Strangers to Ourselves

by Timothy D Wilson

  The unconscious has also still another aspect: within its compass are included not only the repressed content but also all such psychical material as does not reach the threshold of consciousness. It is impossible to explain the sub-threshold character of all this material by the principle of repression, otherwise a man, at the release of repression, would certainly achieve a phenomenal memory that forgot nothing."

  Freud undoubtedly would agree, saying something like "Yes, yes, but this kind of unconscious thinking is the small stuff; nuts and bolts, lowlevel thinking that is much less interesting than matters of the heart and mind, such as love, work, and play. Of course we do not have conscious access to such things as how we perceive depth, just as we do not have conscious access to how our digestive tracts operate. The fact remains that repression is the reason why more important, higher-order mental processing is unconscious. People could directly access their primitive urges and desires, if repression and resistance were circumvented, but generally we do our best to keep such thoughts and feelings outside of awareness."

  In contrast, the modern view of the adaptive unconscious is that a lot of the interesting stuff about the human mind-judgments, feelings, motives-occur outside of awareness for reasons of efficiency, and not because of repression. Just as the architecture of the mind prevents lowlevel processing (e.g., perceptual processes) from reaching consciousness, so are many higher-order psychological processes and states inaccessible. The mind is a well-designed system that is able to accom plish a great deal in parallel, by analyzing and thinking about the world outside of awareness while consciously thinking about something else. This is not to deny that some thoughts are quite threatening and that people are sometimes motivated to avoid knowing them. Repression may not, however, be the most important reason why people do not have conscious access to thoughts, feelings, or motives. The implications of this fact for how to gain access to the unconscious cannot be underestimated and are a major topic of this book.

  The Non-Freudian Unconscious

  To illustrate further how the adaptive unconscious differs from the Freudian version, let's engage in a bit of counterfactual history, in which we imagine how ideas about the unconscious would have developed if Freud had never proposed his theory of psychoanalysis. To do so, it is necessary to consider briefly the status of pre-Freudian thinking about unconscious processes.

  In the nineteenth century, the long shadow of Descartes influenced thinking about the nature of the unconscious. Descartes is best known for his sharp division of the mind and the body. So-called Cartesian dualism, or the "mind-body" problem, has occupied philosophers and psychologists ever since. Many have rightly objected to the idea that the mind and the body are separate entities that obey different laws, and few philosophers or psychologists today would identify themselves as dualists; in fact Antonio Damasio has dubbed the "abyssal separation between body and mind" as "Descartes's error."'

  Descartes made a related error that is less well known but no less egregious. Not only did he endow the mind with a special status that was unrelated to physical laws; he also restricted the mind to consciousness. The mind consists of all that people consciously think, he argued, and nothing else. This equation of thinking and consciousness eliminates, with one swift stroke, any possibility of nonconscious thought-a move that was called the "Cartesian catastrophe" by Arthur Koestler and "one of fundamental blunders made by the human mind" by Lancelot Whyte. Koestler rightly notes that this idea led to "an impoverishment of psychology which it took three centuries to remedy."10

  Despite Descartes's blunder, a number of nineteenth-century European theorists, such as Pascal, Leibniz, Schelling, and Herbart, began to postulate the presence of nonconscious perception and thought. Especially noteworthy were a group of British physicians and philosophers who developed ideas about nonconscious processing that were openly anti-Cartesian and remarkably similar to current thinking about the adaptive unconscious. These prescient theorists, especially William Hamilton, Thomas Laycock, and William Carpenter, can rightly be called the parents of the modern theory of the adaptive unconscious. They observed that a good deal of human perception, memory, and action occurs without conscious deliberation or will, and concluded that there must be "mental latency" (Hamilton's term, drawing on Leibniz), "unconscious cerebration" (Carpenter's term), or a "reflex action of the brain" (Laycock's term)." Their description of nonconscious processes is remarkably similar to modern views; indeed, quotations from some of their writings could easily be mistaken for entries in modern psychological journals:

  • Lower-order mental processes occur outside of awareness. Hamilton, Carpenter, and Laycock observed that the human perceptual system operates largely outside of conscious awareness, an observation also made by Hermann Helmholtz. Though this view seems obvious today it was not widely accepted at the time, largely as a result of the legacy of Cartesian dualism. It was not widely accepted by modern psychologists until the cognitive revolution of the 1950s.

  • Divided attention. William Hamilton observed that people can consciously attend to one thing while nonconsciously processing another. He gave the example of a person who is reading aloud and finds that his or her thoughts have wandered onto some other topic altogether: "If the matter be uninteresting, your thoughts, while you are going on in the performance of your task, are wholly abstracted from the book and its subject, and you are perhaps deeply occupied in a train of seri ous meditation. Here the process of reading is performed without interruption, and with the most punctual accuracy; and, at the same time, the process of meditation is carried on without distraction or fatigue."" Hamilton foreshadowed the influential theories of selective attention that were developed a century later.

  • Automaticity of thought. The nineteenth-century theorists argued that thinking can become so habitual as to occur outside of awareness with no conscious attention, an idea that was not formally developed in psychology until the 1970s. William Carpenter, for example, noted that "The more thoroughly ... we examine into what may be termed the Mechanism of Thought, the more clear does it become that not only an automatic, but an unconscious action enters largely into all its processes.""

  • Implications of nonconscious processing for prejudice. One of the most interesting properties of the adaptive unconscious is that it uses stereotypes to categorize and evaluate other people. William Carpenter presaged this work more than a century ago, by noting that people develop habitual "tendencies of thought" that are nonconscious and that these thought patterns can lead to "unconscious prejudices which we thus form, [that] are often stronger than the conscious; and they are the more dangerous, because we cannot knowingly guard against them."4

  • Lack of awareness of one's own feelings. A controversial claim about the adaptive unconscious is that it can produce feelings and preferences of which people are unaware. Carpenter argued that emotional reactions can occur outside of awareness until our attention is drawn to them: "Our feelings towards persons and objects may undergo most important changes, without our being in the least degree aware, until we have our attention directed to our own mental state, of the alteration which has taken place in them.""

  • A nonconscious self. Do central parts of our personalities reside out of view, such that we do not have access to important aspects of who we are? William Hamilton wrote extensively about the way in which habits acquired early in life become an indispensable part of one's personality.'6 These mental processes were said to constitute a kind of "automatic self" to which people had no conscious access-an idea that was not to reappear in psychology for more than 100 years.

  Why has Hamilton, Laycock, and Carpenter's work largely been forgotten? The answer, in no small part, is that the very different kind of unconscious proposed by Freud prevented these views from ever making it to the center stage. To my knowledge Freud never quoted or referred to these theorists. If he was aware of their writings, he probably viewed their ideas as irrelevant to the dynamic, repressive Unconscious wi
th a capital U.

  But what if Freud had never proposed his theory of psychoanalysis? Imagine that the anti-Semitism of nineteenth-century Vienna had not blocked Freud's budding career as a university professor studying physiology, and he had continued to investigate the spinal cords of fish. Or imagine that he had become addicted to the cocaine he experimented with in 1884, or had never met Josef Breuer, with whom he began his seminal studies of hysteria. As with any life, there are an infinite number of "what ifs" that might have changed the course of Freud's career.

  Imagine that experimental psychology began as a discipline uninfluenced by psychoanalytic thinking in two key respects. First, researchers felt no need to distance themselves from difficult-to-test ideas about a dynamic unconscious. They were free to theorize about nonconscious thinking in the same way that Laycock, Carpenter, and Hamilton had, namely as a collection of efficient and sophisticated informationprocessing systems. Second, they were free to investigate the mind, even the parts that were unconscious, with experimental techniques. An important part of the Freudian legacy was a rejection of the scientific method as a means of studying the mind. The complex nature of unconscious processes could not be examined in controlled experiments, Freud believed, and could he uncovered only by careful clinical observation. Astute clinical observation can be quite illuminating, of course, but psychologists might have turned sooner to the experimental study of mental processes without this methodological limitation."

  Even in a Freudian vacuum, researchers interested in the unconscious would still have had to contend with the behaviorist movement, which regarded the mind as unworthy of study by any method. One reason behaviorism flourished in the early and mid-twentieth century, however, was that it provided a scientific alternative to what was viewed as the fuzziness of psychoanalytic concepts and methods. Without this backdrop, it is possible that psychology would have discovered sooner than it did that the mind, including the nonconscious mind, can be studied scientifically.

  Thus, in my counterfactual fantasy, cognitive and social psychologists applied their well-honed experimental techniques to the study of the sophisticated, adaptive unconscious sooner than they actually did. Undeterred by the theoretical and methodological obstacles psychoanalysis created for experimental psychology, research and theorizing on the adaptive unconscious flourished.

  This counterfactual history is sure to offend those who find Freud's views indispensable in theorizing about the unconscious. Some theorists, such as Matthew Erdelyi and Drew Westen, have argued persuasively that psychoanalysis was crucial to the development of modern thinking about the unconscious, and that, indeed, modern research has largely corroborated Freud's major insights about the nature of unconscious thought."

  I agree that Freud's greatest insight was about the pervasiveness of unconscious thinking and we owe him a tremendous debt for his dogged, creative pursuit of the nature of the unconscious mind. It is hard to deny the importance of an infantile, dynamic, crafty, Freudian unconscious, in part because the psychoanalytic narrative is so seductive and explains so much. My counterfactual exercise is meant simply to illustrate that it is not the only narrative about the unconscious, and that we might have reached the current one more quickly if psychoanalysis had not so dominated the intellectual stage.

  The narrative of the adaptive unconscious might appear to remove all that is interesting about unconscious processing. The reader with a psychoanalytic bent might find the adaptive unconscious, with its emphasis on automatic information processing, to be dry, emotionless, and, perhaps worst of all, boring. The Freudian unconscious is ingenious, clever, and sexy and has been the topic of great literature at least since Sophocles. There are few great plays or novels on the automatic pilot of the mind, and focusing exclusively on the adaptive unconscious may seem like talking about romantic love without passion and sex.

  This view is misleading, however, because it underestimates the role that the adaptive unconscious plays in all the important and interesting things in life, including Freud's arbeiten and lieben (work and love). As we will see, the adaptive unconscious is not involved in just the small stuff, but plays a major role in all facets of life. The failure to find great literature on the adaptive unconscious may say more about the pervasiveness of psychoanalytic thinking than about anything else.

  Yet the modern view of the unconscious is not anti-Freudian. To say that we possess a sophisticated and efficient set of nonconscious processes that are indispensable for navigating our way through the world is not to deny that there may also be dynamic forces at work keeping unpleasant thoughts out of awareness. There will be times, in the chapters to come, when we encounter phenomena that have a Freudian hue to them, whereby it seems that the forces of repression are at work. Some readers might react by saying, "Hey, didn't Freud say that?"-and the answer might well be that he, or one of his many followers, did. The question to keep in mind, though, is "Do we need Freudian theory to explain that? Are there simpler explanations for the kinds of unconscious phenomena he discussed?"

  Sometimes the answer may be that Freud was right about the dynamic, repressed nature of the unconscious. On other occasions the answer might be that although Freud did not say it, one of his many followers did, particularly those who have moved beyond an emphasis on childhood drives and stressed the role of object relations and the ego functioning. Often, however, we will see evidence for a vast nonconscious system quite different from what Freud imagined.

  Furthermore, Freud and his followers often disagreed about key points, and over his long career Freud himself changed his mind about key concepts such as the nature of repression. The question thus arises of how we know which of these many ideas are true. A tremendous advantage of the modern psychological approach is a reliance on the experimental method to investigate mental phenomena. There has been an explosion of research on the adaptive unconscious because of the development of some quite clever experimental techniques to study it, many of which we will discuss here. Clinical observations and case histories can be a rich source of hypotheses about the nature of the unconscious, but in the end we must put such ideas to the test in a more rigorous and scientific manner. Thus, even if the answer is "Yes, Freud did say that," he or his followers might also have said something entirely different, and it is only through the work of empirically minded psychologists that we can tell the true nuggets from the fool's gold.

  Implications for Self-Insight

  Another key difference between the Freudian and modern approach lies in their views of how to attain self-insight. Psychoanalysis shares with many other approaches the assumption that the path to self-knowledge leads inward. Through careful introspection, the argument goes, we can penetrate the haze that obscures our true feelings and motives. No one claims that such introspection is easy. People must recognize the barriers of repression and resistance and remove them. But when such insight is accomplished, often with the aid of a therapist, people have direct access to their unconscious desires. "It is the task of the analyst," wrote Anna Freud, "to bring into consciousness that which is unconscious"-an assumption made by all forms of insight therapy.'"

  But here's the problem: research on the adaptive unconscious suggests that much of what we want to see is unseeable. The mind is a wonderfully sophisticated and efficient tool, more so than the most powerful computer ever built. An important source of its tremendous power is its ability to perform quick, nonconscious analyses of a great deal of incoming information and react to that information in effective ways. Even while our conscious mind is otherwise occupied, we can interpret, evaluate, and select information that suits our purposes.

  That's the good news. The bad news is that it is difficult to know ourselves because there is no direct access to the adaptive unconscious, no matter how hard we try. Because our minds have evolved to operate largely outside of consciousness, and nonconscious processing is part of the architecture of the brain, it may be not be possible to gain direct access to nonconscious pro
cesses. "Making the unconscious conscious" may be no easier than viewing and understanding the assembly language controlling our word-processing computer program.

  It can thus be fruitless to try to examine the adaptive unconscious by looking inward. It is often better to deduce the nature of our hidden minds by looking outward at our behavior and how others react to us, and coming up with a good narrative. In essence, we must be like biographers of our own lives, distilling our behavior and feelings into a meaningful and effective narrative. The best way to author a good self-story is not necessarily to engage in a lot of navel-gazing introspection, trying to uncover hidden feelings and motives.

  In fact there is evidence that it can be counterproductive to look inward too much. We will see evidence that introspection about feelings can cause people to make unwise decisions and to become more confused about how they feel. To be clear, I am not disparaging all kinds of introspection. Socrates was only partly wrong that the "unexamined life is not worth living." The key is the kind of self-examination people perform, and the extent to which people attempt to know themselves solely by looking inward, versus looking outward at their own behavior and how others react to them.

  The Adaptive Unconscious

  I do not hesitate to maintain, that what we are conscious of is constructed out of what we are not conscious of-that our whole knowledge, in fact, is made up of the unknown and incognisable.

  -Sir William Hamilton (1865)