ABSTRACT
In the case of both psychoanalysis and neurobiology there are, to be sure, modes and manners of proof which tend to validate the inferences and theories. Neurobiology provides potentially valuable physiological pictures of what Freudians describe in psychoanalytic or psychodynamic terms. What brain research suggests is that, as Freud himself suspected, our processes of mind are unconscious as well as conscious. Consciousness is not synonymous with being conscious of some specific content, though the consciousness of something is certainly a part of consciousness as such. Rather, consciousness signals that state of awareness, more neurological than psychological, by which an individual can be said to be awake, alert and thereby, in this sense, "conscious"–as when we say of someone, following an accident or an operation, that she is conscious, or that she didn't lose consciousness. If consciousness is always self-consciousness, then heightening that experience of self-consciousness can be a way for some of us to feel more alive–more competent, more conscious.
