in which issues of embodiment could be taken forward.

1990

. Modern Research In Psychology: Quantitative vs. Qualitative Researc Editura Universitara, Sibiu, Romania 2010 (Conference Proceedings)h, 2010

The essay tries to integrate new discoveries in the field neuroscience and the theory of the dynamic unconscious. The theoretical work of Dehaene, Naccache, Ramachandran and others regarding the neurological characteristics of conscious and unconscious processes are analyzed using the clinical and social psychology works of Erickson, Lifton, Berger & Luckman and others, as well as elements of psychoanalytic theory, chaos theory and thermodynamics, in an effort to create a new conceptual and interpretive framework Key Words: Conscious global workspace, unconscious, identity maintenance, chaos theory, attractor, repression, neural binding.

Conscious mental qualities, aka phenomenal qualities, are seemingly a leading factor in much of our behaviour. Pains make us recoil from painful stimuli, itches make us scratch, feelings of anger sometimes make us shout, visually perceiving red leads us to halt at stop lights, and so on. To relinquish this claim about the efficacy of conscious mental qualities would mean surrendering a major component of our everyday, intuitive self-conception; hence, the claim enjoys considerable prima facie plausibility. Unconscious mental qualities, however, have been posited by a mere handful of philosophers historically, and are nowadays almost universally rejected. Via a case study of 'restless legs syndrome', I argue that there is a hitherto unnoticed cost to this prevailing rejection of unconscious mental qualities: the causal efficacy of conscious mental qualities is threatened. In fact, I argue, we face a dilemma: To endorse epiphenomenalism about conscious mental qualities, or to posit unconscious mental qualities. Since it is so plausible that conscious mental qualities are causally efficacious, this reasoning constitutes an argument for unconscious mental qualities. Moving beyond the sensory case, I explain how analogous reasoning might apply to other mental faculties where phenomenal qualities seem causally involved; notably, emotions and mental imagery.

Does the same relationship of cause and effect obtain in the natural and in the human sciences, in the rather strong sense of this relationship in the agency theory of explanation and causality? If we take the unconscious as the proper object of the human sciences – which is the main thesis of this paper –, a simple answer to this question comes to the fore. There is a sense in which the notion of cause is the same in the natural and in the human sciences. Von Wright applied the experimentalist theory of causality to the natural sciences. However, he failed to understand that the experimentalist theory of causality is necessary also in order to understand causality, prediction, explanation and laws in the human sciences. Human reality is typically constituted by habitual patterns of acting and thinking established and made unconscious by frequent repetition. Unconscious actions and thoughts, because of their stereotyped, repetitive character, make possible in principle causal attributions and conditional predictions in the human sciences. However, in another sense the rules that govern human behavior are different from the laws of nature, because they remain valid or stay in effect only so far as we are unaware of them. Human action always has two sides: One side consists largely of unconscious routines and quasi-automatisms governed by rules, and allows the scientific explanation of human action; the other side persistently dissolves the routines or quasi-automatisms in new courses of action. From this point of view, statistics is not an extrinsic, but an intrinsic method of the human sciences.