Towards a person centred understanding of consciousness and the unconscious.

The nature of consciousness (and by implication at least, the unconscious) seems to be an issue which has preoccupied thinkers since the time of the classical Greeks. With the advent of the scientific approach and the positivistic paradigm, particularly as it manifested in behavioural psychology, less aftention was paid to the phenomenon although it has always had an important role in some psychotherapeutic models of the person. In philosophy and in science, there s currently a resurgence of interest and a variety of models are offered. Broadly speaking, these models fall into biological, psychological and philosophical or metaphysical categories.