ABSTRACT
Historical and theoretical roots of the problem of mental process and consciousness are reviewed. Two prominent strands are examined: neuropsychological roots traceable to the work on cerebral hemisphere functioning and specifically to the bicameral mind hypothesis of Julian Jaynes, and psychoanalytic roots traceable to Freud and the primary process hypothesis derived from his work on dreaming. Jaynes’s work has been prematurely dismissed because critics have not separated his speculations about brain function which are no longer taken seriously from his model of two kinds of mental activity. Freud’s model suffers from inconsistency, contradiction and confusion. While he believed the mental activity he named the primary process to be unconscious and qualitatively different from conscious symbolic thought he also described it as being symbolic and qualitatively similar to waking language and he clearly described its visible conscious manifestations. His attempt to address this confusion with the concept of preconscious mind is examined. Melanie Klein’s formulation of the paranoid-schizoid position and phantasy has many parallels to Freud’s unconscious primary process, and her concept of symbolic equation is very similar to Freud’s concept of a preconscious process. Her formulations suffer from similar confusion as evinced by her use of the language of fantasy, a manifestation of reflective representational thought, to describe phantasy, a primary process-like activity. The attempt by relational theorists using terms like implicit or procedural knowledge to describe the area of mental functioning that is not repressed and unconscious but not available to reflective awareness, and their implication that such phenomena reflect a void in the mind where reflective thought might otherwise be rather than a qualitatively different mental process, are reviewed.
