Dynamic versus Cognitive Unconscious

Abstract The psychodynamic concept of the unconscious is contrasted with the view of unconscious mental life taken by modern cognitive and social psychology. For Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the dynamic unconscious contained thoughts, feelings, and desires that were denied to conscious awareness because of a psychological force, i.e., repression, arrayed against them. It was part of a larger unconscious structure whose contents were descriptively unconscious, simply because they were not in awareness at any particular time. Evidence for the cognitive unconscious, in the form of automatic processes, implicit memory, subliminal perception, and the like, does not warrant acceptance of the dynamic unconscious of psychoanalytic theory. The entry briefly describes three examples of research programs that have attempted to document the dynamic unconscious.