ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a novel way of integrating affective and cognitive aspects of conscious and unconscious brain processes, using a neuropsychoanalytic framework. It addresses the multi-tiered complexities of consciousness from both modern cognitive and affective-neuroscience perspectives. The notion that the brain knows more than it consciously admits can be traced back historically to the clinical and conceptual work of Sigmund Freud. Freud based this notion upon observations he made of post-hypnotic suggestion and clinical states of dissociation, where behaviours were demonstrably caused by motivations of which the subject was not explicitly aware, some of which could subsequently be brought to awareness during psychological treatment. The chapter provides a more solid foundation of the primary-process emotional mind for the clinical, cognitive, and social neurosciences than currently exists. It reviews a primary-process affective foundation of mind to the higher mental apparatus that is receiving the lion’s share of attention in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience, as well as consciousness and psychoanalytic studies.
