Since the 1980s, a substantial body of literature has emerged exploring application psychoanalytic theory in field translation. Lawrence Venuti’s article, “The Difference That Translation Makes: The Translator’s Unconscious,” occupies prominent position within this for two significant reasons: First, challenging descriptive paradigm neglecting translator’s unconscious while primarily focusing o...

I am sometimes asked where I find the material that goes into these columns and whether it is difficult to write something new every month. When I started it was easy because I had a large stock of material accumulated over many years during which I did not write columns. And, yes it is becoming increasingly difficult as the stock has dwindled with the passage of time. I am always on the lookou...

Eye contact captures attention and receives prioritized visual processing. Here we asked whether eye contact might be processed outside conscious awareness. Faces with direct and averted gaze were rendered invisible using interocular suppression. In two experiments we found that faces with direct gaze overcame such suppression more rapidly than faces with averted gaze. Control experiments ruled...

Conscious feelings have traditionally been viewed as a central and necessary ingredient of emotion. Here we argue that emotion also can be genuinely unconscious. We describe evidence that positive and negative reactions can be elicited subliminally and remain inaccessible to introspection. Despite the absence of subjective feelings in such cases, subliminally induced affective reactions still i...

We present a theory about human thought named the unconscious-thought theory (UTT). The theory is applicable to decision making, impression formation, attitude formation and change, problem solving, and creativity. It distinguishes between two modes of thought: unconscious and conscious. Unconscious thought and conscious thought have different characteristics, and these different characteristic...

According to Steven Pinker’s blurb on the dust jacket, ‘‘Ray Jackendoff is a monumental scholar in linguistics who, more than any other scholar alive today, has shown how language can serve as a window into human nature. Combining theoretical depth with a love of revealing detail, Ray Jackendoff illuminates human reason and consciousness in startling and insightful ways.’’ Jackendoff is the aut...

The question about whether there is a political unconscious can be understood in two ways. First, it could refer to our (in the Freudian or Lacanian sense) political. Secondly, mean: are (social, economic...) structures, institutions, and processes that unconscious, sense we do not perceive them “normally” (whatever means exactly) nor reflect on them? I want focus this second meaning and, above...

Cognitive control processes involving prefrontal cortex allow humans to overrule and inhibit habitual responses to optimize performance in new and challenging situations, and traditional views hold that cognitive control is tightly linked with consciousness. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate to what extent unconscious "no-go" stimuli are capable of reaching cortical a...