Some Observations Concerning Out-of-Awareness Mentation

SOME OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING OUT-OF-AWARENESS MENTATION THOMAS P. MILLAR* Introduction The notion of the unconscious mind was not new with Freud but was elaborated upon by psychoanalysis until it became a repository of disowned and primitive instinctual strivings of such energie preeminence that these were deemed to dominate later behavior choice not just in neurotics but in all humans. This is the Freudian conception of the unconscious mind. It has not stood the test of time [I]. It was Freud's view that repression was responsible for the out-ofawareness status of emotionally tinged mentation. While it is not germane to this article to go into detail, Grünbaum, in his penetrating examination of psychoanalytic theory, clearly establishes that the notion of repression is perhaps the most seriously flawed of the fundamental Freudian tenets [2]. However, there is no question that mental operations out of the awareness of the individual do occur, and recent biological findings are assembling a picture of the neurological substrate serving this hidden capacity of whole mind. In some uncertain alliance, limbic lobe and right brain appear to reign over this kingdom, but the details of their anatomical and functional contract are still tantalizingly obscure. This work has recently been summarized by Restack [3]. The time has come to rethink the unconscious in the light of these recent neurobiological advances. In order to avoid connotations regularly associated with the word "unconscious," another term—"out-ofawareness "—will be used herein to refer to the mentation involved. A number of questions must be addressed. What are the characteristics of out-of-awareness mentation as opposed to conscious thought? Why is out-of-awareness mentation rather than conscious cognition *Suite 23, 659 Clyde Avenue, West Vancouver, B.C. V7T 1C8, Canada.© 1990 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 003 1-5982/90/3302-0664$0 1 .00 280 I Thomas P. Millar · Out-of-Awareness Mentation utilized for particular mental operations and not others? Is mentation out-of-awareness because its subject matter is emotionally loaded? Is some out-of-awareness mentation emotionally neutral? The answers to these questions may best be approached by first considering a familiar type of out-of-awareness mentation. Habituated Behavior Patterns If one drives the same route home from work regularly, it is often the case that one arrives at one's doorstep having minimally registered the details of thejourney. Of course, during the first month or two of making the commute, one looks for route and landmarks, but soon one is leaving work and arriving home with no conscious memory of the stops and turns, the passings and avoidings of the trip. Clearly, all the driving decisions were made out-of-awareness. One's hands, eyes, and some portion of mind were attending to the task, while consciousness was filled with other things. To be sure, full awareness of the driving task would havejolted to the surface if some emergency had arisen, but, barring such, it is possible to manage the entire trip without consciously registering the events of the complicated journey. It is characteristic of certain types of out-of-awareness mentation to be, or become, habitual. For example, if the commuter moves, there is a good chance that, for a month or two, he will occasionally be surprised to find he has arrived at his old doorstep. His previous habituated, out-ofawareness sequence has reasserted itself. The mentation that subserves such repetitive behavior becomes patterned , and, once the pattern is set, conscious mind can carry on other mental activities, ofttimes complex and decisional ones, at the same time as the out-of-awareness mentation is going on. The one mental activity does not usually interfere with the other. Obviously, this arrangement multiplies the competence of whole mind, which economizes by using complicated cognitive ratiocination only when it is needed. First, mind applies its cognitive powers to solving a problem, then, once the situation has been mastered, future performance of the task is relegated to a lesser level of mental function, thus conserving conscious cognition for the tasks only it can perform. So we have a partial answer to our first question: why use out-ofawareness mentation instead...