The Last Rites of the Dynamic Unconscious

OUR FEATURE ARTICLE highlighted the failure of recent attempts to shore up the psychoanalytic concept of the dynamic unconscious by invoking empirical evidence derived from cognitive science in favor of the cognitive unconscious. In fact, we argued that recent work in cognitive science suggests that it is time to dispense with the concept of the dynamic unconscious altogether. The responses to our arguments from our two commentators are representative of the schism that marks the contemporary assessment of Freudian psychoanalytic theory as a whole. Woody, on the one hand, is in substantial agreement with the position we develop, and spends his commentary developing further considerations as to why Freud and his followers got the unconscious so wrong. Kroll, on the other, claims that we have failed to show any incompatibility between the dynamic unconscious and the cognitive unconscious, and argues that the former still has an important role to play in the explanation of human motivation and behavior.

It will come as no surprise to learn that we will spend the bulk of what follows responding to Kroll's negative evaluation of our position. We do, nonetheless, want to add some thoughts to Woody's insightful analysis of why the psychoanalytic conception of consciousness is so impoverished. This is where we begin.

Telling Less Than We Know

In one of the more influential articles published in the field of cognitive psychology, "Telling more than we can know," Nisbett and Wilson argue that our introspective access to the higher-order cognitive processes underlying complex behaviors such as judgment, inference, and problem solving is severely limited (1977). As a consequence, when people report on their cognitive processes, as they readily do, these proffered explanations, according to Nisbett and Wilson, are based more on implicit theories we hold about thinking than on any direct access to thinking itself. Rather than accurate descriptions of what goes on in our minds, these verbal reports are confabulations.

These skeptical views about introspection, along with the dominance of computational models that emphasize that most of human cognition occurs unconsciously, have led to a climate in cognitive science that fosters an austere conception of the contents of consciousness. This conception is reinforced further by the popularity of characterizations of consciousness that equate what is consciously experienced with what can be verbally reported. As we observed in the feature article, because there is so much in experience that is difficult to describe in language, these characterizations have the effect of emptying consciousness of a great deal of its more interesting and significant phenomenal contents.

The impoverished conception of consciousness that results from aligning it with verbal reports is the focus of Woody's commentary. He points out that making consciousness dependent on language drastically simplifies the stream of consciousness and consigns much of its complexity and subtle richness to the unconscious. This is especially true, he thinks, of the life of feeling: "We have far richer language for distinguishing the varieties of mosses and moths than the subtleties of human emotions." Why did Freud and his followers embrace such an implausibly arid conception of consciousness? Woody's explanation is that they have succumbed to what William James calls the psychologist's fallacy: insufficiently distinguishing the perspective on the world afforded by one's own mental states from the potentially very different perspectives afforded by the mental states of others. The villain here, according to James, is language. Because we are forced to communicate our conscious experiences by naming the objects they are about, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that because your experience is about the same object as mine, it must have the same content as mine.

We certainly think this is part of the explanation. But we think there is more to the story, especially where affective phenomenology is concerned. To make this point, however, we need make a brief digression into the cognitive science of...