What is it about?
The view of unconscious processes has followed a long and winding road in psychology. Western culture has historically been resistant to accepting, let alone studying, these processes. We sketch that history and then review what we now believe we know about unconscious or implicit processes in various subdisciplimes of psychology: social psychology, personality psychology, cognitive psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. We try to tie is all together to make sense of it all. Finally, all though our review, we apply what we have discussed to the theory and practice of psychotherapy.
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Why is it important?
Psychology has historically studied different aspects of unconscious processes separately, in separate subdisciplines of the field. Knowledge of this important aspect of functioning is therefore largely siloed such that one subdiscipline does not know of the work of the others. As a result, there is no unified view nor is there a way to integrate what we know. This is especially true for clinical and academic psychology which do not tend to interact let alone cross-pollinate. By putting various pieces of knowledge all in one place, we hope to stimulate a productive dialogue so as to advance the field and ultimately advance our understanding of human functioning.
Perspectives
As the senior author of this paper, I have been studying unconscious processes for decades. Early on, the work was strongly resisted. I was frustrated by the fact that different subdisciplines of the field following separate paths and rarely if ever interacted. This fragmented the study of the unconscious in ways that held back our understanding. A lot of good work was being done in each subarea but the subarea next door, so to speak, knew nothing of it and therefore did not benefit from it. I decided to try to learn as much as I could and then put it all in one place. My co-authors and I therefore looked at the work in personality/social psychology, clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, cognitive psychology and science, and cognitive neuroscience as they related to unconscious processes. We came to believe that there were important principles that cut across all of this work and that the cognitive architecture of cognitive neuroscience could provide a common infrastructure for all of it. Further, the clinical/psychotherapy impliciations were important and needed to be communicated. We co-authored a book and this article with that in mind.
Joel Weinberger
Adelphi University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The unconscious: History, research, neurocognitive models, and clinical implications., Psychoanalytic Psychology, February 2026, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/pap0000587.
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