The mind beyond our immediate awareness: Freudian, Jungian, and cognitive models of the unconscious

Abstract

Several branches of cognitive science now focus on the nature of the unconscious. This paper explores some of the findings and models from this research. By introducing formulations based on non-clinical data, the cognitive scientists--in neural linguistics, computational modelling, and neuroscience--may depart from the older psychoanalytic formulations. An understanding of unconscious neural processes is nevertheless emerging showing how synapses are modified by experience and how learning, conscious and unconscious, is due to this important aspect of brain plasticity. Freud and Jung's formulations about the unconscious psyche, representing the main tenets of depth psychology, are also based on a conception of the mind as extending beyond immediate awareness. However, their models are more hypothetical in that their data, almost exclusively, come from treatments of psychotherapy patients and their verbal accounts. So how do these two conceptions of the unconscious match, where do they differ? And how does the neural understanding in the present research support theories and practices of analytic treatments?

Unconscious knowledge: A survey

“…To begin with, it is a connection that many contemporary experimental psychologists vigorously reject, and one that not a few contemporary practitioners and sympathizers of psychoanalysis seek to strengthen. If the former group see the postulation of the Freudian unconscious as lacking in scientific status (as far as the dynamic, or largely irrational and chaotic unconscious is concerned), the latter see the experimental results as corroborating and further developing the psychoanalytic theories (e.g., Davou, 2002; Ekstrom, 2004). …”

Nonconcurrence of Conscious and Unconscious Cognition in Resolving Internal Contradiction

“…Support for the theory is provided by conflicts between the heart and the head, superstitious thinking, the ubiquity of religion throughout recorded history, laboratory research, and others. Another investigation is directed toward proof (Ekstrom, 2004)-how neural understanding in the present cognitive research supports theories and practices of analytic treatments. This article attempts to give new research data in the approach of integration between two influential trends to the unconscious: those of Freud and of cognitive science.…”

The Myth as a Tool for Human Behavior Setting

“…or in space and in time (crossing, directing, finishing, beginning, while, etc. ), or by the perceptive capacity, expressed by our senses, and the motor ability, expressed by our muscle/skeletal apparatus (Ekstrom S. R., 2004): even the paths of Ordinary Logic are rooted in an unconscious structure.…”