Abstract

Abstract:

Recent psychological and cognitive scientific studies outside psychoanalysis have further demonstrated an active collaboration of unconscious and conscious deliberation, so that the classical Freudian Other—the unconscious—might now be better conceived as serving, under certain circumstances, the ego’s own agenda by learning normative constructs that guide the subject in its mediating functions with social and natural environments. Such dialogue between conscious and unconscious locales of the mind supports those formulations that resist the dichotomies of a rational ego and an a-rational id pitted against each other, and substitutes instead a conception of the mind that squarely places unconscious mental processes as integral to a functionally effective ego. Freud, in his last model of the mind, sought to better integrate discrete mental domains and current evidence supports the intuition that drove his theoretical development. Seeing him as a cognitivist excavates the underlying structure of his thinking, which remains highly relevant today.

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