Unconscious mental life

Abstract

The term “unconscious mental life”, or “the unconscious”, refers to the idea that mental states and processes can influence ongoing experience, thought, and action outside of phenomenal awareness and voluntary control. The article reviews the evidence for automatic, unconscious processing, and for the dissociation between explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) perception, learning, memory, and thinking. It also entertains the possibility of unconscious emotion (including attitudes) and motivation as well as cognition. Explicit-implicit dissociations, in various domains, lie at the heart of the dissociative and conversion disorders once known as “hysteria”. Although Freud is often and incorrectly credited with “discovering” the unconscious, scientific research on unconscious mental life provides no evidence supporting psychoanalytic theory.