ABSTRACT
The 2014 Sandler Conference, The unconscious: A bridge between psychoanalysis and cognitive science researchers and clinicians in dialogue, was one of those rare conferences that lived up to its title. Not only were the papers and dialogue of extraordinary quality, but the sense of excitement of a group of colleagues moving toward a joint venture filled the two-and-a-half days of meetings. As such a conference should, this meeting stimulated intensely personal intellectual and emotional reactions in me. My closing remarks were intended not so much to summarize or critique the presentations, but rather to describe some of what the conference had stimulated for me. In what follows, I have tried to retrain these spontaneous responses as my main focus while providing enough scholarly apparatus that the reader can follow up on ideas that may be unfamiliar and invite deeper exploration. Between 1896 and 1905 Freud published a series of masterful studies that
lay the foundation of psychoanalysis by clearly demonstrating that mental processes that are actively barred from awareness result in symptoms, dreams, parapraxes including memory lapses, jokes and creative acts in the arts (Freud 1896, Freud 1900, Freud 1901, Freud 1905, Freud 1905). He carefully described these unconscious mental processes and showed the central ways in which they differ from conscious mentation. Earlier in his career, Freud had attempted to integrate his psychological find-
ings with the rapidly emerging neuroscience of his day (Freud 1891, Freud 1895), an effort he explicitly abandoned in chapter 7 of The Interpretation of Dreams in favor of a purely psychological theory. Nonetheless, his neuroscience thinking clearly shaped Freud’s metapsychology (Pribram and Gill 1976) as generally biological thought continued to inform Freud’s theorizing throughout his career (Sulloway 1979). But generally during this same period during which Freud lay the foundations of the study of the unconscious, he realized that an explanation of these phenomena in terms of the newly emerging neuroscience of his time was beyond the capacities of the field and opted instead for a purely psychological theory, one which found the bases of unconscious phenomena in the realm of human meanings and motives.
