INTEGRATING FREUDIAN, RELATIONAL/INTERPERSONAL PSYCHOANALYTIC AND NEUROSCIENCE CONCEPTS OF UNCONSCIOUS PROCESSES: DISSOCIATION, NOT REPRESSION

Until the "cognitive revolution" in psychology, psychologists and psychoanalysts had different models of the mind.Not only were unconscious processes unimportant to behavioral psychologists, conscious processes were not important as well.Once the "cognitive revolution" took place in psychology, conscious processes, and eventually unconscious processes, were believed to be crucial again to understanding human behavior.The experiences that are unconscious in contemporary cognitive psychology are not, however, experiences that people appear motivated to keep out of awareness.They are experiences that are simply not activated by current situations.The psychoanalytic unconscious has continued to represent experiences that either do not reach awareness or get pushed out of awareness-in other words threatening experiences of which there is motivation to remain unaware to maintain the functioning of the meaning system-what Freud called "repression".Knowledge that neural networks are activated by incoming experiences, especially those related to physical and psychological survival, and that the organization of experiences takes place on an ongoing basis, can unify psychology and psychoanalysis in their understanding of these processes.Psychoanalysts can now join mainstream neuroscience and scientific psychology by laying the term "repression" to rest and thinking instead in terms of "motivated forgetting" and of threatening experiences as sometimes "dissociated."It is useful, however, to conceptualize unconscious processes not only as repressed, dissociated, or "adaptive" (or maladaptive), but as a cauldron of generative experiences.Turning to a patient Andreas, it is noteworthy that his insight into the origin of his "dead" feelings did not eliminate the compulsive sexuality that bothered him so deeply.He required learning other ways of handling feelings, not only an awareness of the origins of these feelings.Specific strategies about alternative ways of responding that some clinicians might consider "nonanalytic" were helpful to him until he became involved in a more meaningful relationship with another man.Unconscious processes are a sort of "boogie-woogie," always rumbling in the background, with desires waiting to be satisfied and connections waiting to be forged.They rumble like a "boogie-woogie" out of awareness all the time until they are activated by external or internal experiences.We can think of the mind as having various aspects of self-representations that are not fully activated influencing our feelings and behaviors without our full knowledge-like Baudelaire's (1857) "city full of swarming ants, city full of dreams where ghosts in plain daylight grab at passers-by."