Book is titled: "Strangers to Ourselves" by Timothy D. Wilson. This is the same guy who wrote "Redirect" and is another excellent volume right up the alley of The Work.
Preface
It might seem that self-knowledge is a central topic in psychology.
In some ways it is; from Freud onward, psychologists
have been fascinated by the extent to which people
know themselves, the limits of this knowledge, and the
consequences of failures of self-insight. Surprisingly, however,
self-knowledge has not been a mainstream topic in
academic psychology. There are few college courses on self knowledge
and few books devoted to the topic, if we rule
out self-help books and ones from a psychoanalytic point
of view.
I think this is about to change. In recent years there has
been an explosion of scientific research on self-knowledge
that paints a different portrait from the one presented by
Freud and his followers. People possess a powerful, sophisticated,
adaptive unconscious that is crucial for survival in
the world. Because this unconscious operates so efficiently
out of view, however, and is largely inaccessible, there is a
price to pay in self-knowledge. There is a great deal about
ourselves that we cannot know directly, even with the most
painstaking introspection. How, then, can we discover our
nonconscious traits, goals, and feelings? Is it always to our
advantage to do so? To what extent are researchers in academe
rediscovering Freud and psychoanalysis? How can self-knowledge
be studied scientifically, anyway? These are the questions
to which I turn in the following pages. The answers are often surprising
and have direct, practical, implications for everyday living. ...
Chapter 1: Freud's Genius, Freud's Myopia
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,—
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.
—Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Oenone” (1833)
What are more important than matters of the heart? Or
more difficult to decipher? Some people are blessed by
knowing exactly what it is their hearts desire, but are
cursed by not knowing how to achieve it. Like King Lear,
some stumble into a course of action precisely opposite to
the one that would satisfy their hearts and minds. Because
of their own pride, stubbornness, or lack of self-insight,
their goals remain unfulfilled.
But at least such people know what they want, be it their
daughters’ devotion, a lover’s embrace, or peace of mind. A
worse fate is not knowing what it is our hearts desire. Consider
Marcel, in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, who
is convinced that he no longer loves Albertine and broods
and plots and schemes about ways of leaving her, until his
housekeeper rushes in with the news that Albertine has left
him. At the instant he hears the words, Marcel realizes how
much he still loves Albertine: “These words: ‘Mademoiselle
Albertine has gone!’ had expressed themselves in my heart
in the form of an anguish so keen that I would not be able
to endure it for any length of time. And so what I had
supposed to mean nothing to me was the only thing in my whole life.
How ignorant we are of ourselves.”1
Marcel’s ignorance of his own feelings is far from rare. Consider
Susan, a friend of mine who was once involved with a man named
Stephen. Stephen was a very nice guy, kind and attentive and reliable and
clearly head over heels in love with Susan. Both he and Susan were social
workers and shared many interests. They dated for over a year, and the
relationship seemed to be getting quite serious, except for one problem—
it was obvious to all Susan’s friends that she did not love Stephen.
She thought she did, but as far as we could see, Susan had convinced herself
that she felt something that she didn’t. Stephen was a dear friend, yes,
but was he someone she deeply loved and wanted to spend the rest of her
life with? No way. Eventually Susan realized that she had been mistaken
and ended the relationship.
Perhaps Marcel and Susan are exceptions, people who are especially
blind to their own hearts and minds. Yet I suspect that most of us can
think of times when we were in a similar state of confusion, like Elizabeth
in Pride and Prejudice, who found that her feelings toward Mr.
Darcy “could not be exactly defined”:
She respected, she esteemed, she was grateful to him, she felt a real interest
in his welfare; and she only wanted to know how far she wished that welfare
to depend upon herself, and how far it would be for the happiness of
both that she employ the power, which her fancy told her she still possessed,
of bringing on the renewal of his addresses.2
Imagine that at such times of confusion we could hook ourselves up
to a machine called an Inner Self Detector. After attaching electrodes to
our temples and adjusting the dials we could ask questions like “How do
I really feel about Stephen (or Mr. Darcy)?” After a few whirs and clicks
the machine would display the answer on a little monitor (a more technologically
advanced version, perhaps, of the Magic Eight Ball that kids
use at slumber parties to tell their futures).
To see how people would make use of an Inner Self Detector, I asked
the students in one of my college seminars to list the questions they
would ask of it. Like Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, some of the students
wanted to know how they really felt about someone. One person,
for example, said her first question would be “How do I truly feel about a
couple of people in my life?” How nice it would be to have a machine to
tell us the answer to questions like this!
The students also had questions about the nature of their own personalities,
including their traits and abilities (e.g., “What is my main
objective/motivation in life?” “Why am I socially inept in certain situations?”
“Why do I sometimes lack motivation for doing homework?”).
Some of these questions, such as those about academic performance and
careers, are undoubtedly specific to the uncertainties of early adulthood.
Even seasoned adults, however, sometimes wonder about their personalities
and abilities. Blindness to one’s character can lead people to make
poor choices, such as the man who assumes that he has what it takes to
lead a fulfilling life as a lawyer when he is better suited to be a teacher, or
the woman who turns down an offer to make an important speech
because of the mistaken belief that she could never pull it off.
The students also wanted to know why they felt or acted the way they
did, such as what it was that made them happy. Understanding the
causes of our responses is crucial to avoiding unwanted influences on
our feelings and behavior. Consider a lawyer who interviews an African-
American applicant for a job as an associate in her firm. She finds the
candidate to be cold, unfriendly, and a tad aggressive, and thus recommends
that he not be hired. She is a fair-minded person who believes
that her negative impression had nothing to do with the applicant’s race.
But what if she is wrong, and his race did influence her impression without
her knowing it? She cannot confront her racism and try to change it
if she does not know that it exists and is influencing her judgment.
This book is concerned with two main questions: Why it is that people
often do not know themselves very well (e.g., their own characters, why
they feel the way they do, or even the feelings themselves)? And how can
they increase their self-knowledge? There are undoubtedly many reasons
for a lack of self-insight; people may be blinded by their hubris (a
favorite Greek and Shakespearean theme), confused, or simply never
take the time to examine their own lives and psyche very carefully. The
reason I will address—perhaps the most common of all—is that much
of what we want to know about ourselves resides outside of conscious
awareness.
The idea that a large portion of the human mind is unconscious is not
new and was Freud’s greatest insight. Modern psychology owes Freud a
large debt for his willingness to look beyond the narrow corridor of consciousness.
A revolution has occurred in empirical psychology concerning
the nature of the unconscious, however, that has revealed the limits
of the Freudian conception.
Initially, research psychologists were skittish about even mentioning
nonconscious mental processes. In the first half of the twentieth century,
the behaviorist onslaught in psychology was fueled by a rejection of
mentalism; behaviorists argued that there was no need to take into
account what occurred inside people’s heads, consciously or unconsciously.
In the late 1950s, mainstream psychology took the giant step of
rejecting behaviorism and initiating the systematic study of the mind.
But the first experimental psychologists to leap off the behaviorism
bandwagon said little about whether those aspects of the mind they were
studying were conscious or unconscious. This was a taboo question; few
psychologists wanted to jeopardize the newfound respectability of the
mind as a scientific topic by saying, “Hey, not only can we study what
people are thinking; we can study what goes on inside their heads that
even they can’t see!” In the psychological laboratories of academe, few
self-respecting psychologists wanted to risk the accusation that they
were, God forbid, Freudians.
But as cognitive and social psychology flourished, a funny thing happened.
It became clear that people could not verbalize many of the cognitive
processes that psychologists assumed were occurring inside their
heads. Social psychologists, for example, were developing models of the
way in which people process information about the social world, including
how they formulate and maintain stereotypes of other groups, judge
other people’s personality, and make attributions about the causes of
their own and other people’s actions. The more researchers studied these
mental processes, the clearer it became that people were not aware of
their occurring. When researchers debriefed participants about what
they must have been thinking during their experiments, they were disconcerted
to find that the participants often shook their heads and said,
“That’s a very interesting theory, professor, but I’m afraid that I don’t
recall having had any thoughts remotely like that.”3 Most of the mental
processes studied by cognitive and social psychologists turned out to
occur out of view of the people who had them. This fact became impossible
to ignore, and theories of nonconscious processing began to creep
into experimental psychology.
Still, many psychologists were reluctant to use the word “unconscious,”
out of fear that their colleagues would think they had gone
soft in the head. Several other terms were invented to describe mental
processes that occur outside of conscious awareness, such as “automatic,”
“implicit,” “pre-attentive,” and “procedural.” Sometimes these
terms do a better job of describing a specific type of mental process than
the general term “nonconscious.” The study of automatic processing has
flourished, for example, and a lack of awareness of these processes is only
one of its defining features.4
But the terms “unconscious” or “nonconscious” now appear with
increasing frequency in mainstream journals. A picture has emerged of a
set of pervasive, adaptive, sophisticated mental processes that occur
largely out of view. Indeed, some researchers have gone so far as to suggest
that the unconscious mind does virtually all the work and that conscious
will may be an illusion. Though not everyone is prepared to
relegate conscious thought to the epiphenomenal refuse heap, there is
more agreement than ever before about the importance of nonconscious
thinking, feeling, and motivation.5
The gulf between research psychologists and psychoanalysts has thus
narrowed considerably as scientific psychology has turned its attention
to the study of the unconscious. This gap has not been bridged completely,
however, and it is clear that the modern, adaptive unconscious is
not the same as the psychoanalytic one.
The Adaptive Unconscious versus the Freudian Unconscious
Freud changed his views often, most notably from his topological model
of the mind to the structural theory, with the publication of The Ego and
the Id in 1923. There are also several schools of modern psychoanalytic
thought, with varying emphases on unconscious drives, object relations,
and ego function. To compare the modern view of the adaptive unconscious
with the Freudian unconscious is like trying to aim at moving targets.
Nonetheless there are clear differences between the views.
WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS?
Freud’s topographic model of the mind distinguished between two types
of unconscious processes. First, people have a multitude of thoughts that
are simply not the focus of their current attention, such as the name of
their seventh-grade math teacher. This kind of information is in the preconscious,
Freud said, and could easily be made conscious by directing
attention to it. More importantly, Freud noted, there is a vast storehouse
of primitive, infantile thought that is kept out of consciousness because
it is a source of psychic pain. These kinds of thoughts are repressed for a
purpose, not simply because our attention is drawn elsewhere. Freud’s
subsequent structural model of the mind was more complex, in that it
allocated unconscious processes to the ego and superego as well as to the
id, but he continued to focus on unconscious thought that was primitive
and animalistic, and characterized conscious thought as more rational
and sophisticated.
According to the modern perspective, Freud’s view of the unconscious
was far too limited. When he said (following Gustav Fechner, an early
experimental psychologist) that consciousness is the tip of the mental
iceberg, he was short of the mark by quite a bit—it may be more the size
of a snowball on top of that iceberg. The mind operates most efficiently
by relegating a good deal of high-level, sophisticated thinking to the
unconscious, just as a modern jumbo jetliner is able to fly on automatic
pilot with little or no input from the human, “conscious” pilot. The
adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warn-
ing people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action in a sophisticated
and efficient manner. It is a necessary and extensive part of a highly
efficient mind and not just the demanding child of the mental family
and the defenses that have developed to keep this child in check.
Nor is the unconscious a single entity with a mind and will of its own.
Rather, humans possess a collection of modules that have evolved over
time and operate outside of consciousness. Though I will often refer to
the adaptive unconscious as a convenient shorthand, I do not mean to
characterize it as a single entity, as the Freudian unconscious typically is.
For example, we have a nonconscious language processor that enables us
to learn and use language with ease, but this mental module is relatively
independent of our ability to recognize faces quickly and efficiently and
our ability to form quick evaluations of whether environmental events
are good or bad. It is thus best to think of the adaptive unconscious as
a collection of city-states of the human mind and not as a single
homunculus like the Wizard of Oz, pulling strings behind the curtain of
conscious awareness.6
WHY DOES THE UNCONSCIOUS EXIST?
Freud argued that our primitive urges often do not reach consciousness
because they are unacceptable to our more rational, conscious selves and
to society at large; they “remind one of the legendary Titans, weighed
down since primaeval ages by the massive bulk of the mountains which
were once hurled upon them by the victorious gods.”7 People have developed
myriad defenses to avoid knowing what their unconscious motives
and feelings are, some of which (sublimation) are healthier than others
(repression, reaction formation, etc.). The therapeutic process involves
the elucidation and circumvention of unhealthy defenses, which is difficult
precisely because people are so motivated to keep their unconscious
motives and feelings hidden.
According to the modern view, there is a simpler reason for the existence
of unconscious mental processes. People cannot directly examine
how many parts of their minds work, such as basic processes of perception,
memory, and language comprehension, not because it would be
anxiety provoking to do so, but because these parts of the mind are inaccessible
to conscious awareness—quite possibly because they evolved
before consciousness did. If we were to ask people to tell us exactly how
they perceive the world in three dimensions, for example, or how their
minds are able to parse a continuous stream of noise emitted by another
person into comprehensible speech, they would be quite tongue-tied.
Consciousness is a limited-capacity system, and to survive in the world
people must be able to process a great deal of information outside of
awareness. Carl Jung acknowledged this point in the 1920s:
The unconscious has also still another aspect: within its compass are
included not only the repressed content but also all such psychical material
as does not reach the threshold of consciousness. It is impossible to
explain the sub-threshold character of all this material by the principle of
repression, otherwise a man, at the release of repression, would certainly
achieve a phenomenal memory that forgot nothing.8
Freud undoubtedly would agree, saying something like “Yes, yes, but
this kind of unconscious thinking is the small stuff; nuts and bolts, low level
thinking that is much less interesting than matters of the heart and
mind, such as love, work, and play. Of course we do not have conscious
access to such things as how we perceive depth, just as we do not have
conscious access to how our digestive tracts operate. The fact remains
that repression is the reason why more important, higher-order mental
processing is unconscious. People could directly access their primitive
urges and desires, if repression and resistance were circumvented, but
generally we do our best to keep such thoughts and feelings outside of
awareness.”
In contrast, the modern view of the adaptive unconscious is that a lot
of the interesting stuff about the human mind—judgments, feelings,
motives—occur outside of awareness for reasons of efficiency, and not
because of repression. Just as the architecture of the mind prevents low level
processing (e.g., perceptual processes) from reaching consciousness,
so are many higher-order psychological processes and states
inaccessible. The mind is a well-designed system that is able to accom-
plish a great deal in parallel, by analyzing and thinking about the world
outside of awareness while consciously thinking about something else.
This is not to deny that some thoughts are quite threatening and that
people are sometimes motivated to avoid knowing them. Repression
may not, however, be the most important reason why people do not have
conscious access to thoughts, feelings, or motives. The implications of
this fact for how to gain access to the unconscious cannot be underestimated
and are a major topic of this book.
The Non-Freudian Unconscious
To illustrate further how the adaptive unconscious differs from the
Freudian version, let’s engage in a bit of counterfactual history, in which
we imagine how ideas about the unconscious would have developed if
Freud had never proposed his theory of psychoanalysis. To do so, it is
necessary to consider briefly the status of pre-Freudian thinking about
unconscious processes.
In the nineteenth century, the long shadow of Descartes influenced
thinking about the nature of the unconscious. Descartes is best known
for his sharp division of the mind and the body. So-called Cartesian
dualism, or the “mind-body” problem, has occupied philosophers and
psychologists ever since. Many have rightly objected to the idea that the
mind and the body are separate entities that obey different laws, and
few philosophers or psychologists today would identify themselves as
dualists; in fact Antonio Damasio has dubbed the “abyssal separation
between body and mind” as “Descartes’s error.”9
Descartes made a related error that is less well known but no less egregious.
Not only did he endow the mind with a special status that was
unrelated to physical laws; he also restricted the mind to consciousness.
The mind consists of all that people consciously think, he argued, and
nothing else. This equation of thinking and consciousness eliminates,
with one swift stroke, any possibility of nonconscious thought—a move
that was called the “Cartesian catastrophe” by Arthur Koestler and “one
of fundamental blunders made by the human mind” by Lancelot Whyte.
Koestler rightly notes that this idea led to an impoverishment of psychology
which it took three centuries to remedy.10
Despite Descartes's blunder, a number of nineteenth-century European
theorists, such as Pascal, Leibniz, Schelling, and Herbart, began
to postulate the presence of nonconscious perception and thought.
Especially noteworthy were a group of British physicians and philosophers
who developed ideas about nonconscious processing that were
openly anti-Cartesian and remarkably similar to current thinking about
the adaptive unconscious. These prescient theorists, especially William
Hamilton, Thomas Laycock, and William Carpenter, can rightly be called
the parents of the modern theory of the adaptive unconscious. They
observed that a good deal of human perception, memory, and action
occurs without conscious deliberation or will, and concluded that
there must be 'mental latency' (Hamiltonfs term, drawing on Leibniz),
'unconscious cerebration' (Carpenterfs term), or a 'reflex action of the
brain' (Laycockfs term).11 Their description of nonconscious processes
is remarkably similar to modern views; indeed, quotations from some of
their writings could easily be mistaken for entries in modern psychologicaljournals:
-Lower-order mental processes occur outside of awareness. Hamilton,
Carpenter, and Laycock observed that the human perceptual system
operates largely outside of conscious awareness, an observation also
made by Hermann Helmholtz. Though this view seems obvious today
it was not widely accepted at the time, largely as a result of the legacy of
Cartesian dualism. It was not widely accepted by modern psychologists
until the cognitive revolution of the 1950s.
- Divided attention. William Hamilton observed that people can consciously
attend to one thing while nonconsciously processing another.
He gave the example of a person who is reading aloud and finds that
his or her thoughts have wandered onto some other topic altogether:
"If the matter be uninteresting, your thoughts, while you are going on
in the performance of your task, are wholly abstracted from the book
and its subject, and you are perhaps deeply occupied in a train of seri-
ous meditation. Here the process of reading is performed without
interruption, and with the most punctual accuracy; and, at the same
time, the process of meditation is carried on without distraction or
fatigue."12 Hamilton foreshadowed the influential theories of selective
attention that were developed a century later.
- Automaticity of thought. The nineteenth-century theorists argued that
thinking can become so habitual as to occur outside of awareness with
no conscious attention, an idea that was not formally developed in
psychology until the 1970s. William Carpenter, for example, noted
that "The more thoroughly . . . we examine into what may be termed
the Mechanism of Thought, the more clear does it become that not
only an automatic, but an unconscious action enters largely into all its
processes."h13
- Implications of nonconscious processing for prejudice. One of the most
interesting properties of the adaptive unconscious is that it uses
stereotypes to categorize and evaluate other people. William Carpenter
presaged this work more than a century ago, by noting that people
develop habitual "tendencies of thought" that are nonconscious and
that these thought patterns can lead to "unconscious prejudices which
we thus form, [that] are often stronger than the conscious; and they are
the more dangerous, because we cannot knowingly guard against
them."14
- Lack of awareness of one's own feelings. A controversial claim about the
adaptive unconscious is that it can produce feelings and preferences of
which people are unaware. Carpenter argued that emotional reactions
can occur outside of awareness until our attention is drawn to them:
"Our feelings towards persons and objects may undergo most important
changes,without our being in the least degree aware, until we have
our attention directed to our own mental state, of the alteration which
has taken place in them."15
- A nonconscious self. Do central parts of our personalities reside out of
view, such that we do not have access to important aspects of who we
are? William Hamilton wrote extensively about the way in which
habits acquired early in life become an indispensable part of one's
personality.16 These mental processes were said to constitute a kind of
“automatic self” to which people had no conscious access—an idea
that was not to reappear in psychology for more than 100 years.
Why has Hamilton, Laycock, and Carpenter’s work largely been forgotten?
The answer, in no small part, is that the very different kind of
unconscious proposed by Freud prevented these views from ever making
it to the center stage. To my knowledge Freud never quoted or referred to
these theorists. If he was aware of their writings, he probably viewed
their ideas as irrelevant to the dynamic, repressive Unconscious with a
capital U.
But what if Freud had never proposed his theory of psychoanalysis?
Imagine that the anti-Semitism of nineteenth-century Vienna had not
blocked Freud’s budding career as a university professor studying physiology,
and he had continued to investigate the spinal cords of fish. Or
imagine that he had become addicted to the cocaine he experimented
with in 1884, or had never met Josef Breuer, with whom he began his
seminal studies of hysteria. As with any life, there are an infinite number
of “what ifs” that might have changed the course of Freud’s career.
Imagine that experimental psychology began as a discipline uninfluenced
by psychoanalytic thinking in two key respects. First, researchers
felt no need to distance themselves from difficult-to-test ideas about
a dynamic unconscious. They were free to theorize about nonconscious
thinking in the same way that Laycock, Carpenter, and Hamilton
had, namely as a collection of efficient and sophisticated information processing
systems. Second, they were free to investigate the mind, even
the parts that were unconscious, with experimental techniques. An
important part of the Freudian legacy was a rejection of the scientific
method as a means of studying the mind. The complex nature of unconscious
processes could not be examined in controlled experiments,
Freud believed, and could be uncovered only by careful clinical observation.
Astute clinical observation can be quite illuminating, of course, but
psychologists might have turned sooner to the experimental study of
mental processes without this methodological limitation.
Even in a Freudian vacuum, researchers interested in the unconscious
would still have had to contend with the behaviorist movement, which
regarded the mind as unworthy of study by any method. One reason
behaviorism flourished in the early and mid-twentieth century, however,
was that it provided a scientific alternative to what was viewed as the
fuzziness of psychoanalytic concepts and methods. Without this backdrop,
it is possible that psychology would have discovered sooner than it
did that the mind, including the nonconscious mind, can be studied
scientifically.
Thus, in my counterfactual fantasy, cognitive and social psychologists
applied their well-honed experimental techniques to the study of the
sophisticated, adaptive unconscious sooner than they actually did. Undeterred
by the theoretical and methodological obstacles psychoanalysis
created for experimental psychology, research and theorizing on the
adaptive unconscious flourished.
This counterfactual history is sure to offend those who find Freud’s
views indispensable in theorizing about the unconscious. Some theorists,
such as Matthew Erdelyi and Drew Westen, have argued persuasively
that psychoanalysis was crucial to the development of modern
thinking about the unconscious, and that, indeed, modern research has
largely corroborated Freud’s major insights about the nature of unconscious
thought.18
I agree that Freud’s greatest insight was about the pervasiveness of
unconscious thinking and we owe him a tremendous debt for his
dogged, creative pursuit of the nature of the unconscious mind. It is
hard to deny the importance of an infantile, dynamic, crafty, Freudian
unconscious, in part because the psychoanalytic narrative is so seductive
and explains so much. My counterfactual exercise is meant simply to
illustrate that it is not the only narrative about the unconscious, and that
we might have reached the current one more quickly if psychoanalysis
had not so dominated the intellectual stage.
The narrative of the adaptive unconscious might appear to remove all
that is interesting about unconscious processing. The reader with a psychoanalytic
bent might find the adaptive unconscious, with its emphasis
on automatic information processing, to be dry, emotionless, and, perhaps
worst of all, boring. The Freudian unconscious is ingenious, clever,
and sexy and has been the topic of great literature at least since Sophocles.
There are few great plays or novels on the automatic pilot of the
mind, and focusing exclusively on the adaptive unconscious may seem
like talking about romantic love without passion and sex.
This view is misleading, however, because it underestimates the role
that the adaptive unconscious plays in all the important and interesting
things in life, including Freud’s arbeiten und lieben (work and love). As
we will see, the adaptive unconscious is not involved in just the small
stuff, but plays a major role in all facets of life. The failure to find great
literature on the adaptive unconscious may say more about the pervasiveness
of psychoanalytic thinking than about anything else.
Yet the modern view of the unconscious is not anti-Freudian. To say
that we possess a sophisticated and efficient set of nonconscious
processes that are indispensable for navigating our way through the
world is not to deny that there may also be dynamic forces at work keeping
unpleasant thoughts out of awareness. There will be times, in the
chapters to come, when we encounter phenomena that have a Freudian
hue to them, whereby it seems that the forces of repression are at work.
Some readers might react by saying, “Hey, didn’t Freud say that?”—and
the answer might well be that he, or one of his many followers, did. The
question to keep in mind, though, is “Do we need Freudian theory to
explain that? Are there simpler explanations for the kinds of unconscious
phenomena he discussed?”
Sometimes the answer may be that Freud was right about the dynamic,
repressed nature of the unconscious. On other occasions the
answer might be that although Freud did not say it, one of his many followers
did, particularly those who have moved beyond an emphasis on
childhood drives and stressed the role of object relations and the ego
functioning. Often, however, we will see evidence for a vast nonconscious
system quite different from what Freud imagined.
Furthermore, Freud and his followers often disagreed about key
points, and over his long career Freud himself changed his mind about
key concepts such as the nature of repression. The question thus arises of
how we know which of these many ideas are true. A tremendous advantage
of the modern psychological approach is a reliance on the experimental
method to investigate mental phenomena. There has been an
explosion of research on the adaptive unconscious because of the development
of some quite clever experimental techniques to study it, many
of which we will discuss here. Clinical observations and case histories
can be a rich source of hypotheses about the nature of the unconscious,
but in the end we must put such ideas to the test in a more rigorous and
scientific manner. Thus, even if the answer is “Yes, Freud did say that,” he
or his followers might also have said something entirely different, and it
is only through the work of empirically minded psychologists that we
can tell the true nuggets from the fool’s gold.
Implications for Self-Insight
Another key difference between the Freudian and modern approach lies
in their views of how to attain self-insight. Psychoanalysis shares with
many other approaches the assumption that the path to self-knowledge
leads inward. Through careful introspection, the argument goes, we can
penetrate the haze that obscures our true feelings and motives. No one
claims that such introspection is easy. People must recognize the barriers
of repression and resistance and remove them. But when such insight is
accomplished, often with the aid of a therapist, people have direct access
to their unconscious desires. “It is the task of the analyst,” wrote Anna
Freud, “to bring into consciousness that which is unconscious”—an
assumption made by all forms of insight therapy.19
But here’s the problem: research on the adaptive unconscious suggests
that much of what we want to see is unseeable. The mind is a wonderfully
sophisticated and efficient tool, more so than the most powerful
computer ever built. An important source of its tremendous power is
its ability to perform quick, nonconscious analyses of a great deal of
incoming information and react to that information in effective ways.
Even while our conscious mind is otherwise occupied, we can interpret,
evaluate, and select information that suits our purposes.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that it is difficult to know ourselves
because there is no direct access to the adaptive unconscious, no
matter how hard we try. Because our minds have evolved to operate
largely outside of consciousness, and nonconscious processing is part of
the architecture of the brain, it may be not be possible to gain direct
access to nonconscious processes. “Making the unconscious conscious”
may be no easier than viewing and understanding the assembly language
controlling our word-processing computer program.
It can thus be fruitless to try to examine the adaptive unconscious by
looking inward. It is often better to deduce the nature of our hidden
minds by looking outward at our behavior and how others react to us,
and coming up with a good narrative. In essence, we must be like biographers
of our own lives, distilling our behavior and feelings into a meaningful
and effective narrative. The best way to author a good self-story is
not necessarily to engage in a lot of navel-gazing introspection, trying to
uncover hidden feelings and motives.
In fact there is evidence that it can be counterproductive to look
inward too much.We will see evidence that introspection about feelings
can cause people to make unwise decisions and to become more confused
about how they feel. To be clear, I am not disparaging all kinds of
introspection. Socrates was only partly wrong that the “unexamined life
is not worth living.” The key is the kind of self-examination people perform,
and the extent to which people attempt to know themselves solely
by looking inward, versus looking outward at their own behavior and
how others react to them.
Preface
It might seem that self-knowledge is a central topic in psychology.
In some ways it is; from Freud onward, psychologists
have been fascinated by the extent to which people
know themselves, the limits of this knowledge, and the
consequences of failures of self-insight. Surprisingly, however,
self-knowledge has not been a mainstream topic in
academic psychology. There are few college courses on self knowledge
and few books devoted to the topic, if we rule
out self-help books and ones from a psychoanalytic point
of view.
I think this is about to change. In recent years there has
been an explosion of scientific research on self-knowledge
that paints a different portrait from the one presented by
Freud and his followers. People possess a powerful, sophisticated,
adaptive unconscious that is crucial for survival in
the world. Because this unconscious operates so efficiently
out of view, however, and is largely inaccessible, there is a
price to pay in self-knowledge. There is a great deal about
ourselves that we cannot know directly, even with the most
painstaking introspection. How, then, can we discover our
nonconscious traits, goals, and feelings? Is it always to our
advantage to do so? To what extent are researchers in academe
rediscovering Freud and psychoanalysis? How can self-knowledge
be studied scientifically, anyway? These are the questions
to which I turn in the following pages. The answers are often surprising
and have direct, practical, implications for everyday living. ...
Chapter 1: Freud's Genius, Freud's Myopia
Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control,—
These three alone lead life to sovereign power.
—Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Oenone” (1833)
What are more important than matters of the heart? Or
more difficult to decipher? Some people are blessed by
knowing exactly what it is their hearts desire, but are
cursed by not knowing how to achieve it. Like King Lear,
some stumble into a course of action precisely opposite to
the one that would satisfy their hearts and minds. Because
of their own pride, stubbornness, or lack of self-insight,
their goals remain unfulfilled.
But at least such people know what they want, be it their
daughters’ devotion, a lover’s embrace, or peace of mind. A
worse fate is not knowing what it is our hearts desire. Consider
Marcel, in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, who
is convinced that he no longer loves Albertine and broods
and plots and schemes about ways of leaving her, until his
housekeeper rushes in with the news that Albertine has left
him. At the instant he hears the words, Marcel realizes how
much he still loves Albertine: “These words: ‘Mademoiselle
Albertine has gone!’ had expressed themselves in my heart
in the form of an anguish so keen that I would not be able
to endure it for any length of time. And so what I had
supposed to mean nothing to me was the only thing in my whole life.
How ignorant we are of ourselves.”1
Marcel’s ignorance of his own feelings is far from rare. Consider
Susan, a friend of mine who was once involved with a man named
Stephen. Stephen was a very nice guy, kind and attentive and reliable and
clearly head over heels in love with Susan. Both he and Susan were social
workers and shared many interests. They dated for over a year, and the
relationship seemed to be getting quite serious, except for one problem—
it was obvious to all Susan’s friends that she did not love Stephen.
She thought she did, but as far as we could see, Susan had convinced herself
that she felt something that she didn’t. Stephen was a dear friend, yes,
but was he someone she deeply loved and wanted to spend the rest of her
life with? No way. Eventually Susan realized that she had been mistaken
and ended the relationship.
Perhaps Marcel and Susan are exceptions, people who are especially
blind to their own hearts and minds. Yet I suspect that most of us can
think of times when we were in a similar state of confusion, like Elizabeth
in Pride and Prejudice, who found that her feelings toward Mr.
Darcy “could not be exactly defined”:
She respected, she esteemed, she was grateful to him, she felt a real interest
in his welfare; and she only wanted to know how far she wished that welfare
to depend upon herself, and how far it would be for the happiness of
both that she employ the power, which her fancy told her she still possessed,
of bringing on the renewal of his addresses.2
Imagine that at such times of confusion we could hook ourselves up
to a machine called an Inner Self Detector. After attaching electrodes to
our temples and adjusting the dials we could ask questions like “How do
I really feel about Stephen (or Mr. Darcy)?” After a few whirs and clicks
the machine would display the answer on a little monitor (a more technologically
advanced version, perhaps, of the Magic Eight Ball that kids
use at slumber parties to tell their futures).
To see how people would make use of an Inner Self Detector, I asked
the students in one of my college seminars to list the questions they
would ask of it. Like Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, some of the students
wanted to know how they really felt about someone. One person,
for example, said her first question would be “How do I truly feel about a
couple of people in my life?” How nice it would be to have a machine to
tell us the answer to questions like this!
The students also had questions about the nature of their own personalities,
including their traits and abilities (e.g., “What is my main
objective/motivation in life?” “Why am I socially inept in certain situations?”
“Why do I sometimes lack motivation for doing homework?”).
Some of these questions, such as those about academic performance and
careers, are undoubtedly specific to the uncertainties of early adulthood.
Even seasoned adults, however, sometimes wonder about their personalities
and abilities. Blindness to one’s character can lead people to make
poor choices, such as the man who assumes that he has what it takes to
lead a fulfilling life as a lawyer when he is better suited to be a teacher, or
the woman who turns down an offer to make an important speech
because of the mistaken belief that she could never pull it off.
The students also wanted to know why they felt or acted the way they
did, such as what it was that made them happy. Understanding the
causes of our responses is crucial to avoiding unwanted influences on
our feelings and behavior. Consider a lawyer who interviews an African-
American applicant for a job as an associate in her firm. She finds the
candidate to be cold, unfriendly, and a tad aggressive, and thus recommends
that he not be hired. She is a fair-minded person who believes
that her negative impression had nothing to do with the applicant’s race.
But what if she is wrong, and his race did influence her impression without
her knowing it? She cannot confront her racism and try to change it
if she does not know that it exists and is influencing her judgment.
This book is concerned with two main questions: Why it is that people
often do not know themselves very well (e.g., their own characters, why
they feel the way they do, or even the feelings themselves)? And how can
they increase their self-knowledge? There are undoubtedly many reasons
for a lack of self-insight; people may be blinded by their hubris (a
favorite Greek and Shakespearean theme), confused, or simply never
take the time to examine their own lives and psyche very carefully. The
reason I will address—perhaps the most common of all—is that much
of what we want to know about ourselves resides outside of conscious
awareness.
The idea that a large portion of the human mind is unconscious is not
new and was Freud’s greatest insight. Modern psychology owes Freud a
large debt for his willingness to look beyond the narrow corridor of consciousness.
A revolution has occurred in empirical psychology concerning
the nature of the unconscious, however, that has revealed the limits
of the Freudian conception.
Initially, research psychologists were skittish about even mentioning
nonconscious mental processes. In the first half of the twentieth century,
the behaviorist onslaught in psychology was fueled by a rejection of
mentalism; behaviorists argued that there was no need to take into
account what occurred inside people’s heads, consciously or unconsciously.
In the late 1950s, mainstream psychology took the giant step of
rejecting behaviorism and initiating the systematic study of the mind.
But the first experimental psychologists to leap off the behaviorism
bandwagon said little about whether those aspects of the mind they were
studying were conscious or unconscious. This was a taboo question; few
psychologists wanted to jeopardize the newfound respectability of the
mind as a scientific topic by saying, “Hey, not only can we study what
people are thinking; we can study what goes on inside their heads that
even they can’t see!” In the psychological laboratories of academe, few
self-respecting psychologists wanted to risk the accusation that they
were, God forbid, Freudians.
But as cognitive and social psychology flourished, a funny thing happened.
It became clear that people could not verbalize many of the cognitive
processes that psychologists assumed were occurring inside their
heads. Social psychologists, for example, were developing models of the
way in which people process information about the social world, including
how they formulate and maintain stereotypes of other groups, judge
other people’s personality, and make attributions about the causes of
their own and other people’s actions. The more researchers studied these
mental processes, the clearer it became that people were not aware of
their occurring. When researchers debriefed participants about what
they must have been thinking during their experiments, they were disconcerted
to find that the participants often shook their heads and said,
“That’s a very interesting theory, professor, but I’m afraid that I don’t
recall having had any thoughts remotely like that.”3 Most of the mental
processes studied by cognitive and social psychologists turned out to
occur out of view of the people who had them. This fact became impossible
to ignore, and theories of nonconscious processing began to creep
into experimental psychology.
Still, many psychologists were reluctant to use the word “unconscious,”
out of fear that their colleagues would think they had gone
soft in the head. Several other terms were invented to describe mental
processes that occur outside of conscious awareness, such as “automatic,”
“implicit,” “pre-attentive,” and “procedural.” Sometimes these
terms do a better job of describing a specific type of mental process than
the general term “nonconscious.” The study of automatic processing has
flourished, for example, and a lack of awareness of these processes is only
one of its defining features.4
But the terms “unconscious” or “nonconscious” now appear with
increasing frequency in mainstream journals. A picture has emerged of a
set of pervasive, adaptive, sophisticated mental processes that occur
largely out of view. Indeed, some researchers have gone so far as to suggest
that the unconscious mind does virtually all the work and that conscious
will may be an illusion. Though not everyone is prepared to
relegate conscious thought to the epiphenomenal refuse heap, there is
more agreement than ever before about the importance of nonconscious
thinking, feeling, and motivation.5
The gulf between research psychologists and psychoanalysts has thus
narrowed considerably as scientific psychology has turned its attention
to the study of the unconscious. This gap has not been bridged completely,
however, and it is clear that the modern, adaptive unconscious is
not the same as the psychoanalytic one.
The Adaptive Unconscious versus the Freudian Unconscious
Freud changed his views often, most notably from his topological model
of the mind to the structural theory, with the publication of The Ego and
the Id in 1923. There are also several schools of modern psychoanalytic
thought, with varying emphases on unconscious drives, object relations,
and ego function. To compare the modern view of the adaptive unconscious
with the Freudian unconscious is like trying to aim at moving targets.
Nonetheless there are clear differences between the views.
WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS?
Freud’s topographic model of the mind distinguished between two types
of unconscious processes. First, people have a multitude of thoughts that
are simply not the focus of their current attention, such as the name of
their seventh-grade math teacher. This kind of information is in the preconscious,
Freud said, and could easily be made conscious by directing
attention to it. More importantly, Freud noted, there is a vast storehouse
of primitive, infantile thought that is kept out of consciousness because
it is a source of psychic pain. These kinds of thoughts are repressed for a
purpose, not simply because our attention is drawn elsewhere. Freud’s
subsequent structural model of the mind was more complex, in that it
allocated unconscious processes to the ego and superego as well as to the
id, but he continued to focus on unconscious thought that was primitive
and animalistic, and characterized conscious thought as more rational
and sophisticated.
According to the modern perspective, Freud’s view of the unconscious
was far too limited. When he said (following Gustav Fechner, an early
experimental psychologist) that consciousness is the tip of the mental
iceberg, he was short of the mark by quite a bit—it may be more the size
of a snowball on top of that iceberg. The mind operates most efficiently
by relegating a good deal of high-level, sophisticated thinking to the
unconscious, just as a modern jumbo jetliner is able to fly on automatic
pilot with little or no input from the human, “conscious” pilot. The
adaptive unconscious does an excellent job of sizing up the world, warn-
ing people of danger, setting goals, and initiating action in a sophisticated
and efficient manner. It is a necessary and extensive part of a highly
efficient mind and not just the demanding child of the mental family
and the defenses that have developed to keep this child in check.
Nor is the unconscious a single entity with a mind and will of its own.
Rather, humans possess a collection of modules that have evolved over
time and operate outside of consciousness. Though I will often refer to
the adaptive unconscious as a convenient shorthand, I do not mean to
characterize it as a single entity, as the Freudian unconscious typically is.
For example, we have a nonconscious language processor that enables us
to learn and use language with ease, but this mental module is relatively
independent of our ability to recognize faces quickly and efficiently and
our ability to form quick evaluations of whether environmental events
are good or bad. It is thus best to think of the adaptive unconscious as
a collection of city-states of the human mind and not as a single
homunculus like the Wizard of Oz, pulling strings behind the curtain of
conscious awareness.6
WHY DOES THE UNCONSCIOUS EXIST?
Freud argued that our primitive urges often do not reach consciousness
because they are unacceptable to our more rational, conscious selves and
to society at large; they “remind one of the legendary Titans, weighed
down since primaeval ages by the massive bulk of the mountains which
were once hurled upon them by the victorious gods.”7 People have developed
myriad defenses to avoid knowing what their unconscious motives
and feelings are, some of which (sublimation) are healthier than others
(repression, reaction formation, etc.). The therapeutic process involves
the elucidation and circumvention of unhealthy defenses, which is difficult
precisely because people are so motivated to keep their unconscious
motives and feelings hidden.
According to the modern view, there is a simpler reason for the existence
of unconscious mental processes. People cannot directly examine
how many parts of their minds work, such as basic processes of perception,
memory, and language comprehension, not because it would be
anxiety provoking to do so, but because these parts of the mind are inaccessible
to conscious awareness—quite possibly because they evolved
before consciousness did. If we were to ask people to tell us exactly how
they perceive the world in three dimensions, for example, or how their
minds are able to parse a continuous stream of noise emitted by another
person into comprehensible speech, they would be quite tongue-tied.
Consciousness is a limited-capacity system, and to survive in the world
people must be able to process a great deal of information outside of
awareness. Carl Jung acknowledged this point in the 1920s:
The unconscious has also still another aspect: within its compass are
included not only the repressed content but also all such psychical material
as does not reach the threshold of consciousness. It is impossible to
explain the sub-threshold character of all this material by the principle of
repression, otherwise a man, at the release of repression, would certainly
achieve a phenomenal memory that forgot nothing.8
Freud undoubtedly would agree, saying something like “Yes, yes, but
this kind of unconscious thinking is the small stuff; nuts and bolts, low level
thinking that is much less interesting than matters of the heart and
mind, such as love, work, and play. Of course we do not have conscious
access to such things as how we perceive depth, just as we do not have
conscious access to how our digestive tracts operate. The fact remains
that repression is the reason why more important, higher-order mental
processing is unconscious. People could directly access their primitive
urges and desires, if repression and resistance were circumvented, but
generally we do our best to keep such thoughts and feelings outside of
awareness.”
In contrast, the modern view of the adaptive unconscious is that a lot
of the interesting stuff about the human mind—judgments, feelings,
motives—occur outside of awareness for reasons of efficiency, and not
because of repression. Just as the architecture of the mind prevents low level
processing (e.g., perceptual processes) from reaching consciousness,
so are many higher-order psychological processes and states
inaccessible. The mind is a well-designed system that is able to accom-
plish a great deal in parallel, by analyzing and thinking about the world
outside of awareness while consciously thinking about something else.
This is not to deny that some thoughts are quite threatening and that
people are sometimes motivated to avoid knowing them. Repression
may not, however, be the most important reason why people do not have
conscious access to thoughts, feelings, or motives. The implications of
this fact for how to gain access to the unconscious cannot be underestimated
and are a major topic of this book.
The Non-Freudian Unconscious
To illustrate further how the adaptive unconscious differs from the
Freudian version, let’s engage in a bit of counterfactual history, in which
we imagine how ideas about the unconscious would have developed if
Freud had never proposed his theory of psychoanalysis. To do so, it is
necessary to consider briefly the status of pre-Freudian thinking about
unconscious processes.
In the nineteenth century, the long shadow of Descartes influenced
thinking about the nature of the unconscious. Descartes is best known
for his sharp division of the mind and the body. So-called Cartesian
dualism, or the “mind-body” problem, has occupied philosophers and
psychologists ever since. Many have rightly objected to the idea that the
mind and the body are separate entities that obey different laws, and
few philosophers or psychologists today would identify themselves as
dualists; in fact Antonio Damasio has dubbed the “abyssal separation
between body and mind” as “Descartes’s error.”9
Descartes made a related error that is less well known but no less egregious.
Not only did he endow the mind with a special status that was
unrelated to physical laws; he also restricted the mind to consciousness.
The mind consists of all that people consciously think, he argued, and
nothing else. This equation of thinking and consciousness eliminates,
with one swift stroke, any possibility of nonconscious thought—a move
that was called the “Cartesian catastrophe” by Arthur Koestler and “one
of fundamental blunders made by the human mind” by Lancelot Whyte.
Koestler rightly notes that this idea led to an impoverishment of psychology
which it took three centuries to remedy.10
Despite Descartes's blunder, a number of nineteenth-century European
theorists, such as Pascal, Leibniz, Schelling, and Herbart, began
to postulate the presence of nonconscious perception and thought.
Especially noteworthy were a group of British physicians and philosophers
who developed ideas about nonconscious processing that were
openly anti-Cartesian and remarkably similar to current thinking about
the adaptive unconscious. These prescient theorists, especially William
Hamilton, Thomas Laycock, and William Carpenter, can rightly be called
the parents of the modern theory of the adaptive unconscious. They
observed that a good deal of human perception, memory, and action
occurs without conscious deliberation or will, and concluded that
there must be 'mental latency' (Hamiltonfs term, drawing on Leibniz),
'unconscious cerebration' (Carpenterfs term), or a 'reflex action of the
brain' (Laycockfs term).11 Their description of nonconscious processes
is remarkably similar to modern views; indeed, quotations from some of
their writings could easily be mistaken for entries in modern psychologicaljournals:
-Lower-order mental processes occur outside of awareness. Hamilton,
Carpenter, and Laycock observed that the human perceptual system
operates largely outside of conscious awareness, an observation also
made by Hermann Helmholtz. Though this view seems obvious today
it was not widely accepted at the time, largely as a result of the legacy of
Cartesian dualism. It was not widely accepted by modern psychologists
until the cognitive revolution of the 1950s.
- Divided attention. William Hamilton observed that people can consciously
attend to one thing while nonconsciously processing another.
He gave the example of a person who is reading aloud and finds that
his or her thoughts have wandered onto some other topic altogether:
"If the matter be uninteresting, your thoughts, while you are going on
in the performance of your task, are wholly abstracted from the book
and its subject, and you are perhaps deeply occupied in a train of seri-
ous meditation. Here the process of reading is performed without
interruption, and with the most punctual accuracy; and, at the same
time, the process of meditation is carried on without distraction or
fatigue."12 Hamilton foreshadowed the influential theories of selective
attention that were developed a century later.
- Automaticity of thought. The nineteenth-century theorists argued that
thinking can become so habitual as to occur outside of awareness with
no conscious attention, an idea that was not formally developed in
psychology until the 1970s. William Carpenter, for example, noted
that "The more thoroughly . . . we examine into what may be termed
the Mechanism of Thought, the more clear does it become that not
only an automatic, but an unconscious action enters largely into all its
processes."h13
- Implications of nonconscious processing for prejudice. One of the most
interesting properties of the adaptive unconscious is that it uses
stereotypes to categorize and evaluate other people. William Carpenter
presaged this work more than a century ago, by noting that people
develop habitual "tendencies of thought" that are nonconscious and
that these thought patterns can lead to "unconscious prejudices which
we thus form, [that] are often stronger than the conscious; and they are
the more dangerous, because we cannot knowingly guard against
them."14
- Lack of awareness of one's own feelings. A controversial claim about the
adaptive unconscious is that it can produce feelings and preferences of
which people are unaware. Carpenter argued that emotional reactions
can occur outside of awareness until our attention is drawn to them:
"Our feelings towards persons and objects may undergo most important
changes,without our being in the least degree aware, until we have
our attention directed to our own mental state, of the alteration which
has taken place in them."15
- A nonconscious self. Do central parts of our personalities reside out of
view, such that we do not have access to important aspects of who we
are? William Hamilton wrote extensively about the way in which
habits acquired early in life become an indispensable part of one's
personality.16 These mental processes were said to constitute a kind of
“automatic self” to which people had no conscious access—an idea
that was not to reappear in psychology for more than 100 years.
Why has Hamilton, Laycock, and Carpenter’s work largely been forgotten?
The answer, in no small part, is that the very different kind of
unconscious proposed by Freud prevented these views from ever making
it to the center stage. To my knowledge Freud never quoted or referred to
these theorists. If he was aware of their writings, he probably viewed
their ideas as irrelevant to the dynamic, repressive Unconscious with a
capital U.
But what if Freud had never proposed his theory of psychoanalysis?
Imagine that the anti-Semitism of nineteenth-century Vienna had not
blocked Freud’s budding career as a university professor studying physiology,
and he had continued to investigate the spinal cords of fish. Or
imagine that he had become addicted to the cocaine he experimented
with in 1884, or had never met Josef Breuer, with whom he began his
seminal studies of hysteria. As with any life, there are an infinite number
of “what ifs” that might have changed the course of Freud’s career.
Imagine that experimental psychology began as a discipline uninfluenced
by psychoanalytic thinking in two key respects. First, researchers
felt no need to distance themselves from difficult-to-test ideas about
a dynamic unconscious. They were free to theorize about nonconscious
thinking in the same way that Laycock, Carpenter, and Hamilton
had, namely as a collection of efficient and sophisticated information processing
systems. Second, they were free to investigate the mind, even
the parts that were unconscious, with experimental techniques. An
important part of the Freudian legacy was a rejection of the scientific
method as a means of studying the mind. The complex nature of unconscious
processes could not be examined in controlled experiments,
Freud believed, and could be uncovered only by careful clinical observation.
Astute clinical observation can be quite illuminating, of course, but
psychologists might have turned sooner to the experimental study of
mental processes without this methodological limitation.
Even in a Freudian vacuum, researchers interested in the unconscious
would still have had to contend with the behaviorist movement, which
regarded the mind as unworthy of study by any method. One reason
behaviorism flourished in the early and mid-twentieth century, however,
was that it provided a scientific alternative to what was viewed as the
fuzziness of psychoanalytic concepts and methods. Without this backdrop,
it is possible that psychology would have discovered sooner than it
did that the mind, including the nonconscious mind, can be studied
scientifically.
Thus, in my counterfactual fantasy, cognitive and social psychologists
applied their well-honed experimental techniques to the study of the
sophisticated, adaptive unconscious sooner than they actually did. Undeterred
by the theoretical and methodological obstacles psychoanalysis
created for experimental psychology, research and theorizing on the
adaptive unconscious flourished.
This counterfactual history is sure to offend those who find Freud’s
views indispensable in theorizing about the unconscious. Some theorists,
such as Matthew Erdelyi and Drew Westen, have argued persuasively
that psychoanalysis was crucial to the development of modern
thinking about the unconscious, and that, indeed, modern research has
largely corroborated Freud’s major insights about the nature of unconscious
thought.18
I agree that Freud’s greatest insight was about the pervasiveness of
unconscious thinking and we owe him a tremendous debt for his
dogged, creative pursuit of the nature of the unconscious mind. It is
hard to deny the importance of an infantile, dynamic, crafty, Freudian
unconscious, in part because the psychoanalytic narrative is so seductive
and explains so much. My counterfactual exercise is meant simply to
illustrate that it is not the only narrative about the unconscious, and that
we might have reached the current one more quickly if psychoanalysis
had not so dominated the intellectual stage.
The narrative of the adaptive unconscious might appear to remove all
that is interesting about unconscious processing. The reader with a psychoanalytic
bent might find the adaptive unconscious, with its emphasis
on automatic information processing, to be dry, emotionless, and, perhaps
worst of all, boring. The Freudian unconscious is ingenious, clever,
and sexy and has been the topic of great literature at least since Sophocles.
There are few great plays or novels on the automatic pilot of the
mind, and focusing exclusively on the adaptive unconscious may seem
like talking about romantic love without passion and sex.
This view is misleading, however, because it underestimates the role
that the adaptive unconscious plays in all the important and interesting
things in life, including Freud’s arbeiten und lieben (work and love). As
we will see, the adaptive unconscious is not involved in just the small
stuff, but plays a major role in all facets of life. The failure to find great
literature on the adaptive unconscious may say more about the pervasiveness
of psychoanalytic thinking than about anything else.
Yet the modern view of the unconscious is not anti-Freudian. To say
that we possess a sophisticated and efficient set of nonconscious
processes that are indispensable for navigating our way through the
world is not to deny that there may also be dynamic forces at work keeping
unpleasant thoughts out of awareness. There will be times, in the
chapters to come, when we encounter phenomena that have a Freudian
hue to them, whereby it seems that the forces of repression are at work.
Some readers might react by saying, “Hey, didn’t Freud say that?”—and
the answer might well be that he, or one of his many followers, did. The
question to keep in mind, though, is “Do we need Freudian theory to
explain that? Are there simpler explanations for the kinds of unconscious
phenomena he discussed?”
Sometimes the answer may be that Freud was right about the dynamic,
repressed nature of the unconscious. On other occasions the
answer might be that although Freud did not say it, one of his many followers
did, particularly those who have moved beyond an emphasis on
childhood drives and stressed the role of object relations and the ego
functioning. Often, however, we will see evidence for a vast nonconscious
system quite different from what Freud imagined.
Furthermore, Freud and his followers often disagreed about key
points, and over his long career Freud himself changed his mind about
key concepts such as the nature of repression. The question thus arises of
how we know which of these many ideas are true. A tremendous advantage
of the modern psychological approach is a reliance on the experimental
method to investigate mental phenomena. There has been an
explosion of research on the adaptive unconscious because of the development
of some quite clever experimental techniques to study it, many
of which we will discuss here. Clinical observations and case histories
can be a rich source of hypotheses about the nature of the unconscious,
but in the end we must put such ideas to the test in a more rigorous and
scientific manner. Thus, even if the answer is “Yes, Freud did say that,” he
or his followers might also have said something entirely different, and it
is only through the work of empirically minded psychologists that we
can tell the true nuggets from the fool’s gold.
Implications for Self-Insight
Another key difference between the Freudian and modern approach lies
in their views of how to attain self-insight. Psychoanalysis shares with
many other approaches the assumption that the path to self-knowledge
leads inward. Through careful introspection, the argument goes, we can
penetrate the haze that obscures our true feelings and motives. No one
claims that such introspection is easy. People must recognize the barriers
of repression and resistance and remove them. But when such insight is
accomplished, often with the aid of a therapist, people have direct access
to their unconscious desires. “It is the task of the analyst,” wrote Anna
Freud, “to bring into consciousness that which is unconscious”—an
assumption made by all forms of insight therapy.19
But here’s the problem: research on the adaptive unconscious suggests
that much of what we want to see is unseeable. The mind is a wonderfully
sophisticated and efficient tool, more so than the most powerful
computer ever built. An important source of its tremendous power is
its ability to perform quick, nonconscious analyses of a great deal of
incoming information and react to that information in effective ways.
Even while our conscious mind is otherwise occupied, we can interpret,
evaluate, and select information that suits our purposes.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that it is difficult to know ourselves
because there is no direct access to the adaptive unconscious, no
matter how hard we try. Because our minds have evolved to operate
largely outside of consciousness, and nonconscious processing is part of
the architecture of the brain, it may be not be possible to gain direct
access to nonconscious processes. “Making the unconscious conscious”
may be no easier than viewing and understanding the assembly language
controlling our word-processing computer program.
It can thus be fruitless to try to examine the adaptive unconscious by
looking inward. It is often better to deduce the nature of our hidden
minds by looking outward at our behavior and how others react to us,
and coming up with a good narrative. In essence, we must be like biographers
of our own lives, distilling our behavior and feelings into a meaningful
and effective narrative. The best way to author a good self-story is
not necessarily to engage in a lot of navel-gazing introspection, trying to
uncover hidden feelings and motives.
In fact there is evidence that it can be counterproductive to look
inward too much.We will see evidence that introspection about feelings
can cause people to make unwise decisions and to become more confused
about how they feel. To be clear, I am not disparaging all kinds of
introspection. Socrates was only partly wrong that the “unexamined life
is not worth living.” The key is the kind of self-examination people perform,
and the extent to which people attempt to know themselves solely
by looking inward, versus looking outward at their own behavior and
how others react to them.
