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Paul Grobstein's picture

the freudian and the cognitive unconscious

Yep, I agree that there are interesting similarities in the two stories, certainly enough to encourage the two communities to talk more together than they do. See Making the Unconscious Conscious: A Bi-Directional Bridge Between Neuroscience/Cognitive Science and Psychotherapy.

That they don't connect as well as they might is partly for historical/sociological reasons, but there are as wel significant differences between the freudian unconscious (even as it has evolved today) and the "cognitive unconscious," a term that I've borrowed but that is itself understood differently by different users of it. Those differences may in the long run as important to bridging the gap as the similarities.

The "cognitive unconscious" in my usage is neither "primitive" nor the detritus of things that have previously been conscious nor independent of culture. It is instead a quite sophisticated information processing system that learns and is altered by culture. Perhaps most importantly, it is the essential foundation of consciousness rather than a by product of it. Nothing reaches consciousness except via initial processing in the unconscious.

Along similar lines, consciousness (conceived now as the "I-function" or "story teller" is not something whose business it is to constrain the unconscious but rather a system that acts to integrate a disparate set of unconscious elements and, in so doing, to influence their function. The primary function is not to "control" but rather to provide candidate "stories" which are in turn tested by the elements of the unconscious. It is not a "director" but a "fuschia dot" (see The Brain, Story Sharing, and Social Organization).

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