Unconscious Representations Research Articles

Neural activation, information, and phenomenal consciousness

O'Brien & Opie defend a “vehicle” rather than a “process” theory of consciousness largely on the grounds that only conscious information is “explicit.” I argue that preconscious and unconscious representations can be functionally explicit (semantically well-formed and causally active). I also suggest that their analysis of how neural activation space mirrors the information structure of phenomenal experience fits more naturally into a dual-aspect theory of information than into their reductive physicalism.

What has consciousness to do with explicit representations and stable activation vectors?

To assess O'Brien & Opie's connectionist vehicle theory of consciousness, (1) it is not enough to point to the methodological weakness of certain experiments (dichotic listening, etc.). Successful cognitive theories postulating explicit unconscious representations have to be taken into account as well. (2) The distinction between vehicle and process theories cannot be drawn in the way envisaged by the authors because a representation's explicitness depends not only on its structural but also on its processing properties. (3) The stability of an activation vector is not very suitable for implementing the explicitness of a representation.

Commentary on "Searle and the 'Deep Unconscious'"

Commentary on “Searle and the ‘Deep Unconscious’” Dan Lloyd (bio) Can another person know my thoughts with better authority than I know them myself? With his affirmative answer to this question, Freud invented the twentieth-century human, a being whose mind is accessible to scrutiny from outside, and whose attempts at conscious self-explanation are at best partial and in many cases wrong. Even as Freud’s scientific influence wanes, the shift of authority he inaugurated is still gathering strength. Now the mind is open to many outsiders. Not only psychoanalysts, but behaviorists, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists are all striving to read my mind, and yours. Against this historical sea change stands the solitary John Searle, whose work is consistently animated by fierce adherence to first person authority and surly attacks of any theory that could be exploited to undermine that authority. To most readers Searle’s positions seem stubbornly anti-scientific and covertly dualistic, despite his insistence to the contrary. And since science is good and dualism is bad, Searle’s arguments have become standing obstacles for theorists to discuss, debate, or dismiss. Buttressing his insistence on first person authority, Searle defends a Cartesian view of mental representation or intentionality, holding that an intentional entity is a conscious entity, either in actuality or potentiality. Deeply unconscious representations are therefore impossible. Eric Gillett has joined the debate just here with a pointed critique of Searle’s argument (also discussed in Lloyd 1990). Gillett performs a double service by challenging Searle’s premises and offering some positive grounds for the deep unconscious. I agree with Gillett that establishing the existence of deeply unconscious representations requires a theory of intentionality that is independent of conscious awareness. Ruth Millikan’s evolutionary teleology is an excellent candidate, in its pursuit of real function and real content (vs. “as-if” interpretation) for mental items. Some questions remain. First, if deeply unconscious entities are clinically important, then in addition to a defense-in-principle of their existence we will need some method of identifying specific deep representations in particular cases. Millikan’s functionalism links content to broad biological and environmental contexts, and thereby seems to be an unwieldy tool for content ascription. If deeply unconscious representations get their content in the way Millikan describes, how can the clinician make use of them? Second, and more important, Millikan’s theory shares with many others the ambition to explain all intentional entities, conscious and unconscious alike. This leads to a new dualism of mental contents, a split between intentional content and conscious content, since the comprehensive theory of intentionality will assign mental content both [End Page 201] shallow and deep, irrespective of consciousness. This is a perplexity that transcends particular theories of intentionality, since what my mental states represent seems at least partly dependent on my environment or context, but my current state of consciousness is exclusively dependent on my brain. How, in theory, can these two concepts of content be reconciled? In sum, deeply unconscious representations do not come cheap. One way to escape the new dualism of content is to deny that the deep entities are representations. Instead, they might be dispositions or the “mechanisms, instinctual drives, structures, and energies which can never become conscious under any conditions,” as Gillett suggests. (In Lloyd 1994 I explore the possibility of a dispositional unconscious understood via connectionism.) On this view, mental content could remain within our first person authority, while the causal processes that manage that content remain out of sight. I wouldn’t have to guess what I’m thinking, but I would depend on the sciences of the mind to tell me how I come to think it. Related Articles Feature Article: Searle and the "Deep Unconscious" Commentary: Commentary by Lloyd Dan Lloyd Dan Lloyd, Department of Philosophy, Trinity College, Hartford, CT 06106, U.S.A. References Lloyd, D. 1990. Loose connections: Four problems with Searle’s argument for the ‘Connection Principle.’ Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13: 615–16. Google Scholar Lloyd, D. 1994. Connectionist hysteria: Reducing a Freudian case study to a network model. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 1, no. 2: 69–88. Google Scholar Copyright © 1996 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Theoretical foundations of cognitive-behavior therapy for anxiety and depression.

Cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) involves a highly diverse set of terms and procedures. In this review, the origins of CBT are briefly considered, and an integrative theoretical framework is proposed that (a) distinguishes therapy interventions targeted at circumscribed disorders from those targeted at generalized disorders and (b) distinguishes interventions aimed at modifying conscious beliefs and representations from those aimed at modifying unconscious representations in memory. Interventions aimed at altering consciously accessible beliefs are related to their theoretical bases in appraisal theories of emotion and cognitive theories of emotion and motivation. Interventions aimed at modifying unconscious representations are related to their theoretical bases in learning theory and findings from experimental cognitive psychology. In the review, different formulations of CBT for anxiety disorders and depression are analyzed in terms of this framework, and theoretical issues relating to self-representations in memory and to emotional processing are considered.

The changing contexts of gender: Between fixed and fluid experience

Each of us holds unconscious representations of man and woman. Traditional psychoanalytic theories have viewed gender as formed primarily through unconscious representations of either man or woman. These theories have linked gender identifications to the resolution of either oedipal or preoedipal developmental issues. With this resolution, gender identifications have been conceptualized as acquiring a cohesiveness and a fixed nature over the rest of the life span. Contemporary feminist theories have challenged these ideas of fixed, unitary identifications and have offered instead the notion of a fluid gender that moves between multiple identifications. What is problematic is that either the understanding of gender has been restricted to the idea of singular, fixed identifications because of the linear frame of traditional theories or, in the feminist psychoanalytic quest for multiplicity and fluidity, no place has been left for the more fixed quality of gender experience. The tension between gender rigidi...

Evidence that phenomenal consciousness is the same as access consciousness

AbstractBlock seems to propose untested answers to empirical questions. Whether consciousness is a “mongrel problem,” rather than a single core fact with many facets, is an empirical issue. Likewise, the intimate relationship between personal consciousness and global access functions cannot be decided pretheoretically. This point is demonstrated by the reader's private experience of foveal versus parafoveal vision, and for conscious versus unconscious representation of the many meanings of common words.

La temporalité au féminin : une représentation paradoxale

Marie-Nöelle Breucker, The temporality of femininity : a paradoxical representation. When dealing with the articulation between temporality and femininity, the question of the origin of temporality arises, which contains a part of inescapable violence in the process of integrating the "infans". The conflictual nature of conscious, preconscious and unconscious representations of time attest to the paradoxical nature of its experience. But is there a temporal paradox of femininity ? This could be considered from two perspectives: the femininity of bisexuality and psychofemininity. Puberty gives us an example of the confrontation of cyclical time and the necessary inscription within the arrow of time. This specificity of femininity can be found as an evocation in fairytales and as a repetition in the transference that occurs during psychoanalytic treatment. This is how the inescapableness of the féminin superego and masochism, the immoderateness of narcisism and the unbearableness of anxiety and castration can be seen. Key-words : Temporality, Femininity, Representation, Psychoanalytic treatment, Fairy tale.

Perception and awareness in phonological processing: the case of the phoneme

The necessity of a “levels-of-processing” approach in the study of mental representations is illustrated by the work on the psychological reality of the phoneme. On the basis of both experimental studies of human behavior and functional imaging data, it is argued that there are unconscious representations of phonemes in addition to conscious ones. These two sets of mental representations are functionally distinct: the former intervene in speech perception and (presumably) production; the latter are developed in the context of learning alphabetic literacy for both reading and writing purposes. Moreover, among phonological units and properties, phonemes may be the only ones to present a neural dissociation at the macro-anatomic level. Finally, it is argued that even if the representations used in speech perception and those used in assembling and in conscious operations are distinct, they may entertain dependency relations.

Social cognition and object relations.

Social cognition research and psychoanalytic object relations theory both address the cognitive and affective processes that mediate interpersonal functioning. Each approach faces a number of difficulties that could be more readily addressed by examining the methods, assumptions, metaphors, and models of the other. Social cognitive research could benefit from the psychoanalytic understanding of affective processes, defensive processes, and unconscious representations; object relations approaches could benefit from social cognitive methodologies and developemental findings. Current research suggests that despite certain incompatibilities between the two approaches, integrative methods and models are both possible and potentially useful in exploring phenomena such as poor social functioning in borderline personality disorder

Conscious and unconscious representation of aspectual shape in cognitive science

Conscious and unconscious representation of aspectual shape in cognitive science

Unconscious content.

Holt recently questioned whether classical psychoanalytic metapsychology is relevant to modern psychoanalytic and psychodynamic clinical theories. He claims that Freud's structural and dynamic models do not meet updated philosophical standards. In addition, Freud's notion of the unconscious has always posed problems of definition, description, and measurement. The very existence of an unconscious has been doubted; nonetheless, some metapsychology is necessary, and such theorists as Schafer have accordingly worked to redefine the nature of psychoanalysis. Wolff and Schimek reexamined Freud's notion of unconscious mental representation. Extension of their work to clarify the need and role for a concept of unconscious which can be part of a more modern, philosophically acceptable metapsychology is attempted here.

Dual coding: a cognitive model for psychoanalytic research.

Four theories of mental representation derived from current experimental work in cognitive psychology have been discussed in relation to psychoanalytic theory. These are: verbal mediation theory, in which language determines or mediates thought; perceptual dominance theory, in which imagistic structures are dominant; common code or propositional models, in which all information, perceptual or linguistic, is represented in an abstract, amodal code; and dual coding, in which nonverbal and verbal information are each encoded, in symbolic form, in separate systems specialized for such representation, and connected by a complex system of referential relations. The weight of current empirical evidence supports the dual code theory. However, psychoanalysis has implicitly accepted a mixed model-perceptual dominance theory applying to unconscious representation, and verbal mediation characterizing mature conscious waking thought. The characterization of psychoanalysis, by Schafer, Spence, and others, as a domain in which reality is constructed rather than discovered, reflects the application of this incomplete mixed model. The representations of experience in the patient's mind are seen as without structure of their own, needing to be organized by words, thus vulnerable to distortion or dissolution by the language of the analyst or the patient himself. In these terms, hypothesis testing becomes a meaningless pursuit; the propositions of the theory are no longer falsifiable; the analyst is always more or less "right." This paper suggests that the integrated dual code formulation provides a more coherent theoretical framework for psychoanalysis than the mixed model, with important implications for theory and technique. In terms of dual coding, the problem is not that the nonverbal representations are vulnerable to distortion by words, but that the words that pass back and forth between analyst and patient will not affect the nonverbal schemata at all. Using the dual code formulation, and applying an investigative methodology derived from experimental cognitive psychology, a new approach to the verification of interpretations is possible. Some constructions of a patient's story may be seen as more accurate than others, by virtue of their linkage to stored perceptual representations in long-term memory. We can demonstrate that such linking has occurred in functional or operational terms--through evaluating the representation of imagistic content in the patient's speech.

A case of syntactical learning and judgment: How conscious and how abstract?

This study examined two possible bases for grammatical judgments following syntactical learning: unconscious representations of a formal grammar, as in Reber's (1976) hypothesis of implicit learning, and conscious rules within informal grammars. Experimental subjects inspected strings generated by a finite-state grammar, viewed either one at a time or all at a time, with implicit or explicit learning instructions. In a transfer test, experimental and control subjects judged the grammatically of grammatical and nongrammatical strings, reporting on every trial the bases for their judgments. In replication of others' results, experimental subjects met the critical test for grammatical abstraction: significantly correct classification of novel strings. We found, however, that reported rules predicted those grammatical judgments without significant residual. Subjects evidently acquired correlated grammars, personal sets of conscious rules, each of limited scope and many of imperfect validity. Those rules themselves were shown to embody abstractions, consciously represented novelty that could account for

Kant’s Unconscious ‘Given’

Kant appeals to unconscious representations for reasons that are deeply connected to his distinctive theory of cognition. He is an empirical realist, accepting the Empiricist claim that cognition must be based in sensory data. He is an idealist about spatial and temporal representations. He believes that human perception is always of objects or events with temporal and spatial properties. It follows from these three claims that the sensations that must begin the process of cognition lack spatial and temporal properties and so are not perceived, but unconscious.

An exceptional transference in psychotherapy.

In psychoanalysis, it is customary to utilize as a therapeutic tool the unique psychic phenomenon which we call transference. By transference we mean the patient's tendency to displace emotions belonging to an unconscious mental representation of an infantile object onto a mental representation of an object in the (present day) external reality. 7 This psychic phenomenon is normally a potential characteristic of mental functioning in the interpersonal relationship, and everyone (with the possible exception of some psychotics and very severe character disorders) has the potential for transference. If certain significant mental elements have been overtaken by repression, and then if there should be a reactivation of what has been repressed, there will also be a reactivation of the infantile objects behind the images of the present day objects. In the neurotic, this transference of infantile emotional attitudes to a present-day object may pertain to any