The Emotional Unconscious

One of the earliest marks of the cognitive revolution in psychology was a revival of interest in consciousness, rather than behavior. The cognitive psychology that emerged immediately after World War II to replace functional behaviorism focused on the span of apprehension, primary memory, attention, and imagery. Now, as we approach the twenty-first century, cognitive psychology has begun to seriously explore unconscious mental life and the psychological unconscious: the idea that conscious experience, thought, and action is influenced by percepts, memories, and other mental states that are inaccessible to phenomenal awareness and somehow independent of voluntary control. In the modern history of cognitive psychology, one can discern four early stages in the conceptualization of the psychological unconscious (Kihlstrom, 1995b, 1999). The first of these might be called the wastebasket view: that the unconscious includes unattended and unrehearsed events and memories lost through decay or displacement. There is also the file cabinet view: that the unconscious includes passively stored memories that must be actively retrieved into short term or working memory in order to play any role in cognitive processing. Neither view allows dynamically active unconscious percepts, thoughts, and memories. Thus, they do not really satisfy the definition of the psychological unconscious.