Chapter 24 - Motivation, decision making, and consciousness: from psychodynamics to subliminal priming and emotional constraint satisfaction

Summary

This chapter discusses the theory and research on psychodynamic processes that may contribute to the current understanding of conscious and unconscious processes. It describes the models of consciousness that emerged from psychoanalytic clinical observation at the turn of the last century. The chapter argues that these models were not only prescient in multiple respects but that they also point to phenomena that would be important to integrate with contemporary views of consciousness that have their roots in the laboratory. Then, it describes two areas of psychoanalytically influenced research that bear on contemporary concepts of consciousness: unconscious (subliminal) activation and unconscious affect-regulation processes that affect judgment and decision making. In conclusion, the chapter discusses two ways that the psychodynamic theory and research might inform contemporary accounts of consciousness, by distinguishing among different meanings of activation and between implicit/explicit and declarative/non-declarative processes.