Instead of asking why psychoanalysis has lost its central position in mental health, one might marvel at its longevity when considering that psychoanalysts have not attained agreement about basic methods for observing unconscious mentation, either their own or that of others. Ambiguity abounds regarding the operations involved in, and the usefulness of, introspection, and even more so of empath...

Most researchers leverage bottom-up suppression to unlock the underlying mechanisms of unconscious processing. However, a top-down approach - for example via hypnotic suggestion - paves the road to experimental innovation and complementary data that afford new scientific insights concerning attention and the unconscious. Drawing from a reliable taxonomy that differentiates subliminal and precon...

A great deal of complex cognitive processing occurs at the unconscious level and affects how humans behave, think, and feel. Scientists are only now beginning to understand how this occurs on the neural level. Understanding the neural basis of consciousness requires an account of the neural mechanisms that underlie both conscious and unconscious thought, and their dynamic interaction. For examp...

All conscious perceptions are alike but each unconscious perception is unconscious in its own way. This “Anna Karenina” (Tolstoy, 1901, first sentence) principle concerning unconscious perception (Block, 2011) holds because conscious perception is a matter of oscillating feed-forward and feed-back signals that are uniform in the essential features of their successes but variegated in their fail...

In the study of human behavior, motivation is a basic psychological process, like perception and learning. On the other hand, it must be remembered that motivation should not be thought as the only explanation of behavior. Many people equate the causes of perception and learning, it is presented here as being a very important process in understanding behavior. It interacts with and acts in conj...

The unity of the personality is the keystone of Individual Psychology. Not only the reason, the will, memory, the unconscious, but the life-philosophy and the psychology which an individual accepts are the expression of his "style of life"?"every psychologist talks the language of his own either original, or subsequently modified, style of life." It is therefore possible to trace the connection...

Although the concept of the defense mechanism was rejected from academic psychology for a number of years, recent empirical studies show renewed interest in defenses. Cognitive psychologists have confirmed the existence of unconscious psychological processes, a requisite for defenses. Developmental, personality, and social psychologists have all found evidence for defense mechanisms that explic...