ABSTRACT
The psychoanalytic focus on the role of unconscious processes in human behavior elicited a major debate among psychologists that still continues. Few question that there are motoric responses governed by automatic mechanisms of which the individual is unaware. Most psychologists would agree that there are conditioned responses which are also automatic, and that the individual may not be cognizant of the conditioned stimulus evoking the response. The experimental work about subception (Balay & Shevrin, 1988; Silverman, Ross, Adler, & Lustig, 1978) and about parallel processing (MacKay, 1987), with many other studies, provides strong evidence for the influence of environmental stimuli affecting cognitions and behavior of which the individual is unaware. Yet the debate persists.
