Unconscious Mental Activity 1 Revising Scientific Models of Unconscious Mental Activity

The question posed for this presentation is: What revisions are necessary in scientific models of unconscious mental activity? The discovery of the unconscious is commonly attributed to Sigmund Freud, but the idea of unconscious mental activity can be traced back at least to Leibniz’s notion of unconscious petites perceptions, and Helmholtz’s argument that conscious perception is mediated by unconscious inferences. At the end of the 18th century, Kant discussed "the ideas which we have without being conscious of them", and in 1890, fully two years before Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, William James elaborated a concept of “subconscious ” or “co-conscious ” mental states, based largely on the work of Freud’s French rival, Pierre Janet. Still, Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and technique popularized the notion of unconscious mental life. The behaviorist revolution in psychology proscribed discussions of both consciousness and unconscious mental life, but the cognitive revolution of the 1950s and 1960s revived interest in consciousness. The “rediscovery ” of the unconscious followed soon thereafter, prompted by research on the Stroop effect, skilled reading, and visual search; experimental studies of hypnotic analgesia and posthypnotic amnesia; solid evidence of “subliminal ” perception, and neuropsychological studies of th