ABSTRACT
The human mind has a strong tendency to make the world intelligible by conceptualizing it in terms of dichotomies. There is no exception to this general rule when the mind reflects about its own functioning. Both our folk psychology and our scientific theories about how we perceive, learn, think, and act are often grounded in the idea of an opposition between two fundamentally different modes of mental functioning. Among the dichotomies that have been proposed throughout the history of psychology are those between perceptive versus apperceptive, analytic versus holistic, rational versus experiential, logical versus intuitive, verbal versus imaginal, propositional versus analogue, symbolic versus subsymbolic, abstract versus specific, willful versus automatic, or declarative versus procedural processes. Ever since Freud (1901) distinguished between primary and secondary processes in his book on the interpretation of dreams, probably the distinction that has produced most fascination and controversy is the one between conscious versus unconscious mental processes (cf. Epstein 1994). Whereas Freud conceived of the unconscious in terms of dynamic processes driven by emotional conflicts and repressed wishes, most recent conceptualizations of the unconscious have, however, been developed independently of, or even deliberatively in opposition to, psychodynamic views. It has become common to use the term “cognitive unconscious” to denote forms of information processing that occur automatically and outside of awareness, but which are not necessarily related to unconscious conflict and motivated repression (e.g. Greenwald 1992, Kihlstrom 1987, Velmans 1991).
